Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, on indulgence: today we honour a great man who designed a great building and through that great building made an extraordinary contribution to the great city that is Sydney. It is with sadness that all Australians reflect on the passing of Jorn Utzon. Any of us who visit Sydney and stay there from time to time—though I am not a son of Sydney’s shores—and are confronted once again, of a morning, by the sun dancing on the sails of the Opera House are reminded of what an extraordinary contribution this is. What Jorn Utzon did way back in 1957, 50 years ago, to come forth with a design like that was truly path-breaking. He was out there ahead of the game, ahead of the rest. He had an extraordinary sense of design and an extraordinary sense of innovation.

To Australia he has given a great gift. It is not just our view of the significance of the building. Last year the Opera House was inscribed on the World Heritage List and was described by UNESCO as a ‘masterpiece of human creative genius’. If you travel around the world and ask anyone whom you see, ‘What is your image of Australia?’ there will be a range of answers. But the one unifying visual image is the sails of the Opera House. We owe that to someone from a distant land, who came here in response to an international competition and had the flair to win and the perseverance to prevail despite the difficulties he encountered in so doing.

I think that it is fair and appropriate that the Australian parliament today honours the contribution of this great man. He gave Sydney a great gift, but in so doing he gave Australia a great gift. We honour him as a son of Denmark but, as I said yesterday, his spirit lives with us. We honour him too, in that sense, as a son of Australia.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, on indulgence: again I associate the opposition with the fine remarks of the Prime Minister. Jorn Utzon came from a nation of sailors and a family of sailing boat builders. He was a sailor himself. And he came to a city on a harbour filled with sails and he created a most remarkable building, a building that 50 years after it was designed still seems as fresh and modern as it was the moment it was conceived in Jorn Utzon’s mind.

What a remarkable creation the Sydney Opera House is. It sits there in Sydney—new, fresh, dynamic, the ultimate in modernity, even though most Australians cannot remember a time when it was not there. And we have the other great symbol of our nation, Uluru, as old as time itself. What a remarkable thing it says about Australia that we have those two great magnificent creations, each of them speaking to our timelessness, our history, but also to the fact that we are a young nation, a new nation always striving forward.

Jorn Utzon has inspired so many architects around the world. If you go down to the new National Portrait Gallery you will see his inspiration there. Every city around the world that chooses to hire a great architect—many of them nowadays Australian—to build an iconic building is saying to itself: we want to have a Sydney Opera House; we want to do for our city what Jorn Utzon did for Australia. His building is a song in concrete. It speaks of Sydney but it is bigger than that. As the Prime Minister said, it speaks of a whole exciting nation always new, always looking to the future. Jorn Utzon’s son, Jan, said that when his father closes his eyes he sees the Opera House. Mr Speaker, when we see the Opera House we see in our eyes the spirit of Jorn Utzon.