SPEECH - MUSEUM OF DEMOCRACRY - MONDAY, 13 MAY 2024

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

SPEECH

MUSEUM OF DEMOCRACRY

MONDAY, 13 MAY 2024

SUBJECTS: Launch of the refurbished House of Representatives Chamber at Old Parliament House, Burnt Norton, the feeling of being in the Chamber, past parliamentarians and journalists, the Bark Petitions,

TONY BURKE MP, MINISTER FOR EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE RELATIONS, MINISTER FOR THE ARTS, LEADER OF THE HOUSE: Thanks so much, Barry and thanks to Paul Girrawah House. Every time you welcome us to Country we learn and every time there is a generosity in your welcome. As a nation, I don't think we're there yet, but I really do hope as each year goes on that we can respond as a nation with the same level of generosity that you consistently show. Thank you so much Paul.

Barry's been kind enough to mention some of the former Members of Parliament who are here, other than those here on the board. I'll just acknowledge some of my current colleagues who are here as well; Susan Templeman, who is the Arts Envoy, we work really closely and she's done a lot of work around neglected institutions, Patrick Gorman, the Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister and Alicia Payne and David Smith who are both local Members for where we are now - thank you all for being here.

I want to thank everybody who serves on the board as well, it's an absolutely phenomenal board.

Some of you might have been next door when I talked about the Senate. For those of you who haven't heard how I feel about places like this, I’ll start with a bit of context.

I read a poem out loud each day and I have done so since I was about 18. My favourite poem - usually they’re quite random ones, I just open a book and whatever appears on the page is the poem of the day - but my favourite poem is one by T.S. Eliot ‘Burnt Norton’, where T.S. Eliot goes through the ruins of an old church and talks about hearing the choir and all the things that happen when you are physically in a location where something happened.

I’m reminded of it every time I hear Paul welcome us to Country, as to how the memory lives in place. But there's a line in that poem, “Other echoes, Inhabit the garden” and this building is that garden of democracy for Australia, where the echoes about democracy exist in every single corner.

I want to try something, and I will warn you now, the chances of this succeeding are remote. I just want to give it a go though, because I want you to feel the room that you are in and, at the moment everybody is unbelievably polite. I just want that moment where you have a sense of what the roar of this building is like.

I can tell you primary school kids do this for me every time, but I'm quite nervous about how this will go with adults. I'd be terribly grateful if everybody on the Government benches could call out as loudly as they can “Hear, hear”.

CROWD: *Silent*

BURKE: Okay, I’ll try one more time.

CROWD: “Hear, hear!”.

BURKE: Okay, and I would like everyone on the Opposition benches to call out, “Shame, resign”.

CROWD: “Shame, resign!”.

BURKE: Okay, now on the count of three I’d like everybody to say their respective words all at once and you will know what this room is like. One, two, three.

CROWD: *simultaneously shouting* Hear, hear, shame, resign!

BURKE: They’re the echoes that live here and that's the room that we’re in.

Let's not forget some of those moments. Parliament didn't start here when we had Federation, it started down in Melbourne. The Mace that they used in Melbourne was brought here, it's not the Mace we use anymore in Parliament, but that's a replica of the Mace that was brought from Melbourne.

The despatch boxes were here from day one, but the despatch boxes that were actually here are two of the only things that have gone from this building to the new Parliament House and what you're seeing there are replicas, but everything else you see is exactly as it was.

Think about when they sat as a Parliament for the first time. Stanley Melbourne Bruce comes in as the most proper and English of all of our Prime Ministers and he's getting to the vote on - of all issues, my portfolio of Workplace Relations - whether or not we should have a conciliation and arbitration commission.

The vote held in this room fails, the legislation fails and the drama of that moment knowing as a result of what had just happened, he was going to walk down to the Governor-General and resign his commission as Prime Minister because of the moment of how many people sat on each side, on that vote, on that legislation. I'm trying to do a rough count, I’m not sure the Government's got the numbers at the moment. But I think we might be okay.

Behind us, the Press Gallery. Now, you might notice and it was never planned this way, but on the Speaker's chair there are spikes. One night during the Scullin Government - I'm not sure which year, but the Scullin government ran from 1929 to 1932.

One night, a journalist- and the polite history says ‘fell asleep during proceedings’ by the name of Reg Leonard, he worked for the Herald and Weekly Times, the precursor to today's Herald Sun. When he woke up having fallen asleep, Parliament had finished, everybody had gone home, the room was in complete darkness. He knew he only had to take three steps to get to the door. He took three steps in the wrong direction, went straight over the edge there, narrowly missed the spikes, landed right here, got up and walked home.

Many of you will know the lyrics from Hamilton ‘The Room Where It Happens’ and there's a there's a line there where there's a reference that ‘No one really knows how the game is played, The art of the trade, How the sausage gets made, We just assume that it happens, But no one else is in the room where it happens'.

Of course, for our Parliament, that's not the case. We have the media behind us, we have the public galleries, we have the direct engagement. Except during World War II. There were three sittings of the Parliament in this room. To this day we have no idea what was said. Hansard was not recorded. The national security implications were viewed as so dire, so serious, that even for those days, this room was closed.

It took until 1943 before Dame Enid Lyons walked through those doors, at the same time that Dorothy Tangney walked into the into the Senate across Kings Hall.

Look at those despatch boxes, in 1963 one of the Members of the Opposition executive, Kim Beazley senior, had been to Yirrkala. Yirrkala had met with the community and they’d said that they wanted to make representations. He said, ‘well, why don't you make a petition in a way that is true to your culture?’

