Mr LAURIE FERGUSON(9.53 a.m.) —I join with the other speakers today. As the member for Calwell (Dr Theophanous) indicated, Mitterrand's victory in 1981 was probably as interesting to my generation and the progressive wing of politics as a Thatcherite victory in Britain. As earlier speakers have remarked, he was a very complex person, a man who, in 1935, led demonstrations against foreign workers but, with his victory in the 1980s, increased their rights in France. In the Fourth Republic, when he was variously minister for veterans' affairs, overseas territories and the interior, Mitterrand was responsible for the first liberalisation of rights in colonial Africa but, at the same time, condoned the torture of FLN fighters in Algeria. That lead-up to 1981, after the rise in 1968, and his ability to re-establish the strength of the Socialist Party was, indeed, deeply inspiring to many of us. Only yesterday my father remarked on the huge emotion in Paris when he arrived there on 10 May 1981 as Deputy Premier of New South Wales and on the exuberance of the French population at that change of the French political scape.

To my mind, Mitterrand was most crucial, as some speakers have alluded to, in the actual transformation of French Left politics. From the 1920s, the Left in France had been largely dominated by the pro-Stalinist Communist Party and their control of the major trade union federation, the CGT. Mitterrand had to walk a very narrow tightrope in essentially forming a socialist party that had credibility after its rather unfortunate history during the Fourth Republic. He was a man who had sacrificed himself by being one of the few on the left to strongly oppose the basic coup by de Gaulle and was to lose his seat as a result of that. He went into the wilderness and then, in 1971, became the first secretary of a party he had not previously been a member of, from a very small base.

On the one hand, he had to increase the strength of the Socialist Party and, on the other, he had to try to bring the Communist Party into an electoral alliance. He succeeded in doing that by the joint program and, in that process, marginalised the French Communist Party as a force in France. Of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union and later events were to strengthen that trend, but that was his essential accomplishment—he made the French Socialist Party the major party of the Left.

The period from 1981 did have a lot of very essential social reforms: the abolition of the death penalty; the abolition of the rather draconian security court; and people have referred to the increase in the arts expenditure. Modern Paris has been transformed by many of the edifices that he was responsible for. One thing that has been left out and is crucial, and very contemporary in this country, is the question of centralisation of power. He essentially—very crucially—got rid of the authoritarian centralised Bonapartist leftovers. He abolished the prefecture system to a large degree—undermined it—and established local and regional government. Even in Australia at this time we debate the process of eliminating municipal power and centralising controls.

In conclusion, I join with others and finally refer to a fairly novel and independent foreign policy, on the one hand supporting Pershing missiles, being part of NATO, being fairly anti-Soviet but, on the other hand, being one of the first people to welcome Gorbachev into the international community, supporting the Third World, taking an independent line in regard to the US embargo on Cuba and, of course, supporting liberation movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Question resolved in the affirmative, honourable members standing in their places.