Kristina Keneally (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) | Hansard source

ENEALLY (—) (): I rise on behalf of the opposition to express our condolences following the passing, at age 85, of a Labor comrade, the Hon. Michael Eamon Beahan AM, former President of the Senate.

As I begin, I wish to convey the opposition's condolences to his family and friends, and I'd also like to acknowledge the Acting Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Cash, for her contributions today. I thank the Beahan family; the Hon. Gary Gray AO, Australian Ambassador to Ireland and personal friend of Michael; and members of the Western Australian branch of the Australian Labor Party, particularly John Cowdell and Marcelle Anderson, for their thoughtful consideration, advice and anecdotes about former Senator Beahan.

Eleven years ago, the Australian people recognised the contribution of Michael Beahan by admitting him as a Member of the Order of Australia, 'for service to the Parliament of Australia, particularly as a senator for Western Australia, to the promotion of international bipartisan political debate, to the pharmacy profession and to the community'. At his funeral in Melbourne on Tuesday 7 February 2022, former Senator Beahan was described as a genuinely good and kind man. For a kid who played and swam at Coliemore Harbour and attended Loreto Abbey school at Dalkey, he would rise to great heights. His career was varied. He was an electrician, a teacher, a union leader and a secretary of the Australian Labor Party in the state of Western Australia. In 1987, he became a senator for that state. That culminated in his role as President of this chamber, until he left politics in 1996. Former Senator Beahan was a true Labor man and a great Irish Western Australian. Through all of this, he remained good, gentle and kind.

Michael Beahan was born in London in 1937, and his early years were not easy. The impact of the Great Depression was still being felt; then the Second World War came, with constant bombings, including of his family home. As a consequence, the family decided to move to Ireland. Former Senator Beahan often spoke of his teenage years as a time of joy. He immersed himself in Irish culture and became a true lover of his father's native country, especially of Yeats's poetry and Joyce's prose. In his adult life, he returned to Ireland often.

When the Beahan family decided to migrate from Ireland to Australia, former Senator Beahan was 17 years old, and it was time for him to think of the future. In 1954, after disembarking a migrant ship at Fremantle, he found work at the Australian Electrical Company in Perth, manufacturing electrical equipment. Following his apprenticeship as an electrician and his introduction to trade unionism, he became increasingly interested in and concerned about workers' rights and workplace safety and was determined to do something about them. In his 20s, he decided to return to formal education. He attained arts and education degrees from the University of Western Australia and became a secondary school teacher in the regional town of Bunbury in Western Australia.

It was this combination of factory floor background, trade qualification, union membership and teaching that led to Mr Beahan becoming the first-ever education officer of the Trades and Labour Council of Western Australia. This initiative underpinned the establishment, in 1975, of the Australian Trade Union Training Authority, known as TUTA, funded by the Whitlam government to provide education and training programs for union officials. TUTA was a project of Labor minister Clyde Cameron, and former Senator Beahan was a devotee of its mission. It not only sought to educate union officials on the basics of organising and representing workers but also greatly improved the training of officials by including courses on governance and running a business. In addition, its emphasis on extending professionalism extended to appearance, style and language. It was the importance of image and presentation that former Senator Beahan carried into his later role as a party official preparing candidates for election.

Former Senator Beahan was instrumental in guiding the establishment of TUTA as a statutory authority in every state and territory, and he became its first director in Western Australia. It was through TUTA that he also learned the importance of training and organisation to keeping unions relevant in an ever-changing world. He was also attuned to the need for political action to ensure that the rights and wellbeing of working men and women were protected.

Michael Beahan's move to the political wing of the labour movement occurred in 1981, when he became the general secretary of the Western Australian branch of the ALP. This was a significant time, as Senator Cash notes, to be involved as a party official, as success occurred at a state and federal level. Former Senator Beahan led Labor's successful election campaign to win government at the state level in February 1983. A few weeks later, Labor won the March 1983 federal election, installing Bob Hawke as prime minister. Former Senator Beahan would go on to oversee Labor's successful state re-election campaign in WA in 1986 as well as the local contribution to further federal success in 1984 and 1987. These elections saw Labor in Western Australia address the lack of women in state and federal parliaments, with a record number of women from Western Australia elected at both the state and federal levels. I'd like to think that Mr Beahan would be a little bit delighted that two female senators were leading his condolence motion today. While Michael Beahan was a champion of women being elected to parliament—and his record reflects this—he was not a supporter of affirmative action or quotas, an issue in which he was at odds with his party.

Michael's enduring political legacy during his time as party secretary was the modernisation of Labor's political campaigning infrastructure, practice and culture in Western Australia. He brought a greater professionalism to campaigns, seeing the value of modernising local and regional organisational structures and of training campaign workers. His vision was to ensure that those who followed him would be best placed to steward his party forward. He adopted new ideas and technology from overseas, and he created a culture of campaign innovation, which deployed political imagery and themes communicated with new tactics and methods. In the 1980s these ideas were novel, and those who worked alongside him at the time became used to his organisational motto of 'crisp, concise and contemporary'. This became the campaigning hallmark of New Labour under Tony Blair in Britain, but its origin was very much in former Senator Beahan's thinking 40 years ago. He further introduced wage equality for political workers and party staff, becoming the first to champion pension payments and equality of reward and opportunity for female staff. The party adopted his approach to campaigning and organisation nationally, and by 1993 Beahan was the chairman of the Australian Labor Party's national campaign committee. In that year, under Paul Keating, Labor won a federal election victory many had dismissed as impossible—the 'victory for the true believers'.

