George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate records its deep sorrow at the death on 9 August 2017 of Patricia Jessie Giles AM, former senator for Western Australia, and places on record its gratitude for her service to the parliament and the nation, and tenders its profound sympathy to her family in their bereavement.

Patricia Jessie Giles, or Pat Giles, as she was known, was born in Minlaton, South Australia on 16 November 1928. She was the first child of Eustace and Marjorie Giles. The young family moved to Melbourne shortly after Pat's birth, but it was a brief and unhappy union. Eustace disappeared when Pat was only three years old and, with no means of support and expecting a second child, Marjorie returned to South Australia to be close to her parents.

Much of the burden of raising Pat and her sister fell to Marjorie's mother, who was a strict Presbyterian. These were trying circumstances, made all the more acute and distressful by the sensibilities of the age in which significant stigmas still lingered around single motherhood. It is little surprise that half a century later, when she entered this place, social justice and the rights of woman ranked high among the causes for which Pat Giles fought so passionately.

Pat was educated at Woodville Primary School and Croydon Girls Technical School in Adelaide's north-western suburbs. At the age of 17, she left Adelaide to enrol in a nursing course at the Renmark district hospital. But, by 1950, she had returned to complete her training at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. In 1951, she qualified as a midwife. In the following year, on 23 August 1952, she married Keith Emanuel 'Mick' Giles, a young doctor from Western Australia. Returning to the west, the young couple settled in Bassendean, north-east of Perth. On their two-acre block, Mick and Pat Giles raised five children: Anne, Timothy, Penelope, Fiona and Josephine. I understand that Dr Fiona Giles is present in the gallery today.

Pat Giles was a relative latecomer to party politics, but her commitment to volunteerism and community service extended far beyond her time in this place. A passionate advocate for better schools funding, Pat first gained public recognition in 1969 when she contested the federal seat of Perth as the candidate for the Council for the Defence of Government Schools. In 1971 she was appointed to the Health and Education Council of Western Australia and became Vice-President of the Western Australian Parents and Citizens Associations in the same year. In 1972, the darkest of all tragedies struck, with the suicide of her son Timothy, then aged only 18. However, what for many would have meant a premature and definitive end to public life failed to deter Pat from fighting for the causes which she held dear. For this, all Australians—and, particularly, I must say, Australian women—owe Pat a deep debt of gratitude.

In 1971, while a mature-aged university student, she joined the Australian Labor Party. It was the beginning of a lifelong association which would eventually propel her into elected office in this chamber. Her rise through the Labor Party in Western Australia was swift. Within two years, by 1973, she was a delegate to ALP state executive. In that year she also helped to establish the Western Australian branch of the Women's Electoral Lobby and was appointed its inaugural convenor. In 1974, she was appointed by the Whitlam government to be chair of the Western Australian Committee on Discrimination in Employment and Occupation. Having assumed the role of organiser for the Hospital Employees Industrial Union, she chaired the first women's committee of the ACTU, served as the first female member of the executive of the Western Australian Trades and Labour Council and was the first woman on Labor's State Administrative Committee, on which she served from 1976 until 1981. As that recitation of offices discloses, her career in the labour movement was, indeed, a series of firsts.

At the 1977 federal election, Pat Giles cut her teeth contesting the safe Liberal seat of Curtin for the Labor Party against the incumbent Fraser government minister, Sir Victor Garland. In 1980, she campaigned once again to secure preselection, this time for the doubtful third spot on the Labor Party's Senate ticket. However, when the former Labor minister, John Wheeldon, withdrew from the ticket, Pat won the backing of the Western Australian state secretary of the Labor Party, former Senator Bob McMullan, to secure the vacant winnable second position. Thus, she was elected at the October poll that followed and, at the age of 52, embarked upon what she would describe in her maiden speech as her fifth career, as a senator for Western Australia.

It was clear from the outset that Pat intended to bring to her role as senator the same drive for social justice and the same passion for the rights of women that had animated half a lifetime spent fighting for those causes. As she lamented in her first speech in this place:

The young seeking employment, households on low incomes, the chronically unwell, those on pensions, single parents, the handicapped and the homeless are progressively being more effectively shelved, their real choices minimised and their existence made precarious, too many of them are just one week's wage or one welfare cheque off destitution.

Pat Giles saw that she had a job to do when she entered this place and lost no time in prosecuting the case for social reform both within and on behalf of the labour movement. She convened the ALP's National Status of Women Policy Committee in 1983 and 1985, as well as chairing the caucus Committee on the Status of Women throughout her time in the Senate.

Pat Giles would subsequently be re-elected to the Senate in the 1983, 1984 and 1987 elections. In 1990 she was appointed Special Parliamentary Adviser to the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Violence Against Women. However, like so many men and women who have passed through this chamber, it was the work of the Senate committees which she found to be among the most rewarding. She served as chairman of the Senate Privileges Committee from 1988 to 1993 and chairman of the Regulations and Ordinances Committee from 1990 to 1992. Unsurprisingly, she was an active member of both the legislative and general purpose Standing Committee on Social Welfare from 1981 to 1987 and the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee from 1987 to 1993. Drawing upon her considerable experience as a nurse and midwife, she served as a member of the Select Committee on Private Hospitals and Nursing Homes from 1981 to February 1983, and again as committee chair from May 1983 to 1997. During this time, she played a pivotal role in the production of two significant reports into the health and aged care sector.

Speaking in her valedictory speech in this place, Senator Giles echoed sentiments which would, I think, be familiar to all honourable senators, when she reflected:

Some of the increasingly heavy load of committee work in which I have been involved has been enlightening, and some of it exhausting and frustrating to the point of making one grind one's teeth. Much of it rewarding and undeniably worth while.

To the public and to those who served with her in this place, Pat Giles will perhaps be remembered as helping to lead a generation of activists and for advocating for many of the reforms which we now take for granted. In that frontier of social reform she was indeed a pioneer. She was among the Hawke government's most vocal advocates for legislative reform on issues such as abortion, contraception and access to child care, and helped to shine a light on impediments to gender equality, much to the chagrin of some of her more conservative parliamentary colleagues on both sides of the chamber. In the debate surrounding the Hawke government's decision to ratify the 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which led to the eventual enactment of both the Sex Discrimination Act and the Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act. Senator Giles remarked that the 'hysterical emphasis on the sanctity of the family and wellbeing of children' by opponents of reform was a 'shabby and unworthy ploy copied from the American opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, the so-called moral majority, who are neither moral nor a majority'.

Pat was also a tireless advocate for greater civic participation by women in Australia's democratic institutions, as her own career exemplified. This sense of duty is perhaps best encapsulated in her valedictory speech, in which she said:

The few women who have the honour of being elected to this place have a duty and a challenge to ensure that other Australian women of all ages and backgrounds are made aware of the fact that a career in politics can be civilised and rewarding; that it provides a unique opportunity to influence people and events, and to serve one's country and its people; and that it can be constructive, rewarding and even fun.

For her lifetime in public service and her advocacy for the rights of the underprivileged and the rights of women, Pat Giles was awarded an honorary doctorate by Murdoch University in 1996. In 2010, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia. Pat Giles's life was dedicated to the proposition that, when women are permitted to reach their full potential, society itself is the richer for it. She was a tireless advocate for reform, a formidable parliamentarian and a devotee to the highest ideals of community service. She will be sorely missed, and her contribution to Australian public life greatly valued. On behalf of the government, I offer our sincere condolences to her family.