House debates

Thursday, 21 February 2008

Condolences

Mr Leonard Joseph Keogh; Dr Kenneth Lionel Fry; Ms Helen Mayer; Hon. Robert Lindsay Collins AO; Mr Matt Price; Mr Bernard Douglas (Bernie) Banton AM; Hon. Sir Charles Walter Michael Court AK, KCMG, OBE; Sir Edmund Percival Hillary KG, ONZ, KBE

12:12 pm

Photo of Ms Anna BurkeMs Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Hansard source

Whilst I want to be associated with all the condolences, I want to pay tribute to the life of Helen Mayer, the former member for Chisholm during the Hawke years from 1983 to 1987, who passed away—sadly, too soon—very recently. I knew Helen very well and I had the great joy of working on her unsuccessful campaign in 1989, when she tried to re-enter parliament. The last time I saw her was at a dinner held for me in Box Hill last year prior to the election, where she attended and brought along a table of her former staff to listen to another past Labor candidate for Chisholm, and former Chief Justice of the Family Court, Alastair Nicholson.

Helen was a remarkable woman—tenacious, committed, hardworking, idealistic and selfless. She was a positive, energetic woman, well respected as an MP for her work in parliament and in the local community and described by many as a dignified role model. Helen actively pursued her ideas in parliament, because she was passionate about them. She was motivated by her belief in ‘the light on the hill’—that is, the duty and responsibility of the community, and particularly those who are in a more fortunate place, to look after our less fortunate fellow citizens. To her, good government meant governing for all and creating a better world for all citizens to live in. She was a passionate supporter of women’s rights and a strong and active role model for women in public life. Indeed, in her maiden speech Helen says how proud she is to be the first woman and the first Labor member to be elected to represent Chisholm, which bears the name of Caroline Chisholm, the social worker who helped new women migrants settle into this country. She was also passionate about poverty, the environment, reconciliation and education.

Helen Mayer was born in Kaniva between Nhill and Bordertown on the Wimmera-Mallee border on 7 September 1932. Her family later moved to Echuca, where she had the great fortune of being able to ride a Clydesdale horse to school, she notes. She was brought up in a lower-middle-class Presbyterian family where ‘the greatest sin in our household was pride or any overt expression of self-esteem.’ She and her siblings were brought up to think only of others and not of themselves. Her mother stipulated that at birthday parties guests had to bring presents for charity rather than for Helen or her siblings. This was to teach the children about sharing and not having something in preference to somebody else having something.

Helen began a diploma in applied science in Melbourne, but after only a year she had to return to Echuca to nurse her ill mother. Two years later she returned to Melbourne to Toorak Teachers College. She then taught in primary schools at Williamstown and Ivanhoe where she encountered huge classes of up to 70 students. At Williamstown she encountered a large number of non-English speakers who were not catered for in schools at that time. At Ivanhoe, she came face to face with a large proportion of students from poor families who had been moved into the former Olympic village.

She then taught at Mount Scopus Memorial College where classes numbered fewer than 30. All these experiences no doubt added to Helen’s growing political consciousness. Helen transferred into the TAFE sector when she became a mother. Although she has been described as someone who was not really a joiner, Helen was so outraged by the sacking of the Whitlam government that she joined the ALP in 1975. In Helen’s words:

It was the feeling that we were not Australia anymore. Gough made people proud to be Australians. Suddenly, it was as if the place where my feet were and always had been, had been chopped out from under me for no reason …

She described her anger at the dismissal as a ‘deep, slow-burning rage’ that galvanised her into action. It was an anger that would fuel Helen’s six-year campaign for the seat of Chisholm which began in 1977 when she ran against the sitting Liberal member, Tony Staley. In 1980 she ran again against the Liberal Graham Harris but was unsuccessful. Undeterred and, despite the fact that three Labor men—Frank Costigan, John Button and Alastair Nicholson—had previously contested Chisholm before her and failed, Helen stood for the seat again in 1983 and won. I should add for the record that the boundaries of Chisholm back then were very different from the ones I now enjoy. It was a fair contest to win it as a Labor member. As a former staff member, Nora Sparrow, said: ‘Helen was never one to shy away from a hard contest.’

