Bob Carr (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

It is a real privilege for me to stand in this chamber and pay tribute to Lionel Bowen. I can remember as a teenager—I must have been 16—going into the New South Wales parliament once, in the school holidays, besotted with politics, and Lionel Bowen, elected member for Randwick in 1962, was there on his feet, talking about a range of things. The issue of state aid was very big. He was saying, 'Menzies is getting credit for state aid to non-state schools, but I was at the last state ALP conference and a bloke in his shirt-sleeves got up and said we ought to be helping these local schools build their science blocks; that's where the idea came from—a bloke at the state ALP conference, not from Bob Menzies.' There was sectarian politics that swirled around both sides in those days. Someone on the other side of the chamber said, 'Yeah, and when it comes you'll be right behind it.' It was a real nasty, narky sectarian interjection. And I remember that later in his speech, a wide-ranging speech, Lionel got on to rent control. Can you believe that rent control prevailed in Sydney's suburbs at the time? Someone from the Liberal side said what a disaster it was—and they were entirely correct—and Lionel said, 'There have been a lot of elections in New South Wales fought on rent control'. It is just a nostalgic thought that comes back to me over all these years. Here was I, a teenager at Matraville High School, besotted with politics, turning up in the gallery of the state parliament to hear the bloke we are memorialising today.

I was honoured to be his campaign director for 18 years and chairman of his federal electoral council for 18 years. I read a lot of his reports in those days. In ways that might even shock Senator Cameron, Lionel was an unabashed protectionist. I would always hear him say, at least at every second FEC meeting, 'Why, in this country we can produce anything; we can manufacture anything.' He was a deep-dyed protectionist. All the standard issues of the time were aired by Lionel, reporting in Randwick Labor Club or Redfern Town Hall, to his federal electoral council. I was lucky enough to be in the chair and hear his wisdom. I backed him in the 1968 preselection, taking him around the members of the Malabar branch, so fondly regarded by Senator Thistlethwaite, right through to today, to see that he got a share of the votes in the Malabar-South Matraville branch, as it then was.

I loved the Bowen stories, such as the story that Senator Faulkner recalled about Lionel Bowen and Gough Whitlam visiting the Kremlin. I tweak my version slightly from the one Senator Faulkner retailed. The Soviet leadership was there to talk about big barter arrangements. They wanted to send us their tractors and get our wheat in return. They would be big trade deals. But Lionel was hugely amused that Gough allegedly said, 'I want to talk about Nicholas II.' He wanted to talk about the last of the Romanovs.

Lionel loved that story and also the one about being appointed Postmaster-General in the Whitlam government—that was his first portfolio. He turned up at the old GPO, where there was a minister's office. The head of the department showed him the office he would use, and Lionel said to him, 'No, I think I will take the office down the corridor,' which was the public servants' area and far more grand, more spacious, more elegant and more of a heritage item.

From that morning he won the heroic battle with the bureaucracy, with the public service. He showed them all the cunning and the strength he had accumulated from his time in local politics in the Eastern Suburbs—those years on Randwick Council, the years fighting for the numbers in the ALP and the years getting elected and campaigning at street corner meetings to hold the seat of Randwick and get into Kingsford Smith. In those days we did have street corner meetings. They were a total waste of time. They would not have shifted one vote. And there was Lionel in those baggy pants of his, his white shirt hanging out over them, with a defective microphone and broadcasting equipment, pounding out a message to uncomprehending shoppers on a Saturday morning at Kingsford or Randwick or Maroubra Junction. But we seemed to endure it; it was good for us.

I remember as his campaign director getting on the phone to him on 12 November 1975, after the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Lionel said, 'Ah, champ, what people seem to want on these campaigns is meetings. They like meetings.' On the Labor side of politics we had become very fond of meetings in the one month during which the budget was blocked in the Senate. So we organised meetings in Botany Town Hall and all the rest. The only people who came were Labor Party loyalists. The rest of the community was not even remotely interested. We received a thumping in Kingsford Smith as well as elsewhere on polling day.

But that was the local politics in which I was able to imbibe, I hope, some of the wisdom of Lionel, delivered in that 'oh, champ' wry, laconic manner that spoke of the racecourse at Randwick, of his life in the suburbs, of his background in the army as a very young man, and of his lone parent mother looking after him. I remember how he was very sad in 1968, I think, when his dear old mum died.

I remember his work for prison reform when he was in the state parliament, which Senator Faulkner referred to. I remember the performance of a play called Fortune and Men's Eyes at the Ensemble Theatre. After the play, which was about savage conditions in an American prison, they turned it over to Lionel Bowen. His work on the state parliamentary committee had illuminated a strong case for prison reform. He spoke about the things he saw in the prisons of New South Wales in the 1960s. He spoke about the shocking sanitary conditions and overcrowding and about the people with severe mental problems—what we call developmental disability today—stranded in the prison system without support or training or education. He spoke about the hopelessness of it. The report he was associated with was a very strong one, and it was the basis for prison reform delivered by Attorney-General Maddison, in the Askin government. But they are very much matters that are on the agenda to this day.

As have other senators, I extend my condolences to the Bowen family, to Claire, to Anne and the seven other children. They can be very proud of their husband's and father's contribution to public life in Australia. He was very proud to be a member of the state parliament and to have in his background the fact of having been Mayor of Randwick and of having served in this national parliament. In 1995, the morning after the night on which I was elected Premier after the votes had finally come in and it had been broadcast on the TV news that my team had been elected to government in New South Wales, I was standing in the Parliament House office, packing cases all around me. It was a shambles. It was very early in the morning and the rest of the staff had not arrived to participate in this happy transition from opposition to government. Out of nowhere appeared this somewhat diminished figure of Lionel Bowen—he had been in retirement and he was beginning at last to look his age, because he had always looked preternaturally young—in the baggy suit and with the wry lopsided smile. It was a measure of our friendship over the decades—our engagement in local politics, me helping him as his campaign director, as someone helping him get preselection votes—that he turned up to say to me, in effect, 'Well, you never succeeded me in my seat as we sort of planned, but I am here as one pro to another to say, "It is nice to see you become Premier."' He shook my hand and his smile and the light in his eyes meant a great deal to me.