Brian Harradine has passed away in Hobart today. He did some wonderful work in the Australian Senate and I was very privileged to work with him during the 1993 Mabo and 1998 Wik native title debates in which he exhibited the finest integrity and commitment to Aboriginal rights. It took some years for Harradine’s critics to concede that he had improved John Howard’s land rights package more than was originally hoped for. Seven years after the Wik debate , when Harradine was retiring from the Senate, Andrew Bartlett, Deputy Leader of the Democrats, made this acknowledgment of Harradine’s acumen on Wik: The agreement he reached on the Wik legislation was one of the few cases I would point to where John Howard was bested in negotiations. Whilst the legislative merits of the Wik agreement were less than ideal, the sort of race election, focused on Indigenous people, that our country would have faced in 1998 if that agreement had not been reached would have been far worse even than the one we endured in 2001. May he rest in peace. He was a good man and a very canny politician.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 05:08:47 +0000
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