What was all the more remarkable was that Helen ran this six-year campaign while teaching full time and completing a Bachelor of Arts degree at Swinburne College of Technology and the University of Melbourne. On being elected to parliament, Helen was immediately appointed to the then Joint Committee of Public Accounts. She worked long hours trying to master the paperwork and admitted to what many a member has probably thought when they first entered parliament:

I woke up at 3 am one morning after I’d been in the job for three months and thought, “I can’t do this job. I’ve got too much to learn. I don’t know how to manage it.” Then I thought, what happens if I resign? There’ll be a by-election. We could lose the seat. I can’t resign. So I began thinking out a way to manage. I decided I had to tolerate a whole lot of disorder and within that, to have a method.

The public accounts committee involved a huge amount of work and entailed many hours preparing for public hearings. Helen relished her widespread responsibilities with the PAC and worked tirelessly on them. The workload invigorated her thinking. She was involved in many highly confidential Department of Defence inquiries.

Helen was also a member of the Joint Standing Committee on the New Parliament House from 1983 to 1984. She pushed very strongly for adequate childcare facilities to be provided in the new Parliament House but, unfortunately, was unsuccessful in her quest.

One of the highlights of Helen’s parliamentary career was the leading role she played in the PAC inquiry into the provision of educational facilities for the children of defence department personnel. Her teaching background and passion for education meant that she was able to achieve positive outcomes in this inquiry. Her former staff member, Nora Sparrow, remembers: ‘Helen loved this work and was good at it.’

Helen had some great women colleagues in parliament: Susan Ryan, Rosemary Crowley, Wendy Fatin and Joan Child, to name a few. She worked with them on a number of issues relating to the status of women, including the anti-discrimination act in 1984, an important and groundbreaking piece of legislation.

But one of the greatest achievements of Helen’s political career was the important work she did in the local community. Helen was a hardworking and enthusiastic MP who was very active in her electorate. Her six-year campaign for Chisholm gave her a very good understanding of the needs and aspirations of the local community. Nora Sparrow recalls of Helen: ‘Helen loved her electorate and its constituents and treated them with the greatest of respect.’ According to Nora:

Helen was never happier than when she was able to cut through the red tape and gain a positive outcome for a constituent. She did much work for the local Vietnamese community by making representations on their behalf under the family reunion scheme. She had an abiding interest in health care, worked assiduously for older people and was a constant visitor to the elderly citizens and various aged care facilities in the electorate. With her teaching background and a lifelong interest in education she worked closely with primary and secondary schools and had strong ties with the local Box Hill TAFE.

Her approach to constituent work was to teach people how to empower themselves. Helen once told a journalist:

I’ve been trying to make myself nothing more than a pipeline, a conduit between the people and the power. I tell a constituent who to contact and what the outcome should be. If it’s not that outcome, we go back and go through the process again. What I say is: ‘I’ll show you how—but you do it. Or we’ll do it together.’ I see my role as not trying to make people comfortable, secure and happy, but making them competent.

Helen was a highly intelligent, generous person who promoted tolerance and social justice. She has been described as ‘well read, an ideas person and full of vision’. She was gracious and charming. There was also a fun-loving side to her, accompanied often by a timely wit, which I was on the end of on a couple of occasions and which was very helpful in carrying out the demands of public life. Despite all her hard work and unstinting dedication to her electorate, unfortunately Helen Mayer’s parliamentary career came to an end in 1987. Sitting on a margin of only 0.2 per cent after the 1984 election, the swing against the Hawke government was on and Helen suffered the consequences. However, Helen remained very active in the local community and even tried to win back the seat from Michael Wooldridge in 1989. I worked on Helen’s campaign in 1989 and watched her throw herself in at it full tilt. Unfortunately, she was unsuccessful.

Helen was greatly heartened by the election of the Rudd government in November last year, and there is no doubt that she would have ardently embraced the Prime Minister’s apology last week. I send my condolences to Helen’s husband, Hendrick, and her son, Jason, and her granddaughter, Zoe. I would also like to thank her good friends Howard and Marie Hodgens and Nora Sparrow for their unstinting support of Helen and for all their help with this speech. Helen’s life after parliament was also very full and she contributed much to the community. She will be sadly missed.

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