Page 2998 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 17 October 2007
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Audrey, Warwick, Kerry and Paula and the extended family and friends of Ken Fry. Vale, Ken.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo): I do not think it was possible to be involved in progressive politics in the ACT without coming across Ken Fry. Only two or three weeks ago I was at a birthday dinner for Bill Tully where both Kerry and Warwick were guests. They were very concerned at that time that Ken had just become ill. In retrospect, it was clearly the last illness.
I want to congratulate Ken, wherever he is, on living a long life and remaining active throughout it, because he never stopped being an advocate of the causes that he believed in, and I believe that his life puts a lie to the fallacy that we get more conservative as we get older.
I first met Ken in 1982, I think it was; I was trying to rack my brains for the year of the ALP conference when I believe the ALP betrayed its principles and probably set in place the grounds for the birth of the Greens party. Certainly after that time there were all kinds of efforts to form progressive parties. At that time I was a co-convenor of a very small local branch in East Gippsland, which ceased to be after that conference because we could see the ALP was probably not going to save forests and do all the other things that we would have liked it to have done. But at that conference I heard Ken Fry speak passionately about East Timor, and he was accompanied by his son Warwick. From that time I have followed his career with a great deal of interest because I believe that Ken Fry was not a career politician—he was a politician of passion. He was there because he had issues that he felt would be best advanced through his being engaged in formal politics, and he put his mouth where his beliefs were.
The record indicates that he was part of a number of movements where people’s action created change. I am thinking of the movement against apartheid, I am thinking about his defence of the tent embassy and I am thinking about his support for self-determination and independence for the people of East Timor. I can only imagine how he felt, with his concerns about East Timor, when the Balibo incident occurred during the Whitlam era and that his own party certainly did not acknowledge it; it has only recently reluctantly acknowledged its neglect during that time.
I thank Ken for showing the East Timorese that there was a compassionate side to the Australian people, that there were people who cared. We know that the activism of those people since that time was partly responsible for the fact that the Howard government actually went in after the terrible violence that followed the referendum on self-determination. So Ken’s work had results, and I am sure he knew that. He lived long enough to know that and he was politically astute to the end, so he would have been well aware of that.
His children are still active in the community and carry on many of his campaigns and interests, and for that reason I am very proud to stand here as a Greens representative and thank Ken for the work that he did, which laid the ground for the work that the Greens and many in the Labor Party continue to do. I send my condolences to his family, even though at the same time they had a very rich time with Ken. Mercifully, he lived a good and long life and they can have the joy of knowing that.
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