Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I join others in farewelling Alby Schultz. He was a country man, and I mean that as the most sincerest form of flattery. He did not just wear the RM Williams boots and pretend—he was a man born and bred in rural-regional Australia and he understood the differences in representing a rural seat compared to a small patch of densely settled suburbia. He understood that when you become a member of parliament in a regional seat it is a vocation in every sense of the word because your anonymity is gone and you are expected to live and breathe 24 hours seven days a week the needs and wants of your electorate. In a rural-regional seat in Australia today, you face extraordinary hardship at every level. There are very high rates of youth unemployment compared to metropolitan Australia, and there are the vagaries of the seasons where, even when there is a bountiful harvest, prices can collapse and your whole year of effort can come to nought. He understood the emotional trauma of living through seasonal disasters like drought, and he and Gloria understood that you did not just put food on the table of those families doing it tough; you also took around pamper packs. Gloria and Alby would ensure that the most basic essentials like a jar of coffee or a bottle of shampoo were available in the kitchens of those houses. He understood the dignity and respect that needed to go along with those offerings—they should never have been seen as a charitable gesture.

I was so pleased to see a man of Alby's background and character in this place, and of course he is typical of Liberal members—we are a very broad church. We have people who are not just lawyers or officials from a trade union background but who have been, as in his case, an abattoir worker who has understood the problems of being a salaried man, of being someone who works on contract. Then, of course, he represented the three tiers of government—local government, state government and then the federal parliament. He spent over three decades in public life trying to bring about a better place for his constituents. I will always be grateful to Alby for the time he crossed the floor with Michael McCormack, the member for Riverina, and me to say no to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. It involved a disallowable instrument, and Michael and I were not aware that Alby was going to vote with us. When he did come and sit with us, all by ourselves on the bench over on the opposite side to both the Labor and the Liberal parties, he was showing the solidarity which he understood was absolutely essential if the Murray-Darling Basin communities were going to survive. If he were alive today I am sure he would be looking on with consternation at the unravelling of that plan's best intentions.

Alby was a man with a marvellous sense of humour, and when tragedy struck and he lost his eye it took a while for his prosthetic eye to become available and so he would wear a patch into parliament over his injured eye. On different days of parliament, that patch would be a different picture from a school. Sometimes it would be a union jack on his eyepatch; sometimes it would be a picture of an animal or a bird. Alby wore them proudly as representations of his school students. What a marvellous gesture that was, when someone else would probably have been cringing and hiding their injury, perhaps being embarrassed by the affliction they were bearing in a very public place.

To say that Alby had honesty and integrity is an absolute understatement. He also had extraordinarily strong views, and it was not unusual for him to lose his temper, but I believe he always did so for a cause that was just. Sometimes you have to throw rocks to draw attention to an issue before it can be solved. Alby certainly understood that, if a matter was of significance and people were not paying attention, you had to draw attention to that issue, and he did. The issues were invariably about rural and regional Australia.

He also championed the business of fatherhood, which he saw as under threat in Australia due to the way our welfare system works and the very sad outcomes of the dissolution of many marriages. We have heard from others about him as the leader of the Lone Fathers Association. I understand exactly where Alby was coming from, and so do many of my fellow members in this House, because we have so many grieving fathers come to us in our constituency offices asking for support as they seek to see their children or seek not to have their children used as a weapon in battles about financial arrangements. Alby understood all of that very well, even though in his own family he did not have any shadow of the marriage strife that he was dealing with in the lone fathers movement.

His sons, Grant and Dean, loved and respected their father. Somehow Alby managed to be a good father despite the incredible days, weeks and months that we must live removed from our families as we serve the nation as federal members. No doubt that was in part due to the extraordinary mothering by Gloria, his wife for more than 50 years. When Gloria became terribly sick, Alby supported her and took up causes related to her cancer. Then, of course, we were all so saddened to hear that Alby had cancer himself—an incurable and inoperable cancer that meant he only lived to 76. Alby was the youngest looking 70-plus person you could imagine, with his dark hair and his rugged country looks. But he was gone by the age of 76, a cruel shortening of his life. I always imagined him living to a great old age with Gloria and his grandchildren. It is farewell to a great country member; he will be sadly missed.

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