CONDOLENCES Hon. Kim Edward Beazley AO
I want to be associated with this condolence motion because I am probably the only member of the House of Representatives who served with Kim Beazley Sr. It was a great privilege to do so and I intend to outline something of the circumstances of that service. I might say, before the member for Canberra departs, that I am sure Kim Beazley Sr would have supported a welcome to country, and her request that that have an ongoing place in our new parliaments I am sure would have met with his approval.
Firstly, I extend my condolences to his wife, Betty, his son, Kim Jr, his daughter, Marilyn,and each of their children. It is not generally known that I was in fact born in Canberra. I claim to have a museum site as a birthplace. My father was here in Canberra and knew Kim Beazley Sr. I noted, in reading his first speech, that it was a speech about postwar reconstruction. My late father was firstly a chief investigations officer in prices and then a deputy commissioner in prices and was very much involved in the administration of the policies that I noted Kim Beazley Sr adverted to in his maiden speech.
It was a speech about the importance of economics. It was a speech about the postwar reconstruction period. I noted that he commended the budget for a number of reasons. In the
first place, it recognised a number of fundamental problems in the immediate postwar period,namely that there was an excess of purchasing power and capacity to invest. My father later became a Liberal member of parliament in New South Wales and a minister but, notwithstanding the fact that he administered price control, he was very much against those sorts of intrusions of the state. But, in the context of what he was doing at that time, he had a clear role that brought him in touch with many, and one of those was Kim Beazley Sr.
In my own period in the parliament, he was father of the House. I now have that honour.
His service was for 32 years, from 1945 until 1977. Being elected in 1973, I saw him as a fine Minister for Education. I did not always agree with all of the policies he implemented, but he was someone who people recognised was a ‘conviction politician’. Of course, he was in opposition in 1975. By that time I had become, as the member for Canberra noted, actively involved in Indigenous affairs and I was chairing the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs. Our first brief was to examine the alcohol problems that Aboriginal people were experiencing and it brought me into conflict with Kim—and, I might say, with Ralph Hunt, who was the Minister for Health at the time. They conspired, I think, to broaden the terms of reference of the House of Representatives committee to look at health generally rather than just at what they saw as being a limited problem. He was a person who was fundamentally interested in the plight of our Indigenous people. He was, I think, very close to the late Professor Fred Hollows, who talked to him about these health issues, and, as befits somebody who was senior in service in the parliament, he continued to play a constructive role.