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- 23 November 2006
Valedictory Speeches
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Mr SPEAKER: Order! I call the Attorney General, Minister for the Environment, and member for Blacktown—I am sorry, the member for the Blue Mountains.
Mr BOB DEBUS (Blue Mountains—Attorney General, Minister for the Environment, and Minister for the Arts) [12.34 p.m.] (Valedictory Speech): Mr Speaker, your error is understandable. We were elected on the same day in 1981, and I do not think there are any other survivors on the Labor side.
Mr SPEAKER: I was the member for Blacktown at that time.
Mr BOB DEBUS: For me it is 25 years since I was first elected, 19 years in the Parliament in two periods and about 16 years in the ministry. I have been contemplating the almost accidental nature of some of the most dramatic events in my political career. In 1981 I only sought preselection because I was traduced by a young man from the office of the then Deputy Premier who worked out that the then seat of Blue Mountains was a marginal Labor seat and that if only they could find a candidate of an appropriate demographic and social background maybe they could win it. They went through the lists of the Labor Party membership in the Blue Mountains and could find only one person with a blue-collar job in their thirties with a young family. So in the end, I was importuned to seek preselection. That young man was Michael Knight.
There then followed a full-scale election campaign with Neville Wran—who, everyone will agree, was the best campaigner any of us ever saw—in which I experienced no particular acquaintance with electoral politics at all. Indeed, I count it as a privilege that I have known Wran and Don Dunstan well over the years—the two best political leaders never to be Prime Minister. My Cabinet selection in 1984 was also a peculiar accident. At that time the Labor Party was looking as if it was going to lose a few seats in the general election, and Neville Wran was worried we may be going to lose the seat of Blue Mountains. So he announced to a very startled crowd at the Hydro Majestic Hotel one day that I was going to be in the next Cabinet. That was not only surprising to a number of other Cabinet aspirants but also utterly startling to me because he did not tell me before he made the announcement.
I was duly introduced into Cabinet, and at the time I was the youngest member. Now I am the oldest. Wran was a mentor; Carr and Iemma have been colleagues. In 1988 I lost by 90 votes, finally beaten by the votes of two groups: working-class gun owners and right wing homophobic Christians. They never warmed to me. I was re-elected in 1995, surrounded by the bizarre events precipitated by Barry Morris. I must say they still have a dreamlike feeling about them when I think of them now. At the election in 1999 I was opposed by a mad campaign from a man named John Walmsley, the man with a dead cat on his head who ran something called Earth Sanctuaries. He wasted more money trying to unseat me than the Liberal Party spent in six elections—and I got a swing to me. If people want to know about that, there is a documentary about it which ends with a scene just like the last scene of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. I had expected that my last two weeks in this place would be rather dull and uneventful.
The Blue Mountains has never been on the losing side of an election in the past 50 years. It is very hard for the member for Blue Mountains to be in Opposition, and I have been very fortunate to have been able to represent a place as interesting and attractive as the Blue Mountains. I acknowledge my enormous unobtainable debt of gratitude to the people of that place who have elected me. I have the first question I asked in this place in 1981. I asked:
My question is directed to the Minister for Police and Minister for Emergency Services. In view of the potentially explosive bushfire season confronting the State and the fact that in the past many bushfires have been deliberately lit, will the Minister detail any new measures being taken to combat this grave problem?
All of that reminds us that State politics does go round and round. I will say something very briefly about portfolios that I have held. Between 1984 and 1988 I had a job called Minister for Finance. I dare not say that I created what is now called the Office of State Revenue outside of this Parliament; I have excised it from my curriculum vitae. For reasons that still mystify me to this day, people tend to react rather poorly to that information, when all the office does is enforce fine collections. I have never understood the problem. In that period we reformed the State taxation laws, required as a result of the massive national economic reforms being implemented by the Hawke Labor Government in the mid-1980s that contributed to the establishment of Sydney as the financial centre for the Southern Hemisphere.
In the period since 1995 I have had a number of portfolios and I draw attention to some of them. I was the longest serving Minister for Corrective Services in the past 30 years. We rebuilt and modernised many correctional institutions and closed the deplorable old institution at Maitland. We opened the fantastic open institution for low-security indigenous inmates called Yetta Dhinnakkal at Brewarrina, and another one is being opened on the North Coast now. We created the restorative justice unit and redeveloped Long Bay as a therapeutic environment for inmates with intellectual disabilities and other challenging behaviour. We also greatly reduced the escape rates in New South Wales prisons, but we could not stop Lucy Dudko with her helicopter! That event occurred two days before the election of 1999 and left me more or less paralysed for a whole morning, yet it turned out not to be a political event. There is a book on that episode.
In the area of emergency services, if I had to choose the most inspiring experience of my political career it was the time when I had the privilege of exercising a certain leadership role in the bushfire emergency of 2001 and 2002. Those were two of the worst three bushfire seasons ever experienced. It was as well that in the years beforehand we had increased the amount of money being spent on equipping and training what has now become, all honourable members would agree, amongst the very best volunteer emergency services in the world.
In the area of the environment Neville Wran and Barrie Unsworth were committed to its better protection, but Bob Carr pressed for environmental change. He was relentless and for that reason we, together with Pam Allan before me, expanded the national park estate by more than two-thirds. We created massive new national parks on the North Coast and South Coast and, more latterly, in the inland. Almost 40 per cent of the coastline of New South Wales is now part of a national park, a figure that cannot be replicated in almost any other jurisdiction in the world. We have some famous World Heritage listings and we introduced the RiverBank Program to buy back water from our stressed inland rivers. Some important national parks have been handed back to the Aboriginal people, the State's pollution laws have been overhauled and we have made new waste laws. We have done other things of which I feel proud.
