John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too want to associate myself with this condolence motion. Joe Riordan was very much a man of his era. He was born in the middle of the Great Depression in 1930. He was a man of strong working-class allegiances and a man with an unwavering sense of social justice. Although his period in the federal parliament was very short, only from 1972 to 1975, his was a life of service: to his community, to his union and the union movement, and to his party.

Joe Riordan's first speech to the parliament on 1 March 1972, I really do think, reflected his sense of humanity. It was a plea for the government to remember that its first responsibility was to human beings, not to machines, to technology or to the financial bottom line. He said:

This is a society where machines have more importance and are given greater significance than the men and women who operate them, where material possessions are the very criteria of success, where job satisfaction and purpose in life have come to be regarded as almost irrelevant.

At the first sign of an economic cold breeze, labour is the most easily disposed of part of a company's productive process.

No doubt informed by his background in the trade union movement, Joe described many corporations as:

Faceless, impersonal—a callous and cynical machine … with no concern for those who work for them, for those who produce the wealth of the organisation, and certainly no concern for the families of these people … [For] when there are 100,000 out of work, about 300,000 people are in need.

Joe Riordan believed that the government that preceded the Whitlam government had created and encouraged this depersonalised society for whom the unemployed were simply units on a piece of paper. But perhaps one of the areas most important, I think, in terms of his brief period in the federal parliament, carried out by Joe Riordan was his chairmanship of the Joint Committee on Pecuniary Interests of Members of Parliament. It was an issue that then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam really did feel very strongly about and, for Joe Riordan, a total cleanskin about whom there was never—never—any hint of corruption, it was a matter that he was fanatical about.

The committee was set up in August 1974 and it was at that time groundbreaking. There was no register of members' interests, no declaration of the often conflicting interests of ministers in their holding of shares or their directorships of companies, and no restrictions on officials who resigned from public service, going straight into companies in fields associated with that service. There was no code of conduct for members of parliament or for ministers. The possibility of improper influence on the decision making process was clear, and the problems that raised were both serious ones and controversial ones.

In his opening remarks for that first public hearing of the committee, Joe Riordan said:

It is not the function of the committee to be concerned about the degree or level of wealth of any person irrespective of that person's position. The committee is concerned with interests held by the individual which may conflict with the execution of his or her public responsibility. We … seek recommendations which will protect and uphold the dignity and honour of parliamentarians and public officials.

Of course, current events, even in New South Wales, demonstrate the truth of Joe Riordan's view. The committee reported in September 1975. It recommended that members, the staff of ministers and shadow ministers, and journalists in Parliament House should make declarations of their pecuniary interests in a publicly available register. Unfortunately, these recommendations were not able to be acted upon before the dismissal of the Whitlam government. In fact, we did not see a register of pecuniary interests for members of the House of Representatives until after the election of the Hawke government.

Joe Riordan was appointed to the ministry in June 1975, replacing Les Johnson as Minister for Housing and Construction. Of course, his tenure was to be very short. However, as minister he continued the Whitlam government program of welfare housing. Through this program, the Commonwealth made advances to the state housing authorities at low interest rates for the provision of housing for those persons and families most in need. It was a program he heartily endorsed. He believed that housing was the engine of the economy—the first to suffer in a downturn but capable of driving the economy out of recession.

It is also true that Joe Riordan, Jim McClelland and John Kerr had a shared history working in industrial relations and were long-time and genuine friends. At the time of the crisis in 1975, Governor-General Kerr maintained contact with those two Labor ministers—Joe Riordan and Jim McClelland—and they became informal intermediaries between the Governor-General and the then Prime Minister. They believed that the Governor-General deliberately deceived them as to his intention to dismiss the government. Their sense of betrayal by Kerr was, for them, particularly bitter.

Beyond politics, Joe Riordan, as we have heard, was a proud and committed trade unionist. He began in the union movement in 1952. He was federal secretary of the Federated Clerks Union from 1958 to 1973 and a member of the ACTU executive from 1963 to 1967. He has been described to me—and you have heard again from Cameron in this condolence debate—as a superb industrial advocate, noted for his preparation. He believed that trade unionism was vital for the protection of workers. He said in parliament in 1972:

I notice from what has been said in previous debates that honourable members opposite seem to have an antipathy towards trade unions. That is very unfortunate. I remind the honourable member that, since 1904, judges of Australian arbitration tribunals said that employees who enjoy the benefits of union awards should be members of unions.

This argument about the benefits derived from the work of unions was basic to Joe Riordan's philosophy. In a case before the Commonwealth Arbitration Commission in 1973 considering union claims for preferential treatment for union members, Joe Riordan noted that both unionists and non-unionists reap the advantages of conciliation and arbitration proceedings for new awards and agreements but unionists alone bear the costs of obtaining them. He had never known non-unionists who object to being compelled to receive award benefits. He was a man who believed in solidarity—in the best and oldest sense of the word. He was a genuine Laborist.

After Joe Riordan's defeat at the 1975 election he returned to industrial relations, the area of his great expertise. He was appointed as head of the New South Wales Department of Industrial Relations. He served as the Senior Deputy President of the Industrial Relations Commission from 1986 until 1995. Finally, in 1997 he was made chair of the WorkCover authority of New South Wales, serving until 2004.

I think Joe Riordan was a man to be respected. He ran a parliamentary committee in a non-partisan manner. Despite being in the Right faction of the Labor Party, he respected, and was respected by, members of the Left, particularly on these probity issues I have spoken about. Although he lost his seat of Phillip in the great sweep of 1975, he was very highly regarded throughout that electorate. In his ministerial office he was surrounded by people he knew and trusted, and they in return admired him enormously and were immensely loyal to him. Joe Riordan's life was a life of service and commitment to the ideals of fairness, equity and social justice. I join with other senators in offering my most sincere condolences to his family and friends.