John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security) Share this | Hansard source

Anybody who does not like the fact that I am in parliament or wishes that I were not here will need to blame Ralph Hunt. I knew Ralph Hunt, but I did not know him at all well until after he had left politics, and then I got to know him very well indeed. Ralph was somebody who put his money where his mouth was. After 20 years in politics and, as you have heard from other people, a very full life otherwise in local government and various other things, Ralph did a lot of things for which he got no recompense, and probably no recognition, but he did them because he believed that he should. When Ian Causley, a former member of the federal parliament, was Minister for Lands in New South Wales back in the early 1990s he formed the Western Lands Advisory Board, and he asked Ralph to chair it. Ralph did that and I was one of the first members on it. For the next few years I got to know an absolute gentleman very well.

As my leader, the member for Wide Bay, said yesterday during the condolence motion, Ralph was one of nature's gentlemen. He was a gentleman in politics. He was very tough but he was a gentleman at all times. He just believed that he had a duty to help agriculture and he had a duty to help people. He chaired a western lands board but he had never owned land in the western lands. He had certainly been the member for a lot of the western division in New South Wales. In fact, I remember Ralph telling me that when Bourke was added to the seat of Gwydir the then mayor of Bourke took him into one of the hotels. He said: 'I'm trying to make the right impression, as you do. This big chap walked up, said something to the mayor and the mayor king hit him, and bang, he went out like a light.' Ralph said he thought to himself: 'This is not going to be a good look. Front page: "Candidate for Gwydir involved in brawl,"' at a particular hotel in Bourke. He said: 'Everybody in the pub yelled out, ''Good on you, Wally, the bloke deserved it,'' and so we were heroes.'

Ralph was one of nature's gentlemen and a lovely man. Ralph was actually a redhead, but I guess he had lost most of his red hair when we knew him. But the red hair was as true on him as it is on most redheads: he certainly could get stirred up. I knew a couple of blokes who went to school with him at Scots in Sydney and they said that the red hair belonged on him. He was a tough bloke, even though he was a gentleman.

More than anything, the more I got to know Ralph the more I thought, 'Whatever parliament does, it must make you aware of everybody you look after and are responsible for.' We had an awful lot of fun, and he taught me a heck of a lot about the side of politics that is not talked about very much, about how people in politics can be of different persuasions but still be very good friends, as rigorous as it might get. Even with somebody like Ralph, who you might think everything went well for, he and Mim had issues. I do not mean between them, but they had family issues and things they had to deal with that would have put stress upon anybody, and they dealt with them magnificently. Their children would go through hell and back for them, pretty much as they did for one another and for their family.

For the National Party I guess Ralph was—to use a Labor saying—a 'true believer'. He did a lot towards McEwen House. He and Doug Anthony were very good mates. Ralph would be on the phone and would be talking to Doug and they would be trying to coerce someone to do something. It would not matter much who it was for and Ralph would say, 'I rang him last time, Doug; it's your turn to ring this time and stir him up and get him going.' As time goes on, you always think that it was simpler before you. But they had very clear lines of demarcation, if I can put it that way. They stood by one another. He and Peter Nixon and Ian Sinclair were a very tough and motivated crew. They all worked together. They worked with the Liberals very well. I would like to think that Mim knew how much we all appreciated everything Ralph did for the Australian parliament, for the coalition and for the National Party. He gave his heart and soul to it. After he left—after he walked away from this place—he still gave his heart and soul to the people he had represented for all those years. He still did things that the rest of us hope to do after we leave here. He was a very unselfish man and I am very proud to have known him.

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