Wednesday, 20 March 2019

 Ms D’AMBROSIO (Mill Park—Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, Minister for Solar Homes) (10:16): Vale, the Honourable Giovanni Sgro, MLC, former Deputy President of the Legislative Council. I reflect on a champion of the Victorian Labor Party and union movement. My friend Giovanni Sgro passed away this week. Giovanni was unique in so many ways and we will never see the likes of him again in our great Labor Party, our unions or parliaments. But he was also representative of the broader Italian community he so ably represented.

Giovanni was born in Seminara, Calabria, like so many of his time into poverty. And like so many others, including my family, with little education or resources he migrated to postwar Australia to find a better life. No-one was ever in any doubt what Giovanni’s thoughts were on any issue, and almost always you could guess his position based purely on his consistently demonstrated values and polemic. An underdog himself, he was the great defender of underdogs. Whether it was at Bonegilla, out on the streets, in schools, on the job, in the town halls or Parliament, you were blessed to have had him in your corner, never giving up on what he knew was right. He was loyal, stubborn, fearless, driven, fair-minded, smart, intelligent, passionate, humble and self-deprecating, ambitious for his working class and community, a firebrand, an orator, a curser, a fighter, a painter and decorator, a unionist and an advocate for multiculturalism.

Giovanni was a loving husband and equal partner and a loving father. It was right and proper that a postwar migrant, one of the tens of thousands who came here from Italy, would be elected to Parliament, giving voice to so many who for too long had no voice, and of course he was a representative of the Labor Party. My heartfelt condolences go to Anne, his four daughters, grandchildren and other family members.