Page 696 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 1 May 2007
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opportunities one after another, and excelled wherever she went. By the time she became the Chief Police Officer of our community she had seen the force in all its incarnations.
She had also seen we Canberrans at our very best and at our very worst. She had been an officer walking the beat in Woden. She had worked in fraud and criminal investigations. She had experienced the national and international facets of the force. She had worked in one of the toughest areas of policing, internal investigations, where police are pitted against their own, with all the anxiety and agony that that entails.
She had worked in the area of training, helping to inculcate in new recruits the ideals that she herself held so dear. In the last decade of her life, she worked at the highest echelons, overseeing some of the most delicate and fraught projects possible, those involving personal protection of high officeholders, witness protection, intelligence, and planning for critical events such as meetings of the commonwealth heads of government. She was intimately involved in the AFP’s protective security response in the wake of the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001.
For this exemplary career, Audrey Fagan was honoured with the Australian Police Medal in 2004. A year later, in July 2005, she came back to the beat where she began her policing career. I do not believe there could have been another appointment greeted with such deep satisfaction on both sides of this chamber.
We all knew that Audrey Fagan was an officer with the intellect and the qualities to equip her to perform any job the AFP had to offer. We were glad and humbled that the job she chose to take on brought these outstanding personal qualities to the service of policing at its most fundamental and its most important—deep in the community.
The outpouring of sorrow and numb disbelief at Audrey Fagan’s death is testament to the impact she had on this community. I intend that her legacy, already profound, will endure and will bear some small and, in time, sweet fruit. To that end, the government will establish a scholarship in her name and in a field that was her passion. The details are still to be finalised, in consultation with her family, but I would like to see this scholarship for tertiary study opened up to any Canberra woman working in the areas of care and protection. These women may be police officers like Audrey herself. They may be women working in allied health areas or women providing professional or social support in areas involving domestic violence or victim support.
By encouraging such women to further study and further professional development, I hope that we may deliver some dividend to the community in Audrey Fagan’s name. I hope too that in this way the government will keep fresh and inspirational the image and memory of a woman who gave so much of herself—perhaps too much of herself as it turned out—to our community.
Audrey Fagan’s death is a sobering blow. I offer my heartfelt condolences to her husband, Chris Rowell; her daughter, Clair; her stepchildren, Glen and Carly; Andrew Phillips; her further family; her friends; and the many AFP officers who are struggling to comprehend the reality of her death.
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