Your Excellency, Premier, Deputy Prime Minister, my colleagues and very particularly the members of the Bjelke-Petersen family. And can I, Flo, on my behalf and Janette's behalf extend to all of you our kind thoughts and condolences, as we gather in a place that is so very dear to you to honour your late husband and honour his contribution to Australia and to Queensland.
I remember a couple of years ago we were having a debate in our party room about the impact of politics on ones life, and one of my colleagues really hit the nail on the head when he said that whatever our ambitions are, at the end of the day, we should all hope that when we die, we have one of our children holding one of our hands. And that is really a metaphor for reminding us that the most important thing in life is your family and the way in which that family moulds you and shapes you. And I have no doubt that the greatest legacy to the Bjelke-Petersen family today is the love that they received from the now deceased patriarch of that family.
Joh was a remarkable political figure - there is certainly no argument about that. One of the things I found interesting and remarkable about him was that although he was of Danish extraction and born in New Zealand, he was quintessentially of the Australian bush. As John read out his great skills and his great adaptability; it was once again a description of the inherent capacity of people of the Australian bush to look after themselves and to be inventive and to be resourceful. One of the things that has given Australia her distinctive character of independence, is the fact that so many of our pioneers had to rely on their own skill and their hands and their inventiveness in order to survive. There is no doubt in the world that the contribution that Joh Bjelke-Petersen made to the development and the expansion of Queensland will be his greatest single political legacy.
I've now been a member of the Federal Parliament since 1974 and in the various positions I've held I've travelled Australia extensively. And no part of Australia has changed more dramatically than has Queensland, particularly the southeast corner of Queensland. It has been transformed, as has the city of Brisbane, in a way quite differently from the transformation that has occurred in any other part of Australia. And whatever people may have said about him from time to time, both his political opponents and some of those who occasionally disagreed with him on his own side of politics, the reality nonetheless is that he made a massive contribution, a defining contribution, to the growth and the expansion of the state of Queensland.
As Peter Beattie has mentioned, as John as mentioned, he was a great practitioner of competitive federalism. One of the first, in fact I think the first pieces of legislation I introduced into the Federal Parliament as Treasurer in 1978 was a bill to give effect to our promise in the 1977 election campaign to abolish federal estate duties. Now that was a direct product of the momentum set in train when probate duties at a state level were abolished in Queensland.
It's fair to say that on a broader scale Joh Bjelke-Petersen often spoke in an instinctive way for conservative Australia on social issues. He was a social conservative. He believed in the wisdom of old institutions. He once said to me and I think it may have been in the course of a discussion about the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax, or one of its forbears, he said John, the only good tax is a very old tax. It's an old saying but it epitomised an approach which said that the institutions and the practices with which you are familiar are the ones that you should continue to embrace. Now that didn't mean to say of course that he wouldn't embrace change, but he certainly had a great reverence for the traditions of this country and he expressed it in so many ways.
It is of course a fact that many of the great years of development in Queensland occurred under the stewardship of a Coalition Government led by Joh Bjelke-Petersen and partnered on the Liberal Party side by people such as the late Gordon Chalk. And that was a great partnership and it was a partnership that really I think laid the foundation for the contribution made on our side of politics to the development and growth of this State.
It is of course well known in Australian political folklore and history that Joh and I fell out very strongly in 1987 and it would dishonest of me not to mention it. It would also be unrealistic and ungracious of me not to acknowledge that with a passage of time those differences dissolved and are seen perhaps not differently in an historical sense, but emotionally and personally are seen in a different light. And out of all of those things, political parties and political individuals are reminded of the habits of not bearing grudges and the habits of reconciliation and understanding that people are motivated by particular things at given periods of time. And as I look back over those years one of the ironies that strikes me is that on a number of these great debates and great issues of the last 20 years, and I think particularly of the issue of industrial relations reform and of course of the centrality of the role of the family in our society, Joh and I held views that were very, very similar.
And I take this opportunity, I hope in not any particularly partisan sense but because it's part of the record, to pay tribute to his contribution to the cause of industrial relations reform in this country, something to which I have been passionately committed for most of my political life.
My friends, my fellow Australians that great architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, Christopher Wren proclaimed when his work was finished; 'if you want my memorial, look around me', and I think that's appropriate. If you wanted Joe Bjelke-Petersen's memorial, look around you. This gathering is not held in a great cathedral, it's not held in the capital of the state, it's not held in the capital of the nation, it's held appropriately in his home town amongst his own people, with his family. It is a reminder that he has in the ultimate sense, come home to Kingaroy, that he is surrounded by the people he valued and loved most and he is in very familiar surroundings.
May I join others in repeating the prayer, may he rest in peace.
[ends]