Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Hansard source

I rise also to contribute to this condolence motion. When we lost Nick Bolkus, Australia—and South Australia in particular—lost one of its truly great political figures, the Australian Labor Party lost one of its great sons and the Greek Australian community lost a great man of state who, as others have described, was one of the architects of our modern multicultural project. Progressives across all of Australia lost a great advocate, because Nick Bolkus was someone who was always ahead of the curve.

His legacy is full of things that, today, we simply take for granted. He was the first Greek Australian to enter the ministry. He introduced some of the first laws of any jurisdiction in the world to protect the privacy of ordinary people against credit data agencies. He introduced the banking ombudsman so that ordinary Australians had someone to stand up for their interests when it came to misconduct from the big banks. He helped streamline our national food standards. He introduced legislation for the disclosure of political donations. He was, alongside Prime Minister Hawke, a key architect of the decision to give refuge to thousands of Chinese citizens in Australia after 1989. That is just a small snapshot of his very extensive record in government. In it, you can see someone laying the foundations of Australia's modern consumer protection, disclosure and migration arrangements, enshrining principles of equality, openness, procedural fairness and nondiscrimination. They are all things that we now take for granted in our expectations about how corporations are required to treat ordinary people and how governments operate. The freewheeling world of the 1980s and the 1990s was a world that wanted government out of society. Nick, in insisting on protections, was well ahead of the curve.

I want to make another important point about former senator Bolkus. It is one thing to be ahead of the curve in government, with a ministerial office, the departments of state and executive power behind you. It is another thing to take those steps from opposition, with limited resources and an important and consequential calculus about how far you can go and what risks you can afford. I was drawn to politics in the eighties and the nineties by the very big debates that were occurring about the protection of Australia's environment. This of course will be shocking to people in this chamber, but there was, at that time, still quite a hot debate, a controversial debate and a contested debate about the reality of climate change and the scientific consensus around greenhouse gas emissions, and that was even true in the Australian Labor Party at that time.

Some shadow environment ministers might have been tempted in that environment to take the easy option, to try and balance the needs of competing stakeholders and to not take a stand on a thing that really mattered, but that was not the approach taken by Senator Bolkus. When you read the contributions that he made in the Senate during his time in that shadow environment portfolio, you can see him castigating the Howard government as it walked away from the Kyoto protocol and you can see him raising the alarm about Australia's carbon emissions at the start of a new millennium. You can see him calling for Australia to be a genuine bridge builder and take an active role at an event, which was quaintly referred as the conference of the parties at The Hague, and to support international action to reduce emissions.

I should acknowledge that being a shadow environment minister can be a tough job, and in one case it involved the then Labor candidate for the seat of Richmond, who I concede was me, putting the shadow minister in a pretty battered Troopcarrier, driving him out to the rainforest out the back of Murwillumbah alongside an overly enthusiastic local activist and requiring him to climb a very steep mountain through subtropical rainforest in suede moccasins as the humidity hit about 90 per cent. I have since organised better shadow ministerial visits than that! I don't think that that was the program that Nick Bolkus expected. He certainly did not dress for that program, but he bore it with exceptional grace and good humour.

I was very glad that he did take the time to spend some time with me as a young candidate, because, for those of us who were active in environment politics at the turn of the new millennium, he was one of our great, great advocates. We saw in him someone who was ahead of the curve, talking about the necessity to take climate change seriously and talking about our obligations to future generations to leave them a better world. These positions are now actually the consensus positions on climate change right across Australia's public sphere. They are accepted by the Public Service, they are accepted by the business community, and there is a broad public expectation that governments will take action on climate change. But that was never a sure thing, and you can see in the Hansard that Nick Bolkus was one of the key people who made the case for climate action here on the floor of the Australian Senate.

It shouldn't be a surprise that Nick, who blazed such a trail in so many areas of our public affairs, was a mentor to many Labor people. Losing Nick is a collective loss for all of us, but the people who will feel it most are his family, and I want to pass on my heartfelt condolences to his family—to his wife, Mary, and his daughters, Aria and Mikayla—and to the whole South Australian Labor family. Vale, Nick Bolkus.