Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to lament the passing of a great Australian, a great Queenslander and, dare I say it, a great Labor man in Tom Burns AO. Tom Burns was a former Federal President of the Labor Party. In fact, he reached that position at the age of 39 and was with Mick Young and Gough Whitlam when they made their famous trip in 1971 which was the first political foray from this country into communist China. Tom was a member of the Queensland parliament from 1972 to 1996 and he was the member for Lytton and Deputy Premier when the Goss government came into power in 1989. I raise all of this because I think it is important to lament the passing of someone who has made an enormous contribution to Australia’s public debate and put in an enormous amount of effort even after leaving parliament.

There are a lot of good stories about Tom Burns, one of the great characters of Queensland politics. Tom had a small fishing boat he used in his bayside electorate of Lytton and if anybody rang his office looking for him, his secretary could say quite truthfully to the constituent, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Burns is out in the electorate’—the name of the boat was, of course, the Electorate. A very clever idea and a great legend that was put around about Tom.

Tom and I had a lot to do with each other on a number of different occasions. In the mid-1980s when I was a journalist, the late Keith Hooper—‘Buckets’ Hooper, the member for Archerfield—was a Labor member with an enormous amount of colourful language, invective and views of the then National Party government in Queensland.

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