Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for this opportunity to pay tribute to Ian Harris AO, Clerk of the House of Representatives, who retires on 4 December after devoting more than 37 years of service to this parliament. I note his presence in the chamber right now. In the speeches about Ian Harris’s service that have already been made in this place, the words ‘professionalism’, ‘commitment’ and ‘integrity’ have come up again and again. There is a reason for that: he epitomises those attributes. The clearest abiding memory I will have of my beginnings, as a member of parliament who celebrated two years in this place on Tuesday, is the welcome and encouragement I received from the Clerk and his staff, who have exercised infinite patience, kindness and wisdom in educating the new arrivals.

Being here for more than 37 years and sitting through countless question times, a person could be forgiven for developing a certain degree of cynicism, yet Ian Harris emanates at all times a positive respect for the institution of the parliament. That is not to say that he does not wish to see reforms in this place. Ian Harris has been interested in pursuing worthwhile changes to the system to improve it. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Main Committee, which has been so successful in making a lot more parliamentary time available to MPs that it has been emulated by the UK House of Commons. As part of a recent inquiry into parliamentary procedures, Ian Harris raised the idea of allowing MPs to use PowerPoint presentations during their speeches, saying:

If we continue to operate parliament as it did in Dickens’ days, it runs the risk of becoming less relevant to the people it represents in the 21st century.

As the first President of the Association of Secretary-Generals of Parliaments to come from the Southern Hemisphere, Ian Harris helped establish parliaments in East Timor, Cambodia and Laos—and he learned French, which is the other main language of parliaments worldwide, including incidentally that place known as the parliament of man, the United Nations.

As I read in an edition of The House Magazine from 1997, Ian Harris had humble beginnings, growing up in the small town of Kurri Kurri in the Hunter region in New South Wales as part of a coalmining family. His family saw education as a means of liberation, and he went through the state school system earning bursaries and scholarships, followed by university in Newcastle, where he gained a BA (Hons) and a Master of Arts specialising in Australian constitutional history, as well as a Diploma of Education. He had various experiences as a university tutor, schoolteacher, journalist and radio broadcaster and knocked back several lucrative offers of employment from banks and corporations before he settled on a career in the Public Service. Fortunately for all of us in this place, in 1972 Ian Harris joined the House of Representatives, where he has at all times embodied the values of the public service code; hence, the oft-repeated descriptors applied to Ian Harris of professionalism, commitment and integrity.

Ian Harris, we salute you and thank you. We also wish you every happiness as you move on to other things—although we suspect that you may not be able to resist tuning in to question time every now and then.

I also offer my congratulations to Ian Harris’s successor, Bernard Wright, on his appointment as Clerk from 5 December 2009. This is a very popular appointment and clearly one based on outstanding merit.

I will finish with a quote, which I hope I have remembered correctly, as a tribute to Ian Harris and all the parliamentary staff. The quote is from one of my heroes, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, who was an incredible public servant. He was killed in rather mysterious circumstances in the Congo in September 1961. Nine days before he was killed he gave an address to United Nations staff where he said something like this:

It is false pride to register and to boast to the world about the importance of one’s work, but it is false humility, and finally just as destructive, not to recognise and recognise with gratitude that one’s work has a sense. Let us avoid the second fallacy as carefully as the first, and let us work in the conviction that our work has a meaning beyond the narrow individual and has meant something for humankind.

Thank you, Ian.

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