Page 1956 - Week 06 - Thursday, 2 May 1991
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ADJOURNMENT
Motion (by Mr Collaery) proposed:
That the Assembly do now adjourn.
Australian Labor Party
MR WOOD (4.29): Mr Speaker, I want to respond to some remarks that Mr Collaery made last night concerning the Labor Party in which he was prepared to - - -
Mr Collaery: They were not unkind.
MR WOOD: I did not say that they were. They were remarks in which he was prepared to mention my name. He ran the line that I have heard in this Assembly before - and I have heard it many, many times in other places - of, "Look back to the good old Chifley Labor Party, the good old days". Those were the days, so to speak. He was ruing the fact that, apart from me, he says - condemning me in some way - the Labor Party today is not of the Chifley mould. It is an old tactic, I might say. It was a popular one in the Queensland Parliament - to condemn the present Labor Party on the ground that it did not match up to the party in former times.
We are all very proud to be identified with Mr Chifley and the party he ran at the time. What was the party that Mr Chifley led like? Mr Chifley was, in terms that I would want to define more fully but do not have the time now, a good old socialist. He was a man who believed in working for the ordinary citizen. One of his great intentions was to provide large-scale public works, as a result of the distress he saw at the time of the Great Depression. So, he provided large-scale public works, the most notable of which was the Snowy Mountains scheme - a scheme that was widely condemned at the time as being impractical and expensive and not at all the role of government. He incurred a great deal of wrath in the community about that.
He was a man who believed in public enterprises. He is on record often as saying that where there was a public utility that was not being run in the interests of the community at large the government ought to nationalise it. That is the man he was. Of course, he set out to do that in the case of the banks. That is almost my first memory of political campaigning - in 1949 when there was a virulent attack on the Labor Party and its proposal to nationalise the banks.
Mr Humphries: Deservedly so.
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