Thursday, 24 September 2026

 Nick McGOWAN (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (14:02): In my maiden speech in this place some 1323 days ago I said, ‘I do not expect nor hope that my time here is long.’ Of course by that I did not mean life, I meant the Parliament. I have always understood intuitively the path I would tread. What I could not know was the unexpected course of events that would lead me to this point. My fate would be to fill a void I had not created, both for my party but more importantly for my community. The decision I made some three years ago was made at a different time, in different circumstances, but with the same determination. I am leaving this place to chase another: the lower house seat of Ringwood. This is not a goodbye built on certainty, it is a goodbye built on choice – mine. The driver for the change? Well, that is simple: I love what I have in the community I serve, and I am not prepared to hand it over to anyone else. It, and they, are my bucket filler. They are the reason for the joy in this job. They – every local primary school, community organisation and citizen – make this job worthwhile and eclipse the worst days and weeks when politics and tribalism seem senseless, albeit entirely necessary. Such is the condition of mankind. If it does not work, if Ringwood says, ‘No, thanks,’ I will still say the same thing I am saying now: it was worth the walk to the door, worth the knock, worth the risk of a no, because the alternative of staying somewhere safe out of fear of the unknown was never really who I was built to be. It was not where I have come from.

I was born in Airlie, Ivanhoe, in 1975. A second son, a quiet arrival to Barry William McGowan and Linda May Webb, kid brother to Christian, who came first and, I like to think, broke our parents in for the both of us. My earliest memories, however, are not of the sprawling east where I grew up – of Wheelers Hill, Vermont, Ivanhoe, Greensborough, Templestowe and so many more places – but of Ballarat, a weatherboard house on Queen Street North, still standing by the railway line fence, still facing the old Ballarat East Primary School across the road, and me still bearing the scar on my stomach I acquired as a child when I caught my young torso on a barbed wire fence.

My father’s people came from grief before they came from anywhere else. His grandmother died when her boy, my grandfather, was only six. His own father, an Australian of Irish descent, proved fonder of the bottle than the boy: he walked away and never looked back. Our family’s Irish threads run thin: a name, an affinity for the bottle, a mystery where the history should be. On my grandmother’s side, the thread holds firm. Constantine Drab, who fled pre–World War I Poland under Russian rule, laid carpets for a living in the sprawling eastern suburbs of Melbourne and married Phyllis Newman in 1923. Theirs is the quintessential settler story. Some men and women vanish, some stay. Regardless, we are built from both.

My mother’s people were English working class from London. Her father, Ernest Henry Webb, left school at 14 and joined the British Army as an apprentice fitter. During World War II Ernest served with the British Expeditionary Force and the 3rd King’s Own Hussars. He was at Dunkirk, swimming cable lines out to the boats during the British evacuation through open gunfire, 400 metres out and 400 metres back again and again because, in his words spoken decades later, ‘When you are 19, you think you are invincible.’ He lay lines from the beach to the boats for those who could not swim safely. Ernest recalled a vivid memory of watching a German Stuka raid during the evacuation. He recalled the scene in a news article as follows: ‘I was propped up on a dune, smoking a cigarette and without a care in the world.’ Ernest rarely spoke of war, though he shared that on one occasion he and a fellow soldier had helped save two German pilots who had been captured by Belgian soldiers. He detailed how ‘two Belgians with pistols were about to blow their heads off’. He said:

Myself and another man, who was also determined not to stand by and see murder done, bought our rifles up and stuck them in the … ribs. They changed their minds soon enough.

Later in the war, when Ernest himself was captured, two German marines would intervene as Japanese guards viciously beat him. He felt as though the favour was returned. Ernest fought on through Egypt, was later captured at Java and endured years in the Batu Lintang camp in Borneo, where two of every three British soldiers never came home. He did.

