Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Urban Development and Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Today I wish to make some comments in memory of Richard ‘Dick’ Scott AM, a former Vice-President of the ACTU, President of the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union and Secretary of the Boilermakers and Blacksmiths Society. Upon the arbitration of the unions, he became a national official and went on to the ACTU. Dick died last week, and I will have the opportunity to attend his funeral tomorrow.

In an age when we see many union officials utilising their union power and role as secretary or president of an organisation to get themselves into parliament, Dick represented a different generation in the trade union movement. Despite the fact that he could become a national official of these unions and the ACTU, throughout this period he remained the secretary of the Guildford West branch of the party and held positions on state and federal electoral councils. He never had the attitude that people should inherit these positions from outside the party. He was constantly an activist at a branch level through campaigns and in the general community. He did contest preselection for Prospect at one stage and, unfortunately, failed in that bid.

Dick was a community citizen of the first order. He was extremely active in the St Mary’s Anglican Church in Guildford. He had a country background. He had two blocks of land. The one next door had a huge vegetable patch. As a youth I recall him having a tractor in suburban Sydney for growing those vegetables. His wife was an active tennis player locally. They were regarded as community minded.

The husband of the member for Fowler, who has just joined me, also knew Dick very well and was at the same branch for many years. The main point I want to stress is that, in this day and age when we see people who think they should inherit positions and inherit parliamentary life—not because of their role inside the party and their personal preparedness to be involved and put their time in but because they are officials of this or that union—Dick reminds me of a different period. It also brings to the core the nature of the suburb of Guildford, which in the 1930s had the biggest anti-eviction demonstration in metropolitan Sydney. It later produced Jim McNeill, who fought in the Spanish Civil War; Jack Mundey and Mick McNamara, who threw out the corrupt and often violent leadership of the Builders Labourers Federation before being supplanted by the intervention of Gallagher; Jack Cambourne, the Secretary of the Federated Engine Drivers; Ted Lipscombe from the Metal Workers Union; and my predecessor, Tom Uren. Dick is typical of that generation of leaders of the progressive wing of politics in this country. I mourn his departure.

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