Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

John Bloomfield. Charlesworth had joined Bloomfield on the board of WAIS in 1984 and would remain there until 1992. Bloomfield‘s role in the foundation of AIS and WAIS had ‘obviously been pivotal’, recalled Ric in 2009. But Bloomfield was replaced on the Australian Sports Commission by Hatt and he ‘blamed me for it!’ as a member of the government. * * * * * Although he soon found he had ‘underestimated the lifestyle shift’ involved for ‘those living outside the Canberra-Sydney-Melbourne triangle’, Ric’s early impressions of parliament were good. He admired the quality of people on the Labor front bench, led by Prime Minister Hawke, and the energy with which the new government pursued reform on many fronts. 26 Protection of the Tasmanian wilderness had been a major election pledge by the ALP, strongly supported by environmentalists around the country. But the way the federal vote in Tasmania itself went against the pro-Labor national trend showed the local appeal of arguments that the building of the massive Gordon-below-Franklin Dam would create many jobs in the hydro-electricity industry. When the Tasmanian government argued the federal one had no constitutional right to intervene, confrontation followed, within the wilderness area; in the air – with new Attorney-General Gareth Evans using RAAF planes to take aerial photographs of work still proceeding on the dam’s infrastructure – and among lawyers in the High Court of Australia. Using the ‘external powers’ of the federal constitution, arguing Australia’s obligations under international environmental conventions, the Hawke government won the legal argument and earned the temporary support of an emerging ‘green’ movement. Evans earned the nickname ‘Biggles’. More far-reaching reforms in the government’s first term included the floating of the Australian dollar, which led, through sometimes difficult times, to Australian successes in a competitive 56 1981-1993 26 The following account of Ric’s years in federal politics is drawn principally from The Coach , pp 44-52, with some additional personal comments drawn from the author’s conversations with him in 2002 and the interview on 30 April 2009.