Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I want to pay credit to the member for Mayo, to the Prime Minister and the opposition leader and to all the speeches that we've heard today. It's clear that we have a nation in grief, and I think the way that's being expressed in the parliament is really doing justice to how our constituents are feeling about this particular time.

It's a real privilege to be able to make a contribution to the discussion today on behalf of the people of Hotham, who I represent in this chamber. Like all of you and all of your constituents, they have experienced an outpouring of grief about the death of the monarch. It's come to me through emails and phone calls. People have stopped me in the street or in the supermarket to talk to me about this matter, and I can see that my community is feeling the need to talk about the Queen. There's a real sense, I think, that we all knew the passing of the monarch was inevitable but it also has been so shocking for it to happen. The Queen has been the monarch for my entire life and for the entire life of, I think, every member of this parliament. When I was born, the Queen had already been on the throne for almost 30 years. So, yes, we knew that she was going to pass, and it was inevitable that it would happen, but the shock has really, I think, struck everyone in my community.

Something that I think isn't always well understood is the level of regard and respect that the monarch held amongst many migrant communities in our country. I have one of the most multicultural electorates in Australia. More than half of my constituents were born overseas. A lot of the people that I represent in this parliament come from countries which are violent, repressive and unstable. This is a community of people that could not place more value on a stable democracy, and for a lot of these communities the monarch was the ultimate representation of that. I just want to express, on behalf of the many community groups that have come to me to reflect that, that we're very much standing with them in the difficult time that we're experiencing.

I talked a little bit about the shock, and I'm not sure if people in the gallery or members of parliament may feel this also, but I've been a little bit surprised by my own reaction to this. I've been thinking about the way that I was introduced to some of these ideas and remembering that the Queen first came into my orbit with a story that my mother told me continually when I was a child. She talked to me about what the royal family had done during the Blitz when London was being bombed. Many of you will know that the then Queen was told to leave London for her own safety and for the safety of her family, but she wouldn't do that because she didn't want to take herself out of that dangerous situation when her husband's subjects didn't have that same choice. Buckingham Palace was bombed. Five explosives were dropped on Buckingham Palace, and, when the King and the Queen were filmed inspecting it the next day, the Queen said: 'I'm glad we've been bombed. Now I can look the East End in the face.' My family are arch-republicans. That is a core value in the household that I grew up in. But what mattered far more to my family than our political system or what side of politics you came from was what it looked like to live a life of service, and that is exactly how we were told to think about the Queen. I was told that story by my mum so many times, because for her that was exactly what leadership looked like. Sometimes it's easy to be a leader, but it is about how you behave when the chips are down, and what she did was really quite extraordinary.

It was amazing, of course, for any individual to exercise the level of power and responsibility that the Queen did, but it was particularly so for a woman. It's hard to imagine becoming the most powerful woman in the world at the age of 25. It is impossible to imagine doing that in 1952. When the first Australian Parliament House was built down the street, that Parliament House was designed without any female bathrooms. That is how irrelevant women were to leadership at that time. Yet the Queen, at the ripe age of 25, became literally the most powerful woman in the world. She carried that off with a level of grace and respect that I think is truly outstanding.

If I can finish with one brief thought, one of the things I constantly reflected on with the Queen was that she didn't have the natural personality of someone to be a global leader. She wasn't full of ego and ambition, and she wasn't that outgoing. But that makes me respect her even more, because everything she did—all the leadership she showed—was done simply for one thing, and that is the duty that she felt towards her subjects. So I say on behalf of my constituents: may she rest in peace.

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