Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to join the debate on this condolence motion on the death of former Democrats senator Sid Spindler. We are saddened to lose our colleague and friend Sid, who died on 1 March, aged 75, on his 50th wedding anniversary. I understand that his death was a peaceful one and that he was surrounded by family on that day. Sid was diagnosed with liver cancer 12 months ago—a diagnosis which, as we all know, often indicates a limited lifetime. On behalf of the Democrats, I offer our condolences to Sid’s widow, Julia; his four children; his many grandchildren; his extended family; and his friends.

Sid’s contribution to Australian politics is a huge one. He was a man who fought injustice all his life and he was central to the formation of our party 30 years ago. He won great respect for his work in the Senate from 1990 to 1996. During his formative years, growing up during the war in Poland, he witnessed first-hand the Jewish ghettos. His dawning realisation of the enormity of what he was witnessing—that these people would be exterminated in Nazi gas chambers—led him to condemn humanitarian abuses of states and to question and condemn the evils of discrimination at every level.

Sid worked extremely hard. He was, as others have said, a prolific writer and speaker, particularly in the chamber but also in the media. He fought many, many battles. He was determined to defend human rights and to improve the lives and the opportunities of those most marginalised in society. He will be remembered for his campaigns to end child labour and the exploitation of outworkers in the textile industry, for establishing a fighting fund for legal challenges to woodchip licences and for campaigns on sexuality discrimination and the treatment of asylum seekers. He was very opposed to militarism. He went to Tahiti to protest against the French nuclear tests there, the last to be held in that part of the world. He challenged the Keating government’s economic policies and prepared alternative budgets to theirs, which took an enormous amount of time and effort, and he put forward alternative proposals for things like tariff protection.

He was perhaps one of the few to have extracted an apology from former Premier of Victoria Jeff Kennett, who accused him of being a Nazi because of the fact that he was, as all children of German parents were, enrolled in the Nazi youth. But, as Jeff Kennett admitted, he was reacting to yet another of Sid Spindler’s efforts to bring about accountability of government by calling for an inquiry, which was eventually abandoned, into casino licences in Victoria. Sid was the first parliamentarian to hold an inquiry independent of the parliament, and that one was into tariffs. He won changes to the industrial relations laws to stop discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual preference, age and physical and mental disability, and he had customs duty removed from wheelchairs.

He led the Democrat negotiations team on native title and was a campaigner even in retirement against Indigenous disadvantage. It was one of his passions. Just days before he died, he said that the 13 February apology to the stolen generations had gladdened his heart more than any other single public event over his long life. In his first speech in the parliament, in August 1990, he declared ‘a strong and continuing interest in their’—that is, Indigenous Australians’—’quest for justice and a place in our community that takes account of their cultural and spiritual heritage, which can and should enrich our own’. Twelve years later Sid, with family and donor supporters, established his own philanthropic fund, called Towards a Just Society, dedicated to supporting Indigenous education.

He was a law graduate who had a successful painting and decorating business in the 1970s, but he worked to establish the Australian Democrats, as I said, and he worked for over a decade as a senior adviser to party leaders Don Chipp and Janine Haines. He won a Senate seat in Victoria in 1990 with, as has been mentioned, one of the highest votes ever.

On Sid’s retirement a member of his staff, Matthew Townsend, arranged for bound volumes of his speeches to be put together and he presented them to Sid. It formed a pile that was bigger than several urban phone directories, which led his widow, Julia, to say, ‘He’d have spoken even more often if they’d let him!’ I am sure that is the case. He was a serial overachiever and always overworked. It was nothing for him to expect his staff to be on duty at least six days a week, preferably seven.

His mother-in-law also said that he was a deft delegator. She once said, ‘Every time you see him, you get a job,’ and that was certainly my experience with Sid as well. There was always something that you could do to assist some cause. I spent quite a bit of time in his office ahead of coming into the Senate to replace him, and that was my experience too. Everyone was pulled in to serve the greater good of whatever the campaign was.

He did not seek re-election after his retirement, but he did admit to me later that he was disappointed in that because he felt that after six years he was just hitting his straps. We agreed that a two-year term is one in which you can develop those skills and really work on the campaigns that you most want to achieve in. But he was not well and he also felt that his family had paid too high a price for his obsession with changing the world. Of course, on his retirement he became much more active in Aboriginal affairs. He became a business manager at the Alice Springs Community College in the late seventies. Aboriginal affairs was a cause that he and Julia supported, including campaigns for reconciliation, a treaty and the implementation of the reforms proposed by the deaths in custody inquiry.

In January he was dismayed that fellow sufferers of cancer could not get an anticancer drug called Avastin. He appeared on television news services campaigning for that drug to be supplied, means tested, on the PBS list. The most recent issue of the current affairs magazine Arena featured a comprehensive and heartfelt Spindler article on empowering Aboriginal communities. So right up until the time of his failing health and his death he was working towards one campaign or another.

He also came to the launch of the Democrat election campaign in November, and it was fantastic to see him there, even though it was fairly clear to most of us that he was very ill. I am personally very grateful to Sid for the help and the mentoring that he provided to me when I contested his seat on his retirement in 1996. I will miss him and I know that other members of our party will do so, as will my colleagues, former colleagues and others in this place.