Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to lament the passing of a great Australian, a great Queenslander and, dare I say it, a great Labor man in Tom Burns AO. Tom Burns was a former Federal President of the Labor Party. In fact, he reached that position at the age of 39 and was with Mick Young and Gough Whitlam when they made their famous trip in 1971 which was the first political foray from this country into communist China. Tom was a member of the Queensland parliament from 1972 to 1996 and he was the member for Lytton and Deputy Premier when the Goss government came into power in 1989. I raise all of this because I think it is important to lament the passing of someone who has made an enormous contribution to Australia’s public debate and put in an enormous amount of effort even after leaving parliament.

There are a lot of good stories about Tom Burns, one of the great characters of Queensland politics. Tom had a small fishing boat he used in his bayside electorate of Lytton and if anybody rang his office looking for him, his secretary could say quite truthfully to the constituent, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Burns is out in the electorate’—the name of the boat was, of course, the Electorate. A very clever idea and a great legend that was put around about Tom.

Tom and I had a lot to do with each other on a number of different occasions. In the mid-1980s when I was a journalist, the late Keith Hooper—‘Buckets’ Hooper, the member for Archerfield—was a Labor member with an enormous amount of colourful language, invective and views of the then National Party government in Queensland.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I used to work on the same booth as he did.

Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There we go—the member for Hinkler might have a few stories too. But when Keith Hooper died suddenly on an operating table, Tom Burns took over the job of being the man who would try to expose a lot of the conspiracies. I remember climbing through all sorts of amazing places at Tom Burns’s direction, with a camera crew in tow and with a radio microphone, to dig out a lot of the dirt that became the basis of the Fitzgerald inquiry. I look back on the times of the Fitzgerald inquiry in the late eighties and I wonder why on earth I was not taken out and dealt with, with concrete boots, because I was inadvertently in the Bellino and the Hapeta places of ill repute, digging out that dirt at Tom’s suggestion.

In more recent years I have seen Tom a lot in my electorate because his affection and love for China has been continuing and the Chinese-born community in my electorate would be very sad at the passing of the Hon. Tom Burns. He of course I think made a deal of money, which is to his credit, from his involvement with China, but he helped to make a deal of money for Queensland and Australia as well. He was highly regarded in China and in Australia. To Angela, his wife, and their family—the children, the grandchildren and, indeed, the great grandchildren: we thank you for Tom. I know that many people today would be stopping and thinking about the great contributions of Tom Burns.