Page 3186 - Week 10 - Thursday, 25 September 2014
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Kurt had recently taken on one of the more challenging roles in this place, as a press secretary in my office, where his workload and responsibility increased significantly. The press secretary role is a 24-hour a day role: the media call all the time; he fielded those after-hours calls. He was the one who took all the calls about events and activities that happened right across the territory, including community meetings and at Labor Party branches. Simply, his role was to be across absolutely everything that happened. He was, and he kept me exceptionally well briefed on all of those issues.
As I have said before, and I will say again, in politics you are only ever as good as the team of people you have around you. Kurt was a standout leader in my team, someone who was admired, respected and cherished by his colleagues. And he was great fun to work alongside. He was talented, productive and committed. He was involved in everything in our office, and within the government, developing and implementing policy, organising at Labor Party conferences, and conducting grassroots campaigning where he forged very strong relationships with people on the other side of politics and within the Greens party. He worked with multiple stakeholders, community groups, the business community and the media. And throughout all of this, he maintained a great sense of humour and a passion for his work, and he demonstrated sound judgement and was a constant source of new ideas.
He was a wise young man. He had the ability to think through an issue or a problem, and also had a tremendous capacity to bring imagination to a task, to go beyond the obvious and to go beyond cliches. He understood that politics was more than winning votes, putting together a budget and counting numbers at Labor Party conferences—that ultimately it was about the values, vision and outcomes that you bring for the people you seek to represent.
Kurt was instrumental in the development of the new brand for Canberra, which for him was more than just a contemporary marketing strategy. It was a way of demonstrating the passion that he had for Canberra, a way of engaging positively in this city’s future. And Kurt had a genuine passion for Canberra—for the uniqueness of our city, for its growth, for its social and cultural potential. He was, at this point, actively involved in the next phase of the brand, particularly the “hipster” elements of it. In one of the last texts that we exchanged before he went away, he said he was proud that he had retained my hipster credibility—which I think you would all know is something that would require a degree of work. He loved living in Braddon and being part of that emerging culture and that part of the city. Kurt recognised that Canberra had reached an important point in its history, somewhere where the young, the creative and the entrepreneurial could stay and make their mark—not having to move elsewhere to achieve their goals. I think Kurt personified this.
Kurt was building a successful career in Canberra, he had assumed leadership roles within the Labor Party, and his professional skills were in high demand. There was a universal view amongst his colleagues that he would go on to achieve even greater things, and I think this has been made clear by the breadth and depth of tributes from across the political spectrum, across the Canberra community and, indeed, around the nation in recent weeks.
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