Howard leads Liberal tributes to Peter Reith, ‘a great all-rounder’

In remembering Peter Reith, former prime minister John Howard said he had lost a wonderful friend and colleague, a person he admired and someone who gave greatly to the Liberal cause.

Australian politics has also lost something increasingly rare; a genuine reformer who sees no point in filling a seat in parliament unless they are trying to change things for the better.

Former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott with other mourners at Peter Reith’s memorial service on Thursday.Credit:Eddie Jim

In delivering a tribute to his former industrial relations minister at a state memorial service in Melbourne, Howard described Reith as the “great all-rounder” of his parliamentary team and someone who engendered “extraordinary affection” among those he worked with.

“I have lost somebody I admire, who gave enormously to the Liberal cause,” Howard told Liberal luminaries gathered at St Andrew’s Anglican church in Brighton, the bayside suburb where Reith went to high school and lived his final days.

“He did fight very hard for politics and he wasn’t there just to draw a parliamentary salary or the perks of office … he was there to bring about change.”

Reith died at the age of 72 on November 8 due to the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Howard, having visited his former colleague five weeks ago, revealed that the disease had not robbed Reith of his droll perspective on politics.

Lamenting the Liberal wipeout at the most recent federal election, Howard noted that the party had a big task ahead of it. “You have got to be joking,” Reith retorted. “We have a huge task ahead!”

Reith’s memorial service was one of the first opportunities since the Coalition’s election defeat for so many party elders to gather under the same roof.

The roll call included former prime minister Tony Abbott, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, a brace of former treasurers in Peter Costello and Josh Frydenberg, former party president Michael Kroger, the Kemp brothers Rod and David and a trio of surviving senators, Jane Hume, James Paterson and Sarah Henderson.

Two former governor-generals, Peter Cosgrove and Peter Hollingworth, were also in attendance.

The pews were also laden with Reith’s large family and former staff and advisers who served him throughout a parliamentary career that spanned long terms in opposition and government.

They included Grahame Morris, Howard’s former chief of staff who ran Reith’s unlikely campaign to win the seat of Flinders at a 1983 byelection and two of his warrior advisers from the waterfront days; lawyer Steve Amendola and press secretary Ian Hanke.

Hanke, who is involved in the current Victorian state election campaign, was invited by Reith’s family to pay tribute to his old boss and noted that, as much as Reith would forever be remembered for leading the bitter waterfront dispute of the late 1990s and his broader industrial relations reforms, he championed lesser known causes.

One of those was a local constituent who had been sexually harassed while serving on the HMAS Swan. A government inquiry, pushed for by Reith from opposition, led to changes to how women were accepted and treated in the navy. Another was his low-key advocacy for Indigenous employment, conducted during a series of trips throughout regional and rural Australia without journalists or television cameras in tow.

Peter Costello, John Howard and Peter Reith in 1999.Credit:Andrew Campbell

“He was a genuine reformer,” Hanke said. “Someone who believed there was no point in being in parliament unless you were going to do something. He wasn’t the sort of person who sat on the backbench just to warm it.”

To Reith’s family, he was a figure of warmth, passion and dad jokes who, in raising four boys, became an expert at conflict resolution. None of them remembered him ever losing his temper.

David Reith testified to his father’s enduring love of puns. He said that as he was walking towards the memorial service on Thursday, he could hear his dad wisecracking about the church being in the dead centre of town and how everyone was dying to get in.

David Reith said his father’s reformist zeal continued after he quit parliament and took up a position in London as Australia’s representative on the board of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Rather than treating it as a plum posting, Reith questioned the purpose of the institution and lobbied his own government to scrap its involvement with the bank. “Aside from a few close friends, Dad was the kid who ate lunch alone,” David Reith said of his father’s time in London.

Peter Reith served in the federal parliament in 1983 and from 1984-2001. He is survived by his wife Kerrie, four children and 13 grandchildren.

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