Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

With the passing Elizabeth II, our Queen, it is the end of an era and the final chapter of a great life. Australians have respected Her Majesty's grace and dignity and have seen in her the example of the very best of royalty: steady, composed, reassuring and ever committed to service and duty. As Paul Keating, one of the Queen's 16 Australian prime ministers, put it:

With her passing, her example of public service remains with us as a lesson in dedication to a lifelong mission in what she saw as the value of what is both enduringly good and right.

Queen Elizabeth was there in the background through most of our lives. She was there as we moved from black and white into colour, from the white Australia policy to our great multicultural presence. After 70 years with her at the centre of public life, we all caught a glimpse of this passage of time and the long arc of our shared lives together, because the world has changed so much in the 70 years of this reign. Under her watch, the British Empire became the Commonwealth. This was the Queen's great project and it helped make our world a better, more open and more democratic place. The Queen understood the enormous changes that were happening all around her, and she didn't struggle against them as a different leader might have. She appreciated the strict line between her duties as a constitutional monarch and the prerogatives of democracy.

The Queen reigned longer than Victoria, longer than Elizabeth I—two other great female monarchs who also defined their eras and our image of the British Crown. She was a great friend to Australia from the first time she arrived on our shores in 1954 through to the bicentenary and the opening of new Parliament House in 1988 and to her final tour in 2011, where I, along with many people here, was honoured to meet her—in my case, for the second time.

She visited our great house of democracy, but she also visited the homes and communities of ordinary Australians. In fact, in my electorate she opened the Opera House in 1973. She was also there in the year 2000 to open the western colonnade of the Opera House. But she also visited the public housing flats in Belvoir Street in Waterloo in 1977, and she was so popular on that visit that the Sydney Morning Herald described that visit as 'victory at Waterloo'. When I first became the member for Sydney, I was visiting the high-rise flats there in Waterloo and I met some of the residents who were there when the Queen visited in 1977, including residents who had welcomed her into their home. I can tell you no-one had forgotten that day. That was a day that really lived with them and stayed with them.

The Queen respected our independence as a nation but always cared deeply about the welfare of Australians. Beneath all the protocol and decorum, there was a rich humanity. She enjoyed a great romance with Philip—as many have said, the love of her life—to whom she was married for more than 70 years. She was a proud mother and—I think this is important—a proud working mother and grandmother and great-grandmother. I think one of the reasons that so many Australians followed her life and her progress and her work so closely was because they related to elements of that life, particularly her love and support for her family. I know—we were talking earlier—my own mother grew up in the then Yugoslavia. She was probably the Queen's biggest fan in Australia, and it was about her dignity, her years of service and her loyalty to her family. When the Queen chose to give us a peek at her inner life in public, as at the Platinum Jubilee alongside Paddington Bear, she revealed wonderful humour and impeccable comic timing.

So today I join the Australian parliament in paying my final respects to Queen Elizabeth II. We send our love and thoughts to everyone mourning her loss, particularly her family and loved ones.

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