Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution on the condolence motion for the honourable Thomas Uren AC. A Balmain boy, Tom Uren served his country in war and in peace. His young life was divided among the sports of lifesaving, rugby league and boxing. Following enlistment in the Australian Army, he served as a bombardier with the 2/1st Heavy Battery in Timor where he was captured by the Japanese and sent to work on the infamous Burma-Thai railway. Then he was a prisoner in Japan and a witness from afar, as we have heard, to the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. These were, as you would expect, formative events in the life he went on to live. The Prime Minister stated that he taught a generation of Australians to forgive and to forge new friendships with our former enemy.

When Tom Uren returned from the war he was a rubber worker in the building industry, then he joined Woolworths as a trainee executive, before eventually opening his own store at Guildford. He became the Labor member for the New South Wales seat of Reid in the 1958 general election and held the seat until his retirement in 1990, when he was the Father of the House. A leading member of the left faction, he served as a minister in the Whitlam and Hawke governments as well as Deputy Leader of the Labor Party from 1976 to 1977.

An inveterate campaigner, Tom Uren threw his energies into issues such as uranium mining, the Vietnam war, Indigenous issues, environmental issues and urban renewal issues as well as compensation for former prisoners of war. He pioneered the protection of Australia's historic and natural heritage. Tom Uren was the first Labor MP to question support for US intervention in Vietnam in August 1962. He was in fact jailed for refusing to pay a fine over a Vietnam march protest in 1971. The opposition leader has described Mr Uren as the keeper of Labor's conscience in trying times. He was their moral centre.

Tony Stephens wrote an obituary on Tom Uren in TheSydney Morning Herald on 27 January. He wrote:

Like most Labor leaders of his time, Uren paid scant attention to the economy. He lost more economic arguments than he won in the last 25 years of the 20th century …

Uren was made an officer of the Order of Australia in 1993 and then a commander in 2013. Following a visit to Hellfire Pass on Anzac Day in 2011, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that the government would meet Uren's long campaign for a supplementary payment to Australia's 900 surviving prisoners from World War II and the Korean War. In an op-ed that he wrote in November 1988, Tom Uren said:

During my years under Whitlam as Minister for Urban and Regional Development and later as Minister for local government under Bob Hawke, I have been involved in most regions of the country. I am most proud of our achievements in saving old parts of Sydney such as Woolloomooloo and Glebe, of our sewerage works, the redirection of freeways away from living areas, the creation of the Australian Heritage Commission and the development of the regional centre of Albury-Wodonga, as well as many parks in the west of Sydney and along the Georges River. … I have had a very exciting life and many great opportunities.

I would like to conclude my comments about Tom Uren by quoting from his maiden speech:

We have a wonderful country with a magnificent future as long as we do not put it in pawn to foreign capital.

On behalf of the Nationals in the Senate, I extend to Mr Uren's family our sincere condolences.