Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Skills and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to talk on this very important condolence motion about a friend and a Labor giant whose contribution to the labour movement, to public life and to this nation was quite simply as wide as it was deep. Simon Crean started as a mentor of mine, but we ended up as friends. I knew him for more than 30 years. When I was a relatively junior union official in the late eighties, Simon Crean was the president of the ACTU. That was at a time when union membership was about 50 per cent of the workforce. The ACTU, the peak body of the union movement, was at its strongest, and it was working very closely in cooperation with a then reforming Labor government, the Hawke government. At that time, the accord that was struck between the union movement, business and the Hawke government was absolutely critical to the economic reforms that people continue to talk about today.

As a co-architect of those reforms in the ACTU, along with the then secretary Bill Kelty, Simon Crean played an absolutely critical role in delivering the economic reform and helping deliver those reforms that were brought about by the Hawke-Keating governments. It was absolutely essential that he was president at that time. You needed people who understood the economy, understood the aspirations of working people and understood what was needed to bring about changes to improve this country's prospects. He was the right person, along with Bill Kelty, to be leader of the union movement at that time, and his contribution in that role was very significant. As a young person, I recall watching Simon on the news. He was well-known to the country well before he was 40 as the leader and spokesperson for the union movement.

He came from a remarkable Labor lineage. His father, Frank, was Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer under the Whitlam government—

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