Prior to his capture, 145 men in his unit, himself included, stood in a circle in Java on 6 March 1942 and voted to keep fighting rather than surrender so that Australia might be bought a little more time, even amidst the rapidly deteriorating military situation and an imminent Dutch surrender. Of those 145 men, only 50 lived to see peace. He was one of the 50. Ernest would later reflect:

Looking back now I realise that every one of those men was voting for a death in action or the horrors of captivity.

I would not be standing here at all if not for that circle, that vote, that terrible arithmetic of courage. Fittingly, Ernest’s camp was liberated by the 9th Australian division on 11 September 1945. Just prior to this, a Japanese order had directed that every prisoner of war at the camp was to be killed on 15 September.

His wife, my grandmother May, grew up in the quiet Nottinghamshire village of Retford. They married at war’s end, had my mother in 1946 and her sister in 1949, and crossed the world on the SS Ormonde – 42 days at sea, chasing a promise. But the marriage that survived the ocean did not survive the peace. May died in 1972, worn thin by illness and by a husband who left her with little more than his name. My mother was 25.

It is not hard, then, to see where my mother’s steel was forged, nor how some of it was handed down to my brother and me. My parents separated when I was four, and from then on she raised us on her own – warehouse shifts, community child care, clerical work, whatever it took to keep her two boys fed and moving forward. Money, or the lack thereof, was a constant grievance in our house, though I never seemed to do without much. In truth, what I needed most never needed to be bought. We shifted rentals frequently – 13 times before I was 15; I have long since lost count – which meant we never quite belonged to one street, but we came to know a great many. I consider myself to have been lucky. I have always thought that was its own kind of schooling – in adapting, in embracing change, in listening and in finding common ground between people who did not start in the same place or possess the same wealth.

It was around those kitchen tables where my politics were quietly born, not from ideology but from necessity and love. Every house we left still lives in me, not in the walls but in who I learned to be there. It is a matter of pride that only recently, through my eldest son’s interest in family history, that I discovered since being in this place, a place adorned with riches of the gold rush, that on my father’s side sits a family from Tipperary – farm servants Cornelius Ryan and Bridget Leonard, who arrived here in 1841, into an Australia still becoming acquainted with its new name. Their daughter Johanna married Thomas Kennedy in 1851. Their child, my great-great-grandmother Mary Ethel, was born on the Eureka goldfields – born, as her obituary in the Advocate rather beautifully put it, ‘in a tent on the gold diggings’. Her father Thomas stood, it is recorded somewhere, among the mayhem at the Eureka Stockade in 1854. So somewhere, in whatever stubbornness I carry, there may be a little of that too, a family that has more than once chosen to stand its ground before choosing to move on.

My interest in politics was a sickness I acquired early – grade 5 to be exact. I cared deeply about our natural world, wondered and worried that there may not be an Amazon left, no rhinos and no elephants. I fought against testing on animals for cosmetic consumables and was frustrated by the persistent nuclear testing in the South Pacific by the pesky French. I was also appalled to live in a world where apartheid could find any harbour, much less a home. These passions and my mother’s intolerance for injustice and bigotry of any kind caused me to think of others more than myself, so I put my hand up for school council.

I joined the Liberal Party on 31 July 1991. I made new friends, found my flock, cold-called a 16-year-old Matthew Guy and asked him to vote for me if I rolled the branch president. We had the numbers. I became, while still a student at La Trobe, the first Liberal ever elected to that university’s council. I also lost a tilt at becoming a shire councillor not long after. Losing, it turns out, was good practice for a life spent, well, losing. I finished an arts degree at Deakin, during which I flipped burgers at McDonald’s, and by 20 I was myself a junior burger in the Victorian Premier’s office, just old enough to understand it was an important moment and apprenticeship while still young enough to genuinely believe that the press secretary celebrating her 30th birthday had the best of her life behind her, particularly at that ripe old age. Oh, how perspective is everything.

