Page 521 - Week 02 - Thursday, 11 February 2021
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But what I am most proud about is the wonderful team that I have had the pleasure and privilege of being part of. Whilst there is no shortage of gutless armchair critics who anonymously put nasty comments about politicians on Twitter or Facebook, every MLA that I have served with was motivated by the most honourable of reasons.
I have one final observation. I think many people on the right of politics can understand why some people are left wing. We disagree, but we understand. Unfortunately, I think there are many on the left who do not understand or comprehend why someone could be on the right wing. All these views are valid and deserve to be respectfully heard and considered.
Canberra is a good place and it has been an honour to serve in the ACT Assembly. I thank the voters of Ginninderra and Yerrabi, and the Liberal Party, for allowing me to represent you. I know that now is the right time to move on from this place. I have a fear that if I were to stay it would turn into a job rather than a calling. Best wishes.
Mr Alistair Coe—tribute
MS LEE (Kurrajong—Leader of the Opposition) (5.45): How, in one speech, can I possibly do justice to Alistair the politician, the mentor, the friend to so many in this chamber and throughout Canberra?
Alistair was elected to the Assembly in 2008 and re-elected three more times. When you access that famous and reliable resource Wikipedia, you can see how important a place politics has had in Alistair’s life—but so too Canberra. He was born at the Royal Canberra Hospital, grew up in Wanniassa and Nicholls, and attended ACT schools in both Tuggeranong and Belconnen.
He obviously took an active interest in politics at a young age, joining the Liberal Party at 16 as a year 11 student at Radford. He continued that involvement when he went to ANU and became a member of the ANU Liberal Club, and the ACT Young Liberals, and he has the rare distinction of being made a life member of both those associations. His political interests were not limited to Australia, however; he was deputy chairman of the International Young Democrat Union in 2011.
His capacity for work is legendary amongst Liberals, and I am sure also in the Labor and Greens circles. His ability to innately understand and unlock the most complex of issues and his forensic prosecution of issues is unequalled in this place, and I suspect there will be a number of ACT officials giving a quiet sigh of relief after his final estimates appearance in the coming weeks. We also know of Alistair’s insistence on doing his own letterboxing in the middle of the night, running. We also know his capacity to read complex planning laws. At one stage he had a tower of paper in his office that was the territory planning laws and he very possibly read every single page. He certainly knew them back to front.
Alistair made his inaugural speech on 9 December 2008. He said in that speech that the Liberal Party was “a party of initiative and enterprise, and I will seek to bring those attributes to my work here”. To quote more from that inaugural speech:
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