Then on the 29th of August, Arthur Calwell stood right there and tabled the bark petitions. Then the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs stood right there and said lines that we have heard in different contexts over the years saying ‘they shouldn’t be allowed to be tabled because they’re not really representative of the community.' That happened here and those petitions, the Bark Petitions are displayed.

There's a wonderful book that's about to come out by Clare Wright, who is on the board of the National Museum, going through the history of those five petitions, but get the book when it comes out and read it, go to the different places where we have copies of the Bark Petitions, but know that this is the room, this is the room where it happened, and that's the spot where they were tabled.

In 1974 our Constitution - we always talk about ‘will there be a double dissolution?’, ‘will there be a joint sitting?’, you hear that in politics all the time, there's only ever been one. It was here. I've read one of the articles that covered when Gough Whitlam got Medibank through in the joint sitting. The article was written by a very, very young journalist who's now on the board of this body and it was a great read, Niki Savva.

We think about the dismissal, with the incredible speech that Gough Whitlam gave on the steps that we all just walked up. But remember as well before that happened, you had here in the Chamber the debate about who the House of Representatives had confidence in. A debate that was voted on and the Speaker then went across to Yarralumla and was not allowed to meet with the Governor General until after the Houses had been dissolved and was kept waiting even though the debate had occurred here.

When the Australia Act went through in 1986, something that's not often thought about, but in constitutional terms, extraordinary. At that moment in the Press Gallery in 1986, right behind me were the following journalists Laurie Oakes, Michelle Grattan, Heather Ewart - who’s here, John Anderson - to later become Deputy Prime Minister, Susan Templeman - to be the current Member for Macquarie and the Arts Envoy, Niki Savva - working for the Melbourne Sun, and the President of the Press Gallery at the time, Barrie Cassidy.

None of this history is that long ago.

But there's one moment that happened here and is the link between here and the other Chamber, that I think is fair to say is one of the great moments that defined our nation.

If I go through the seating plan for around the time of the joint sitting where different people sat. In the back row there, that's where Mick Young sat. Obviously, the Prime Minister was Gough Whitlam at the time. Over there, a very young Philip Ruddock, and beside Philip Ruddock we have John Gorton, just there Billy Snedden, three along from Billy Snedden that was where Ian Macphee sat.

Ian Macphee is a former Immigration Minister who in his time as Immigration Minister, delivered an extraordinary speech about inclusion, when this room was reaching its final occasions.

I'd been here on a school excursion, I remember sitting in the public gallery and looking down while Malcolm Fraser was there talking about why he was doing something on behalf of the country while, Bill Hayden and Bob Hawke sat there chanting ‘bull’ and the place was in an uproar.

When it got to that final sitting, John Howard had become Leader of the Opposition and the issue of Asian immigration had started to arise as a political issue. But what Ian did at that moment, was draw a line about who we were willing to be as a country.

When there was a horrific speech in 2018 - Fraser Anning’s first speech - and I'm not going to repeat any of the words, but suffice to say, when we sat down in opposition tactics to think ‘what would we move?’ We went back to the resolution that had been moved by Bob Hawke, which were the words of Ian McPhee and moved so that at this time some years later, they were carried by the House of Representatives unanimously, and I pay tribute to you Ian, for that.

This Chamber has had its non-parliamentary moments, whether it be the economic summits, this is where the Constitutional Convention for the Republic was held, and this is where all the parliamentary scenes had been filled for the different TV shows - most recently, Total Control. But when you get a moment, listen for the echoes and think of the significance.

When we decided to move to a new building, there was all the talk ‘what would we do?’, ‘how would we repurpose it?’ It was simply dedicated to democracy.

There were advantages in this building. There were disadvantages. It was much harder for people to operate because you were forced to interact. It was much more difficult - I believe - in this House, than it is in the current one for people to go to the extremes, because you were constantly forced to be on top of each other and interacting with each other in so many different ways.

So, for all of you who've come here paying tribute to the building that we're in, what you've shown is by showing your commitment to our history, you're showing a commitment to our democracy. We should never be afraid to tell our history. It's a story of what happened. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, some of it's joyous, some of it's awful. But it's all our story as to how we got here and in understanding it, we can find our way forward.

For the board and in particular for you Barry, as some people would know, I spent ten years waiting to reappoint Barry to this particular role because I wanted someone who understood the link between our democracy and what happened in this building.

Bringing it back to this sort of glory, so long as we're not too polite about it and we don't catch that disease of the leather furniture meaning somehow there was decorum, there wasn't.

People often ask ‘was the anger all feigned?’ Can I tell you, for back then and for now, it's real. It's real because the issues are real. It's real because for Members of Parliament, when they're arguing that there should be a particular outcome, the only thing that is standing between that outcome for the people they are representing and it actually occurring is the people in the room where it happens.

That vote, those numbers, those wafer-thin margins where the people sit on this side of the room or another side of the room, the fury is real, the joy is real and the legacy of those who served here is extraordinary.

For both John and Ian in particular, it means the world that that you've come to be part of this today.

For everybody who served here as journalists and public servants. Thank you so much for telling the stories of this building. Let's keep telling them.

My simple request to all of you after you leave today, tell people about it. Let's fill this Chamber again with people learning about what's happened in our country, understanding our democracy, because if you understand it, you can value it.

There's that line in Good Will Hunting. Where Robin Williams is challenging Matt Damon and says to him, “So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.”

That's why we need to retain this. That's why we need to preserve it. You can't get what you're feeling right now or that roar that you heard when you all shouted, anywhere other than being right here.

With that, I'd be deeply, deeply grateful if instead of a round of applause, my speech was met with the appropriate parliamentary response from each side.

CROWD: “Hear, hear!”.

ENDS