Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

had learned ‘that the backbencher’s life can be pretty frustrating as much of one’s time is spent defending and presenting government policy’. He must always have known that the strictness of party lines would mean that ‘backbenchers are expected to be team players’. Yet he found that ‘one of the most disturbing experiences that one can have in Parliament is to be persuaded by the arguments of the Opposition’. It was only occasionally in committees and, on parliamentary delegations that there was the opportunity ‘to share common views and experiences with the “enemy” on the other side of the house’. He learned quite quickly that ‘there were two sides to most arguments and many of those on the opposite side of the house were decent, thoughtful Australians with ideas and philosophies held for valid reasons.’ He agreed with arguments from the conservative side that trade unions should have secret ballots before taking strike action. And ‘shouldn’t wealthy Australians take out private health insurance to lighten the public burden?’ Both parties believed in broadening the tax base, just by different means. The opportunities to find common ground with political opponents came more easily on parliamentary business away from Canberra. In 1986 he went on a fact-finding mission to Cambodia organised by Kim Beazley senior, a former education minister in the Whitlam government and father of the namesake who was to become ALP leader in the 1990s and 2000s. Ric considered one political opponent on the delegation, Philip Ruddock, to be further to the left than himself. Ruddock was a committed member of Amnesty International, as he would still controversially be ten years and more later, leaving Ric ‘gobsmacked at the things he did as Minister of Immigration’, enforcing a rigorous policy of ‘border protection’ against asylum seekers from the world’s political and social disaster areas. It is perhaps surprising there was no similar Charlesworth retrospective reassessment of Ian Sinclair, who had led the National (previously Country) Party wing of the conservative coalition between 1984 and 1989. In 1988 Sinclair had spoken in favour of a reduction in the numbers of Asians immigrating to Australia. Earlier he had criticised the Hawke government for condoning homosexuality. Despite these socially conservative policies so much at odds with his own liberal values, Ric found him a ‘charming, hardworking and fundamentally decent man’, when 58 1981-1993