Then the world called, as it has a habit of doing to the restless. I went to London in 1997, writing and working for Westminster council, the Disability Rights Commission and the National Consumer Council, volunteering first for UNICEF, then in Thailand with the Australian Volunteers International, learning that democracy is not a document but a daily act of patience and practice with no one prescription for success. Then the United Nations – Congo, Burundi, Uganda, a Liberia still raw from war, where I was a minor part of a team who helped walk child soldiers back from the battlefield and rebels to the negotiating table. It was in Congo, though, where I learned that peace, like most worthwhile things, is made slowly, is entirely imperfect and is brokered by people willing to keep listening past the point where listening is easy. In some minuscule way I helped rebuild the UN’s operation in Iraq, first from Cyprus, then Jordan, before moving on to Afghanistan and then returning home at the end of 2005, carrying all of it with me, every hard-won lesson, every failed mission, every important though unheralded human success. I chased the world to understand my street and found the two were never as far apart as they looked.

Home again, I worked as a media director for Ted Baillieu, ran my own business, served the Australian Red Cross blood bank and returned once more to the UN in New York, this time working on policy, the environment, HIV/AIDS reduction, tackling poverty, fostering democratic governance and confronting head-on the challenges of gender equity, climate and environmental sustainability. Before entering this place I spent an exhausting though educative eight years on immigration and refugee review tribunals as an adjudicator of sorts between the state and the stateless. I cherished the opportunity and was pleased to leave the stress but not the people behind.

In 2022 I was elected to this place, the Victorian Parliament, where a boy from a rented house somehow found himself with a seat and a say. And what, in the end, does it mean to hold a seat in this place? I have loved the schools of my electorate and every student who has, quite unknowingly, made me want to be a slightly better man. I have loved meeting thousands of you in halls, in driveways and on nature strips at 7 in the morning. I have loved spending my office budget where it does the most good: on volunteers running themselves ragged and parents doing their sums twice because the cost of everything keeps rising. I have loved making a difference that was small in size but never small in meaning.

I have not, I confess, always loved coming to Parliament. Democracy is a wonderful thing, but parts of the process I could take or leave; the people, I will hold on to. I have loved working alongside colleagues in the true old-fashioned sense of the word – Michael Galea, Lee Tarlamis, Meng Heang Tak, Rachel Payne and Ann-Marie Hermans among them – people who from every side of this chamber helped me to help a young woman named Jana secure her Australian citizenship notwithstanding a lifetime lived with cerebral palsy. We will never truly appreciate what the certainty of citizenship means to a family like hers, though we can each take some comfort in our small part. I have loved helping raise the funds to let a bright five-year-old named Ivani, born with LAMA2 muscular dystrophy, get a car of her own so that she might simply get about the way any other little girl or boy would without a second thought or a taxi. I will never forget being blindfolded and following Lilly, who is blind, from Flinders Street station to her local station to help me and others understand just how important those little yellow dots are.

I will forever be grateful for the small things that mattered. Just yesterday I shared with Melissa Horne from the other place a photo of young Xavier. Xavier was a bright, bubbly, energetic six-year-old when a freak accident occurred in the classroom. He fell on his pencil of all things. It punctured his eye and pierced his brain as he fell onto it. The severe traumatic brain injury led to a bleed, a blood clot and multiple strokes. Melissa is important to this story because Xavier, on his long path to recovery, could not use a local path to get to school because it was muddy and unpaved. Melissa’s example to all of us on that side, this side, the crossbench – whoever should be fortunate enough ever to be a minister – is that we each have a role to play, and regardless of who gets to govern, being responsive to the little things and to each other in this place and the other place will never make the headlines but really matters.

