Mr GEORGIOU (4:50 PM) —I rise to pay tribute to Francis Eugene Joseph Galbally. Frank died yesterday after a long illness. He would have been 83 today. Over the course of one’s life, you come across many people whom you respect and admire. There are few who achieved distinction in so many diverse fields as Frank Galbally. Francis was a brilliant advocate, an author, a great contributor to Australia’s public policy, a defender of democracy against dictatorship in Greece, a proud husband and father, a man of intellect, of compassion and a man of passion. And he made the world’s finest vodka martini.

Francis Galbally came from a family of Irish Catholic provenance. He considered becoming a priest; indeed, he attended the seminary at Werribee for three years before joining the Navy after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. On his return from the war, he studied law at the University of Melbourne and began his career as a solicitor. He never went to the bar, and always told me that he had made a very wise decision.

I will not say too much about his legal accomplishments because his legal colleagues are better able to do that. I will just say that the tributes to him are replete with references to his being the world’s most successful defence advocate—a man who took on causes that were unpopular and even dangerous. He was, as former Victorian Chief Justice John Phillips described him, ‘a very brave, lion-hearted man’. The fact is that the demands of the defence took their toll. He once told me that, despite his incredible run of successes, he did not want to do any more murder trials because taking the responsibility for somebody else’s life was overwhelming.

I first met Frank in 1975 and our relationship developed over the course of his work on the report on post-arrival programs and services. We then worked together on the Ethnic Television Review Panel and the Implementation Team for Multicultural Television and he was my chairman at the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs. Frank was a wise, generous and dear friend. He became involved with ethnic issues because, when Malcolm Fraser asked him what he wanted to do when we won government in 1975, Frank said he was concerned about the situation of Australia’s ethnic communities.

Malcolm Fraser, sharing these concerns, made him Chairman of the Committee on Post-Arrival Programs and Services. The resulting report, which had all its recommendations accepted and funded, was a watershed in multicultural philosophy and practice. Its fundamental principles were: equal opportunity and equality of access to general services, the provision of special services where these are needed, respect for cultural diversity, consultation, self-help and self-reliance.

The Galbally report, as it became known, institutionalised the commitment to multiculturalism: the right of all Australians to express and share their cultural heritages, the right to equality of treatment and the removal of discriminatory barriers—rights which were always accompanied, in Frank’s mind, by the obligation to make a fundamental commitment to Australia. The Fraser government’s implementation of these principles would, in itself, have earned Frank a place in Australia’s history, but he went on to establish multicultural television, which had stalled, and to oversee the translation of the vision of a multicultural television service into reality. That reality is with us today, and for the service to have survived despite repeated onslaughts from both left and right is a tribute to how well Frank built it.

I believe that the work of Frank Galbally contributed significantly to the fact that what emerged from the mass immigration of the last half century was an admirable, decent, harmonious multicultural Australia—a society based on the appreciation of cultural diversity and on tolerance and mutual respect. Frank Galbally was a distinguished Australian who made a very distinguished contribution. He was a man of vision who conceived things that people had not thought of before and he had the capacity and toughness to translate them into reality. He will be sorely missed, and the thoughts of many people will be with his wife, Bernadette, and his many children, Michael, David, Francis, Simon, Paul, Bernard, Elsa and Joe.