Brett Raguse (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

No, no. I haven’t looked that far! The point I was going to make was that on that same evening the National Archives provided electronic access—and the member for Dawson spoke about electronic record keeping—to those files.

The military records of the World War I veterans are quite amazing. To all those who may have believed my story was not quite true, there was my grandfather Ronald Ross Winks’s record in the Archives. He served in Gallipoli on the second wave. He had been wounded a number of times. Of course, when they were overseas on those commitments they would go to hospital and be sent back out to the front line. They would keep recycling them. He was there for four years certainly in Gallipoli and, as a survivor, moving on to other parts of that campaign.

Interestingly enough those records only exist because we have the process of archiving. If you consider when those records were collected, way back, there was already some sense and understanding of the importance that these records would have for our country. Again, that is a practical example of, and I should say a bit of a promotion and an ad for, the National Archives. All that information is available to all of us whether it is military history, migration, looking at ships’ logs and understanding what occurred—the Archives has it all.

In fact, I have on many occasions, as I said, spent many hours in archives looking for specific information, but every now and again you get carried away and tend to browse. The member for Dawson talked about newspapers. When you go back to certain events that occurred in history and you start to look, you can be carried away just simply understanding and reading that history. That information exists because archives do. It is there because someone took the time and carried out the processes that we see today to continue that preservation. It is certainly bipartisan; we all agree on the importance of this legislation. As I said at the beginning of my speech, this really is a passion of mine.

I hope that other generations that come after me get the same excitement and understanding. My life story has not finished yet, but if I ever have the need to find more information about my family, grandparents and great grandparents then I know that the information will be there. Other speakers mentioned the records of parliament. Being political junkies—as we must be because we are in this place—the very processes of parliament and all of the things that happen here today are archived. The fact is that everyone sitting in this room, in this chamber today, is part of history, and we will be there in some form, I am sure, in the very minutes that are kept and the very attendance in this room. In 50 years time we will be part of the Archives. So when I discover that I might have a long lost uncle or brother or someone sitting over there—

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