Page 3976 - Week 10 - Thursday, 28 August 2008
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Firstly, I would like to thank my family. Karin, you have not helped me. Rhonda, the bride of 45 years—42, sorry. I am okay here; I am protected. Protect me, Deputy Speaker. My children, their partners and my grandchildren: all too often the impact of political life on the families of politicians is not recognised. However, I trust that, in my case at least, their proximity to this ride that has been my union and political career and life has stimulated an interest and insight that is worth remembering. And I hope you are not too scarred by it either.
I would like to acknowledge and thank my parents for providing me with the basic politics and enough determination in my genes to persist on the path of unionism and political life. In short, there was something natural there, I think, which inclined me to that value of collective action.
Early in my working life, I started a boy’s own adventure in the fire service in Sydney and moved to Canberra for a career that was certainly fulfilling but, more importantly, put me in contact with wise and intelligent union activists and connected me with a climate of political activism in the movement of unionised workers. I will give you a little snapshot of a firey’s life. As a professional firey, a firefighter, life for me was long periods of training, preparation and anticipation and then periods of action, ranging from the routine and satisfying to physically and emotionally totally exhausting, from keeping people safe to the worst possible outcome, from a good save to a total loss, from extinguishing a fire in a garbage bin to confronting and chasing a scrub fire, from a fire in a car to an industrial or residential fire or, in earlier days, a terrifying job in the bowels of a ship; at the same time becoming involved in a unionised collective and watching out for wages and working conditions.
Then I came here to light a few fires, which has been pretty interesting too, and to keep a few fires burning. The more time I spent with people like this, the more the things that my parents had said to me in dribs and drabs consolidated into a defined set of values and a capability to develop strategies and achieve some results.
It is also true that the professional firefighter’s best skill is the ability to calculate and safely blend a mixture of safety, fear, passion, excitement and some collectivism of compassion and service. In many ways, that all sounds familiar to the skills you have got to have in this place.
The most lasting words that have stuck with me were the words of a firefighter union mate, something along the lines of: “We are only caretakers of the wages and working conditions we have inherited and our job is to secure them and make them better for the next generation.” Thank you, Matt; they were wise words.
Organised labour, by and large—and you would expect me to say this—is responsible for all the gains we have seen in social conditions, in many ways all achieved in spite of the wishes of the ruling class. Great struggles have occurred on these issues. It has been a natural extension of my union activities to become active in the ACT branch of the Australian Labor Party. This widened my political interests and honed my debating and campaigning skills. I was used to working in an environment where
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