I inherited the Arts ministry from Bob Carr. I draw attention to the extraordinarily important infrastructure investments in the arts in recent times such as the new Sydney Theatre, the Belvoir Street Theatre, CarriageWorks, which will open in a few months' time, and new work on the Opera House. I draw attention to the Western Sydney Arts Strategy, and the accord with local government that is causing local government to now spend more money on the arts than the State Government. I draw attention to the recently announced refurbishment of the Australian Museum and the massive success of the Sydney Festival, which I hope many members will attend during January. The festival is becoming an event of significance throughout the world, promoting tourism but, more important, providing enjoyment for the citizens of this State. The arts are for everybody. The idea that the arts are an expensive sideshow for elites is wrong and stupid, and every community survey tells us that is so. That is why the State Plan now includes such a strong acknowledgment of the arts.
I have been Attorney General for six years. I followed the iconic Jeff Shaw, a true reformer of the law who created so much of the Labor Government's reform agenda. We have passed 258 legal bills through the Parliament in the past six years; that is one-third of the bills passed by the House. I draw attention to the unprecedented reforms to laws relating to sexual assault offences, court procedures, protections for victims of sexual assault, the establishment of the special commission of inquiry into James Hardie, the establishment of Australia's first Circle Sentencing Program, youth conferencing, youth adult conferencing and various alternative justice processes. That may not quench the blood thirst of some in the community for revenge but, nevertheless, they work.
I refer honourable members to the major reform of civil liability insurance law, recent changes to terrorism laws, activities with respect to human rights charters and the defence of David Hicks. I assert that the performance of the courts in New South Wales is overall the best in the country. [Extension of time agreed to.]
Mr Speaker, I take this moment to acknowledge your assistance over the years because I have never entirely understood the procedures of the House. Many honourable members pretend not to understand, but in my case it is genuine. I will say something about the judiciary, which does not get a lot of wraps in this place. The judiciary deserves praise for the skill, commitment and good grace that they bring to matters that come before them. We in this place do not have to decide bail matters, we do not have to sentence a serial murderer, we do not have to make judgment about whether a mother justly participated in the mercy killing of a child. We do not see damaged human beings, the incapacitated or the mentally ill who come before the courts on a daily basis.
It can be made to sound easy when one reads the bare facts in the newspaper. Those treatments belie the fact that every case a judge deals with has a human dimension for both the victim and the perpetrator. Judicial officers have to sift through facts, the human debris and the law to come to a decision that satisfies all. I assert without reservation that we in this State are lucky. We have a court system that is as effective as any in the world and I insist, with all the detachment that I can muster, that there is no better group of judicial officers anywhere.
As I look back on the changes that I have seen in 19 years, I have often had cause for concern about how Parliament and politicians are viewed by the public. The political dramas that are played out in the pages of newspapers, on talkback radio and in the nightly television news highlight the fact that to be a politician these days can often be tantamount to a term of abuse. The importance of civility in public life cannot be overestimated. They say that nostalgia is not what it used to be, but I think that things were somewhat different when I first started here. There seemed to be more time and more mutual respect between honourable members and a broad acknowledgment of differing views.
This place has always been robust. For instance, the exchanges between Neville Wran and Leon Punch had to be seen to be believed, but it was different. Politics was less of a profession. More people in politics came from another life, and I cannot say that was a bad thing. Today we have people poring over the most innocuous remarks looking for flaws that they can talk up with our opponents and the media. It is often an exploitative and unfair process.
People on the outside contemplating a political career might think about these practices and look at the charges levelled at me in the past week or so and wonder if they should make the effort to enter Parliament. And who could blame them? We are all to blame—politicians, political operators and the media. We make the feeding frenzy what it is. It is the price to pay for reducing modern politics to a cross between a blood sport and an open mike night at the Comedy Store. But the events of the past few days have reminded me that the political process still has the power to redeem, to reveal truths and to deliver justice.
I take this opportunity to thank the members of this Parliament's press gallery and others for demonstrating that the media serves a vital role, after all, in holding us accountable for what we do. In the end political decisions remain extraordinarily important. We cannot do without government. How many fire trucks do we have? Will the Opera House be built? Do children have schools and parks? Who will go to prison? Should we make an effort to keep people out of prison? Only governments can do this.
After nearly 16 years in the ministry I have accumulated too many personal debts of friendship to be able to mention the people I have worked with by name. The same is true of the public servants with whom it has been my privilege to be associated. I simply say that no Minister can possibly be successful without the basic back-up of loyal and trusted staff, and no Minister can successfully conduct a portfolio without confidence in the senior public servants who administer it or without a great deal of support from Cabinet and caucus colleagues. I will carry with me the warmth of my association with so many personal staff, colleagues and public officials, and I know that many will remain my friends always.
Everybody will forgive me for breaking the rule I just laid down to make special mention of my former chief of staff, Jenny Mason, and my former electorate officer, June Wilson, who have over the years given me loyalty beyond comprehension. I will break the rule twice more. The significant environmental reforms for which I have been responsible could not have been achieved without my personal staffers, Mark Aarons and Ted Plummer, or Lisa Corbyn and her executive staff at the Department of Environment and Conservation. I could not have got through the past two weeks—or rather a long time before that—without the support of my partner, Leela.
I certainly could not have got through the past two weeks without everybody in my office, particularly my chief of staff Matthew Chesher, and my press secretaries Alex Cramb and Chris Ward. One day I will write a book about the miracles that they performed at a professional and technical level. Finally, I offer my very best wishes to those around me in the Chamber now. It has been a great privilege to serve with you all. Obviously it is not entirely with a light heart that I leave. Nevertheless, there is a time in one's life when one has to either change or begin to reduce one's enthusiasm, and my intention generally is to go before the latter characteristic begins to assert itself.
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