Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to honour Gavin Hillier, a courageous unionist, a fiercely loyal Labor man and a flamboyant Elvis fan. I convey my sadness and deepest condolences to his relatives and friends.

Gavin Hillier was a colleague and a comrade. He was a roof tiler from the country who, when working at Laminex Customwood in Wagga Wagga, got involved in his union because he thought he could do a better job of representing its members. He went on to lead the Australian Timber Workers Union in New South Wales and its successor, the Forestry and Furnishing Products Division of the CFMEU. In this position he played a pivotal role in the forestry disputes of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gavin was tough, brave, constructive, influential and effective. A person of extraordinary ability with an outsized personality to match, he would later work as an organiser in the New South Wales branch of the AWU.

Gavin Hillier attributed his unionism to his father, also a loyal unionist but later left high and dry by the union he had fought for and done the job for. Whilst this broke his father, Gavin's response was to very quickly get involved and help him out. This demonstrates two elements that were to mark Gavin's later career in our movement: he recognised that union leaders had to make tough decisions but that they must always act in the interests of members. It also showed that his instinctive response was to lead from the front, taking personal responsibility when things needed to be done.

Gavin joined the Australian Timber Workers Union in the early 1980s. It was reported by The Sydney Morning Herald that he found the union executive was not interested in the members' welfare and he decided to correct this by becoming active within the union. When he became secretary of the New South Wales branch of the ATWU in February 1987, he replaced Joe Weir, who had held the position for 45 years. This union later merged to form part of the CFMEU in the early 1990s, and around this time I moved to New South Wales from South Australia and joined the union as an industrial officer. These were formative times, and I was fortunate to have Gavin as a colleague and comrade. The closeness of our connection and the impact he made upon me are reflected in my words here tonight.

When Gavin took over, timber workers were poorly represented and underpaid and had to work in unsanitary conditions. Working in a sawmill is dangerous, with many fatal accidents each year. Gavin set about fixing these wrongs with zeal, often relishing the disputes with employers along the way. In his first three years as a union leader, Gavin shook the sawdust of decades from the union's structures and more than doubled its membership. It was for these people that he fought the hardest. He got the biggest real wage improvement for timber workers in Australian history. He achieved wage improvements of 18 per cent in real terms during his time as secretary, and then he added superannuation to them.

Gavin's involvement with the timber workers and later the CFMEU led to heightened activism within the New South Wales timber industry. He had the courage to recognise that the union could not keep operating the way it had and he took on a huge internal fight about the restructuring of the timber industry that was to last over a decade. He also made clear he would rather try to make alliances with conservationists than the employers, but he also recognised that he needed their buy-in too if the industry were to survive.

The challenges of leading the Timber Workers Union at a time of significant change, not in the forestry sector but across the Australian economy, were not ones that Gavin shied from. Too many leaders tell people what they want to hear and few have the courage to speak hard truths. Gavin had such courage. On one occasion he had to go to Eden on the south coast of New South Wales, and he insisted on going alone. Sawmilling of timber was an important industry for most of the life of the town, and for over 100 years the collection and export of wattle bark was also a major industry. At the time, he had to sell the changes to the timber industry to understandably hostile members. I remember him calling me and speaking to me about being spat on and screamed at as he walked down the main street—a journey he took by himself deliberately. He was jeered and heckled in a fiery meeting attended by timber workers and their supporters, including their families, all encouraged by the employer. These were not easy times. The decisions he made, the leadership he provided helped to sustain an industry that might otherwise have been wiped out. And today the major export handled by the Port of Eden is still wood chips.

Gavin Hillier's career was defined by his representation of the union during the forestry debate of the 1990s. He was one of the primary negotiators of the package, in partnership with then Labor leader and later Premier, Bob Carr, and Kim Yeadon, who became the land and water conservation minister in Carr's government. Having worked with Gavin at the union, I then saw this policy debate from the political side as an adviser to Mr Yeadon in the mid-1990s.

Gavin had previously been burned by government decisions that were not accompanied by consultation, and had also disagreed with Labor in state opposition and federal government. Famously, he and many others once organised a picket of the whole of Parliament House while Labor was in government, and I was on that picket line as a union official representing our members. Gavin also received support from the ACTU secretary, Bill Kelty, who spoke lovingly at his funeral. Bill Kelty described the agreement that Gavin engaged in as a matter of enormous achievement and was very clear about his praise of Gavin's role in this.

Logging of native forests, then as now, was contested and controversial, and the conflict, then as now, was not only around environmental policy; it was about the livelihood and way of life of timber communities. Gavin Hillier recognised that the reliance on native forest was becoming unsustainable politically, economically and environmentally, and his objective was to carve out a better path for his members and their families. His vision was for an industry that could move to higher-value jobs in soft wood, plantation and downstream processing, and lessen its reliance on native forests. He saw this path delivering better jobs, higher pay and more security than the annual political fight over timber quotas could deliver, and for this he was prepared to agree to a more rigorous process of forest assessment.

The package he was part of negotiating phased out logging of old-growth forests and provided millions of dollars for the retraining and relocation of workers. It increased plantation timber whilst delivering industry support for value-added production. Native forests were protected with the creation of 24 new national parks, and a rigorous system of forest assessment towards creating a comprehensive and representative reserve system was entered into. To enable industry reform and restructure, measures including reducing timber quotas by 50 per cent were implemented, but they were made tradeable and they were extended to terms of five years. What did this do? This provided certainty. It provided certainty to industry and ensured that timber could go to the highest-value users. It was a complete package: new national parks, ending old-growth logging, reducing timber quotas and supporting workers and rigorous forest assessment.

Yet I recall members of the Greens political party still calling us 'tree killers', which demonstrated to me very clearly that purity and virtue signalling, for that political party, came first. Gavin Hillier contributed more for forest conservation in New South Wales than the many politicians and environmentalists who preen publicly, and to do so he had to show personal courage. And it was a reform delivered in his conviction that it was the right thing for his members.

Gavin passed away in December of last year. His funeral was held in Wagga Wagga just prior to Christmas. The music of Elvis Presley, another of his great loves, was heavily featured. I deeply regretted that I wasn't able to attend the funeral, but I'm grateful to those who have been in contact in recent weeks as we have spoken about Gavin Hillier. I particularly want to acknowledge Mary Stuart, and also the words of Bill Kelty. In his eulogy, Mr Kelty described Gavin as: 'A very significant character in the Australian industrial landscape. Simply put, Gavin Hillier is actually one of the bravest, toughest and most effective union leaders I have ever worked with. He was certainly one of the most unusual—he certainly was the most unusual. Of that there is no doubt. And he was loving, caring and committed.'

Bill Kelty is rightly recognised as one of Australia's most significant, consequential and respected trade union leaders—one of the most respected in our history. That he would speak at Gavin's funeral and give such a stirring tribute speaks volumes about the respect and the regard in which Gavin was held. So we mourn Gavin Hillier's passing, but we remember his courage, toughness and leadership. But perhaps most of all we remember his heart—loving, kind, brave. He has been described as friend, mentor and hero and, as Bill Kelty said, his spirit will never die. I again express my condolences to his family and his many comrades.