Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I thank those opposite for their indulgence. I rise to speak, on this condolence motion, of a good friend and mentor of mine, former Senator Bob Collins. Bob was born in Newcastle and migrated to the Northern Territory, where he worked in agriculture in Maningrida for many years before joining the Labor Party. Bob, when he was in this place as a senator, was no taller than me but was at least twice my weight. Many people would have been surprised to have seen the footage shown in a Four Corners program that I have seen of Bob riding a horse and looking every bit like Little Joe from the TV show Bonanza.

In the late 1970s, to be a member of the Labor Party in the Northern Territory was a pretty tough ask. At successive elections in the middle 1970s, the Labor Party was effectively wiped out so that at one stage, out of a 19-person assembly, 18 of them belonged to the Country Liberal Party and only one was an Independent. There were no Labor members at all in the parliament when Bob was first preselected to stand for the Labor Party in that parliament.

Dawn Lawrie, who was the Independent member at that time, became of course a lifelong friend of Bob’s and eventually a member of the Labor Party herself. Bob was duly elected to the assembly and became leader of the Labor Party for the 1983 Northern Territory election. Things did not get easier for the Labor Party in 1983. In that election we polled less than 34 per cent of the preferred vote and suffered terrible losses as the newly elected Country Liberal Party government in a parliament of 25 seats cornered for itself over 17 of those seats.

Importantly, Bob was a champion of Aboriginal causes—most importantly, the cause of getting Aboriginal people into parliament. He was fearless in championing the cause of uranium mining and never looked back when it came to the interests of Indigenous people. Bob supported the preselection of Wesley Lanuphuy, the first Indigenous member of the parliamentary Labor Party in the Northern Territory, and then Maurice Rioli from the Tiwi Islands. By the late 1980s, Bob’s attention had turned to the Senate. He stood for Senate preselection and walked that in in 1987. He stood for election at the 11 July 1987 election that also saw Warren Snowdon elected to this place. Warren and Bob had always had a fascinating relationship—Warren from one wing of the Labor Party and Bob from the other. It was with some amusement that, in early 1986, in a ballot for the national executive, the ballot was eventually won by Bob—the party vote having been tied on the conference floor, and the deciding vote being drawn from Warren Snowdon’s hat.

Bob had been responsible for developing a core of staff that were extremely loyal, diligent and hardworking: the late Barbara James was central to that core, as were Rolf Gerritsen, now a professor and working in Alice Springs; Jack Lake, who now works for the current Prime Minister; and Brian Johnston, whom I mentioned earlier, who is battling with his own demons at the moment—he has cancer. By 1990, Bob was a minister in the federal parliament: Minister for Primary Industries and Energy and Minister for Transport and Communications. As his ministerial career developed, Bob maintained a massive interest in domestic Northern Territory politics, so by the defeat of the Keating government in 1996 his interest had encouraged the career of, firstly, Brian Ede, who became leader of the party in the early 1990s and then Clare Martin, who became the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory. When Bob left this place, his work developing the Labor Party in the Northern Territory was continued by Clare Martin. I remember Bob for his great humour and his incredible capacity to process information, to speak in a lucid manner and to speak in a concise and precise frame. He is survived by his wife, Rosemary, and his sons and daughters. Bob was a wonderful man—a person who gave me my start in politics. I thank him for that, and I will not forget him.

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