Page 2251 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 17 August 1993
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MR HUMPHRIES: Madam Speaker, I also rise to support the motion moved by the Chief Minister. Dr Hector Kinloch was a man of many contradictions. He was, of course, an opponent of the ACT casino; yet he had been a gambler. He was a pacifist; yet he had been a soldier. He was an ardent critic of the school closure program of the Government of which he was a member; yet members of that Government will recall that it was he, in the joint party room in 1990, who moved for the closure of seven schools in the ACT. He was, as Mr Kaine has said, in politics but he was not a politician.
My educational association with Hector Kinloch began in 1982. At that time I was president of the Students Association of the Australian National University and he was the Dean of Students. He was an interesting person in that position because he at once wanted to empathise with the students whom he served or who were under his charge. He was the only academic that I can recall who bothered to visit the offices of the Students Association. People who visited the offices of the Students Association in those days were not anxious to return - they were not the most pleasant places in the world - but Hector Kinloch wanted to be at one with us and he came and he saw the students in their own place. That inclusive nature, that desire to be empathising with people that he had to deal with, was a pattern in his life.
Our relationship was renewed in 1989 when we both joined the Legislative Assembly as inaugural members. We were both educational spokesmen for our parties and in due course he became the Executive Deputy to me when I became Minister for Health, Education and the Arts. In that capacity, as in all the other things he did as a member of this Assembly, he worked extremely hard. I was told by someone that he found it galling to be playing second fiddle to someone who was much younger than he and who could have been his student in education, but he never said that to me and he fulfilled his duties and his responsibilities with great aplomb.
I think, Madam Speaker, that Hector Kinloch wanted to be in politics, as in other aspects of his life, all embracing. He hated to deliver rejection; yet politics is all about making and enforcing decisions and choices. It is about choosing between causes, between claims, between people; and that was, for Hector Kinloch, a special agony because he hated making those kinds of choices. He hated rejecting people in particular. He found it very difficult to turn away, for example, the school communities who came and put great pressure on him and his colleagues in the Residents Rally, and he wanted to be loyal simultaneously both to the Government of which he was a member and to the interests in the community that lobbied him on that question. There was, of course, tremendous pressure on him during that time.
He dealt with that pressure in a variety of ways. At one stage he resigned from his position in the Alliance Government, but not from the Government. He was a gentle person, but he was also capable of being extremely passionate, even hot tempered. He was deeply disturbed in many respects by the ways of this Assembly, and by rejecting the stock-in-trade of politics he, I think, marked himself not as a politician but as a man with other broader interests. He announced late in 1991 that he would not be contesting his seat in this Assembly again and he said so on the basis that he was not in good health. That was true, of course. It is almost certain that the great pressure he was under in this Assembly contributed to the decline of his health in the last two or so years of his life.
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