Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to pay tribute to a great Queenslander, a great senator, a great servant of the National Party and someone who is a huge loss to many of us. It was a shock a couple of months ago when I received a call on my phone from Ron Boswell. It wasn't a shock to get a call from Ron Boswell, but, when I answered, his daughter, Cathy, who's here today, was on the phone and gave me the very sad news of Ron's passing.

Ron was 85 years old, but you just never thought he could be stopped. He'd had had a fair number of close health shaves in recent years, but he always pulled through. You got yourself into a false sense of security that he would always pull through. It's been very sad to not receive those calls, sometimes multiple a day, from Ron in the last couple of months. When I got into this place, I in effect took over from Ron Boswell. Ron retired at the 2013 election, and I had the great honour of being the National Party candidate at that election to eventually take over this spot in 2014. I said at the time that I was very lucky in a way. It was a huge challenge to fill Ron's massive boots, but I was lucky because Ron Boswell had written the book on how to be a good senator.

Thankfully for all of us, he has now actually written that book, which you can go and buy. As Bridget has said, we checked this morning, and it's not in the parliamentary gift shop right now, so we'll have to fix that. Ron will definitely want us to fix that. But please get yourself a copy, because it does demonstrate what we're here to do. Ron never lost sight of what the vocation of politics is about. If you read that book—in fact, you don't even have to read it; you just read the table of contents of the book—it's not about winning elections or different positions that Ron achieved for himself. All of the chapters of the book are things like 'Wool and wheat', 'Ginger groupie'—work that one out—'Bananarama', 'Have I mentioned fishing?', 'Pharmacies' and 'Sugar seats'. Every little chapter is a little vignette of how Ron was presented with a problem that someone had—a problem that a business, a farmer or a fishing business had—and how he went about working his guts out to fix that problem for that person or that group of people. More often than not, he was successful for them because of his tireless efforts to just fight for people. That's what we're here for. He went to Africa to help one of his constituents get out of a Mozambique jail. He travelled there to do that. He'd be on the phone to ministers and premiers all the time. He once had a huge blue with the Premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, over the sale of fishing markets, which he eventually changed Joh's mind on.

The other thing this demonstrated from his book may be something we've lost—not so much on what we do now, but the way things work now is different. In that era, Ron could often call up the Premier and, in that conversation, change his mind. With that meeting of that group of people, he could get a result. I find, in my experience, that is much harder to achieve, seemingly, because we now have this layer of bureaucracy, process and probity—things that maybe had to come post the Joh era, but there is now a big barrier between the people and the politicians. People who have a problem or an issue are frustrated at either the incompetence or sometimes just the ignorance of the people making decisions about their lives. They can't get through to the decision-makers. There's just a massive, massive gulf between the people and the ruling class that maybe wasn't there when Ron was around, or at least Ron was able to bridge that gulf so often, and people felt like they were served by the political process.

Ron took up all these causes, and, as those titles of chapters demonstrate, a lot of those causes were on farming issues and primary industry issues, but I think it is important to note that Ron himself was an atypical National Party senator. He did not grow up in the bush. He grew up in Perth and Brisbane. He himself did not come from a farming background. What really marked Ron out as an exemplar of a National Party politician wasn't his background; it was the fact that he always fearlessly fought for the small against the strong, for the weak against the powerful, for those who had no voice or opportunity against those who had a direct connection to the powers that be. That is what marks out the National Party—we always stick up for the small as much as we can. Ron exemplified that in spades.

When I first came across Ron, I had gotten a job with Barnaby Joyce., and I was driving around with Barnaby, as we often did in western Queensland, late at night. I said to him, 'What I can't understand, Barnaby, is that the worst climate change energy policy is the renewable energy target, but no-one's against it.' He went off. He went: 'Ron Boswell is against it. You need to go talk to Ron Boswell.' This would have been in 2010. I said, 'Okay, I'll look up Ron Boswell.' I spoke to him, and it immediately struck me that he was, as he would like to say, a paint brush salesman. I think he was a bit higher than that, but he would say he was a paintbrush salesman. He had no extensive schooling; he left school at 14. He spent very little time in academic exercises. He, at a gut level, got the absolute rubbish we were told about energy—and are still told about it—more than anyone else. Ron Boswell had more common sense than all these people who spend their lives in energy, who build models about it and who read lots of books about it combined. I immediately got it. This guy, how did he know that? How did he know? It was because he went through the school of real life. He went through classes of hard knocks and knew rubbish—and some other words we would probably describe it as—when he saw it. He just knew it. He knew these people were full of it because he had seen it before in his life and been hurt by it.

I would take a hundred Ron Boswells over the expert class that rule over us. The 'expertocracy' is not working out for us. We need people like Ronald Boswell with real, hard life experience who know what works and what doesn't. Ron, in that book I mentioned, spent a lot of time talking about how we could get people with more real, hard life experience into this place. We'd be wise to look at it.

That book was never really about Ron. I remember reading that book then going back and reading it again. He had one paragraph in that book about his ministerial ambitions. He was a parliamentary secretary—what we now call an assistant minister—and he lost that position in backroom dealings that happen in this place all the time. It was never something he brought up. He had every reason to be spiteful about it but he just got on with life, helping people, and he never really worried too much about it. That is an example for all of us, because he wasn't in this for himself; he was in it to help others. And he was in it, I know, to help his family as well, who were very close to him. As I said, it was a great honour to take over from him as a National Party senator for Queensland. I did disappoint him in taking this position over because I decided to move the office to Rockhampton. He lobbied me hard against that—just typical of Ron. I was on the receiving end of calls, where he was saying, 'You have to be in Brisbane, Matt. These are all the people to talk to. You need to be here.'

He wanted to reconvene the LNP state council. I told him, 'I can't do that, Ron. I told the state council I would be outside of Brisbane.' He said, 'That's okay, we'll reconvene the whole body—400 people around the state—and you can go to state council to tell them that you have changed your mind and that you will be in Brisbane. They will ratify that and we'll be on our way.'