Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I knew John Kerin reasonably well and I liked him even better. The contribution I'm going to make today draws upon my knowledge and friendship with him, but it draws more heavily on some of his own words in some of his own writings, which were voluminous. It also draws upon three people who knew him for most of his life: Jim Glasson, who grew up alongside him in Yerrinbool—they were at primary school together and they were lifelong friends; Rodney Cavalier, who was well known to many people in this place, a former member of the New South Wales parliament and a prolific Labor historian and a long-time friend of John as well; and a gentleman by the name of Phil Yeo, who was a former principal, a district director of the Department of Education in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales and a former mayor of the Wingecarribee Shire Council.

John was a boy from the Southern Highlands who made a big and lasting mark on Australia and was powered by sincerity, curiosity and a trademark sense of humour. He served in a time of giants: first as a backbencher in the Whitlam government and then as a highly regarded and high-performing minister in one of Australia's most highly regarded and high-performing governments. He was first elected as the member for Macarthur in 1972 in a seat which at that point in time overlapped one-third of my existing seat of Whitlam. That part was the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. But back then the seat stretched all the way from the western suburbs of Sydney down to the South Coast at Nowra. He served until 1975 and then succeeded Gough Whitlam to serve as the member for Werriwa from 1978 to 1993. Both seats took part of what is now the electorate of Whitlam.

He did not take what we now would think of as an ordinary path to get there. Growing up on a poultry farm in Yerrinbool in the Southern Highlands, he was an autodidact. He chased knowledge as well as chooks. He read the New Statesman but also the Spectator, deliberately seeking to see the full span of politics, wanting to know but also to understand. In his youth, he worked as an axeman, a brick setter, a poultry farmer and finally, before his election to parliament, an economist in the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, an organisation to which he returned, unusually, during his brief break in his parliamentary service. He joined the Mittagong branch of the Labor Party in 1965—the year I was born. They met out the back of the Mittagong Hotel, and the attendees were, he insists, five men and a dog. Along with Pat O'Halloran, John built and drove the Mittagong branch, and then he drove and built Labor's standing in the Southern Highlands. If he had done nothing else, he would have deserved the party's gratitude for that feat alone. John Kerin truly was a regional Australian.

The Hawke-Keating government, as it is now known, is storied in Labor history and indeed in Australian history. That is as much because of the depth and range of abilities across its cabinets as it is about the two headline names. John Kerin was one of those in those cabinets. The Prime Minister has said that John Kerin was Australia's finest minister for primary industries, and you'll not hear me contradict that assessment. He was also the longest-serving minister in that portfolio, with all its unique challenges and difficulties.

We are indebted to John for his autobiography, The Way I Saw It;The Way It Was, which he completed in 2017 and made freely available online. It's a detailed, generous, wry account of his life. I think it totals 726 pages. I have a printed copy of it, and it serves many purposes. It serves a great account of his life, but it also has a particular focus on his time as a minister, the things that it taught him and the things that he wished to teach the rest of us. He wrote some mighty wise things, like:

… it is just not possible to be a good policy maker if you do not foster trust.

And:

… it is best to think you may be wrong and try to put yourself into the other person's shoes rather than being supremely confident that you are always right.

There are many thanks to go around and many statements of how privileged he felt to have served in the federal government at that time.

The generosity that John showed in his autobiography, both to Hawke, who he called a superb chairman, and to Keating, who he described as a master, is a measure of his nature. There is no bitterness about the things that had gone wrong, and there are no attempts to elevate his own contribution at the expense of others'. His description of himself a few pages later as 'poorly, or patchily educated, lacking confidence and often indecisive' is a terribly modest reflection of his abilities. But it's a striking reflection of his humility as a human being. That, I think we can all observe, is a rare thing in politics. John Kerin was much more than these things, and Australia and Australian Labor were much enriched for his service. Vale.

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