Michael Beahan won election to the Senate as a senator for Western Australia in the simultaneous dissolution of 1987 and was re-elected in 1990. His principal participation in parliamentary proceedings focused on those areas with which he had the deepest affinity: industrial relations, working conditions, education, the economy and electoral matters. His contribution to committees was significant. Perhaps unusually for a senator, this included pivotal roles on two joint committees. These committees were often maligned by believers in the Senate's institutional independence. By contrast, he saw them as beneficial as a result of their breadth of representation and broad perspective.

He served on the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters from 1987 to 1994, bringing his expertise as a party official to the fore. He argued in support of measures such as the total ban on broadcasting of paid political party advertisements, and he saw the full disclosure of political donations as 'vital to the integrity of the political process'.

He also served as the founding chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Corporations and Securities from 1991 to 1994. This committee had significant oversight of the Australian Securities Commission, the predecessor of ASIC, but it also operated in a vastly different corporate law environment compared to what we know today. It's easy to forget that the 1990s were a highly significant time in the evolution of this area of law in Australia, and Michael Beahan was one who pushed for a thorough redrafting of corporations law. The states and the Commonwealth had been attempting to find ways to create uniform corporations law since the Second World War. They were rebuffed by practical limitations, technical defects and the High Court, which found the Constitution limited the capacity of the Commonwealth to legislate, and so the law remained the domain of the states. Finally, the impetus for reform reached a stage where the input and hard work of many—including parliamentarians like former Senator Beahan—gave birth to the Corporations Act 2001, which remains the overarching law governing companies in our nation today.

Former Senator Beahan was also adept at internal Labor politics. He helped to found the Centre faction, which focused on neither Right nor Left politics but on policy, genuinely looking to balance the party. The Centre faction played a critical role in the success and stability of the Hawke and Keating governments and their reforms, which started 30 years of continuous economic growth.

Michael Beahan, having been a leader in the federal parliamentary Labor Party, became the 19th President of the Australian Senate on 1 February 1994, succeeding Kerry Sibraa. As the Senate's Presiding Officer, he improved the actual working of the chamber, and his reforms continue today. It was during his presidency that changes to the committee system that sought to make committee membership and chairing arrangements more closely reflect the party representation in the Senate came into effect. This was the beginning of the legislative and general purpose standing committee system, incorporating the examination of estimates, that we recognise as having been in operation almost continuously since that time.

Michael Beahan might be described as something of a convert. Like many of his generation, he was sceptical of the role of the Senate due to its role in precipitating the 1975 constitutional crisis, but he came to recognise its essential role, as he said, as a 'check on the power of the executive—any executive'. He particularly enjoyed the challenge of administering the parliamentary departments and working with the parliament's highly skilled and varied staff.

Former Senator Beahan was acknowledged by Gareth Evans, a fellow Labor senator and one of Australia's most significant foreign ministers, for his personal warmth and charm and as an outstanding character who contributed to the opportunity, wealth and humanity of Australia. The role of President of the Senate enabled him to become a global ambassador for Australia, something he had not previously contemplated despite his active work as a member of both the Senate and joint standing committees on foreign affairs, defence and trade, with a particular interest in trade and human rights.

He became the Australian Labor Party's international secretary too, and that allowed him to train campaign workers for social democratic parties all over the world, including in Malta, South Africa, Vietnam and Fiji. In Malta, he campaigned for the election of George Vella. It was clearly a successful campaign: Vella went on to become Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Foreign Affairs and, in 2019, President of Malta. It's worth noting that in recent days the Labour Party in Malta won its third consecutive term in office. As here in Australia, Michael Beahan's legacy lives on in Malta. In South Africa, he campaigned during the first post-apartheid elections, supporting the election of President Nelson Mandela.

This role also provided some unusual opportunities. In 1995, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam visited Australia to coincide with the accession of Vietnam as the seventh member of ASEAN. This was the highest-ranking Vietnamese figure to visit Australia to date. Prime Minister Paul Keating hosted a reception at the Lodge, and the general secretary from Vietnam expressed a desire to meet his counterpart in the Australian Labor Party. The then National Secretary of the ALP was 37-year-old Gary Gray. He was concerned that he might not fit the profile of what the general secretary from Vietnam might expect in his counterpart, so Gary sent Michael Beahan in his place. It's understood that Michael was well received, and Australia-Vietnam relations today remain strong.

Michael Beahan's parliamentary career was cut short when he did not win re-election in the March 1996 campaign. However, the constitutional architecture that governs the Senate placed him in the unusual position of continuing to serve as the President of the Senate even after his term ended on 30 June 1996. He remained in office until the Senate met that August to choose Margaret Reid, the Senate's first and, to date, only female president, as his successor.

Following the conclusion of his political career, former Senator Beahan settled in Melbourne and devoted much of his time to the community. His endeavours included fighting for housing projects, for democracy and for an Australian republic. I know from our colleague in the other place the member for Wills, Mr Peter Khalil—who was former Senator Beahan's local member—just how valued he was in the community. He also acted as a government relations and strategic policy consultant for the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, and the Rudd Labor government asked him to chair a review of political governance aid between 2008 and 2009. As in all his life, he dedicated his energies to good causes, even writing a letter to the editor of the Age newspaper in Melbourne just a few weeks before his death in January, making arguments for republican presidential models.

Michael Beahan lived a real labour life, committed to community and committed to causes. He was the epitome of politeness, a popular identity in the Senate and someone who always worked in support of the team. From London to Dalkey to Perth, and eventually to our national capital, he remained a good, gentle, kind and decent man. He was also someone you could trust. He would straight-up tell you if he was not going to back you and would not hold it against you if you were not going to back him. He will be greatly missed.

Michael is survived by his wife, Margaret; his brothers, Terry, Peter and Frank; his first wife, Jenny; and his children, Daniel and Kate. The opposition again express our condolences following the passing of Michael Beahan and we again convey our sympathies to his family and friends.