In this job you cannot hold on to the joy without encountering the sorrow beside it. I will never forget Bri, a mum who continues to try to make sense of the senseless by raising funds in memory of her son Patrick, who took his own life on 10 February 2023, aged just 17. I will never forget Wayne Holdsworth, whose son Mac at the very same age took his life on 24 October 2023. I will never forget sitting through 18-year-old Elijah’s funeral listening to his parents Jo and Dave delivering a heartfelt tribute to their beautiful, talented son. And I will never forget Elbino Akueng asking me, as we sat in his living room with grief too large for the question, whether anyone in this place, in the Parliament, had spoken his son’s name, Dau. Dau, 15 years old, was killed after playing a game of basketball with his mate, 12-year-old Chol Achiek. Elbino, the truth is too few people have mentioned your son’s name or Chol’s. Too many of our children are dying or being murdered – too many, full stop. There should be none. And too many – in fact most – are black. I raised this subconscious, perhaps even inadvertent, racism in my maiden speech. I raise it again now, because saying it once was never going to be enough.

In my short time in this place I do not believe I have achieved anything especially remarkable, and I find to my own surprise that I have made a kind of peace with that. But if you pressed me, if you asked me what one thing I would call an achievement out of everything, I think I would tell you about Jess Wilson. In full view of everyone in this building, Jess has done for my party what I hope she can do for our state: restore faith. I have had a front-row seat in watching her rise. You should all know this. I have taken delight in telling hundreds of primary schoolchildren from the Ringwood electorate the fact that up until a few months ago every minister in this chamber – bar one, apologies – was a female: Gayle, Ingrid, Lizzie, Jaclyn and Harriet. I was particularly proud of the fact that two of my own leaders on this side of the chamber have also held the torch for women everywhere as leaders of my own proud party, Georgie and Beverley. Women in all leadership roles matter tremendously, because in too many places even now women and girls are underestimated, undermined and almost always underpaid. My mum could have told you that a long time ago. Both my parents passed away some time ago. I will be forever thankful for my stepmother Judy McGowan, who remains and is cherished to this day, like my half-sister Nellie and step-siblings Sarah and Jon and my brother Christian. You are all loved.

I want to also give thanks to Georgie Purcell for her advocacy for animals, all creatures great and small. We live in a world that preaches individuality and then demands herd – it is an animal reference for you. There is nothing wrong with herds. Georgie has never once taken an easy exit from that contradiction. She has stayed unapologetically entirely herself in a society that does not always make room for that. It is not lost on me that women in this place are each in their own right genuine inspirations to women – not just the ones already in this building, but the ones watching from outside it, wondering whether there is space in public life for someone who refuses to shrink themselves to fit in. I hope every young woman who hears this takes the point that being entirely yourself is not a liability here; it is an asset no-one can ever take from you.

I want to also thank the Greens, with whom we share a common desire for the endless task of improving human rights, caring for the environment and fighting for our firefighters. Again, I have failed to achieve almost everything I sought to do. But I draw comfort from the fact that in the days ahead some of my labour may bear fruit. In fact I am quite optimistic it will. The plight of our firefighters is a tragic one. We call them heroes. We send them into harm’s way, and yet we deprive them of the tools they need to keep themselves safe, much less others safe.

Our system is built to be combative, but I have learned from my vantage point in opposition and time in this place as a member that combative need not mean individually antagonistic. Time and again ministers have assisted, perhaps not as much as I would always have liked, but frequently as much as was needed. If I name you, I feel this could only be interpreted as a hostile act seven weeks out from pre-poll and goodness knows how many weeks out from preselection, so I will not venture to do so. But you each know who you are. Without your assistance for members of my community, they would have been much less well-off and we would have been less well-off. Thank you to each and every one of you.

I have learned much and I have admired the patience of ministers, one and all, in and during the committee process. You have taught me that should I ever be in that place – and given I am moving houses, I may not ever be in that place; what a blessing – plain politeness and quiet patience carry us further than most of what gets said in here. From what I have watched across the bench in this place, this has impressed me. The system is built to clash. It does not follow that the people in it have to.

Know what follows a simple goodbye, only a change of address, and it is precisely because it is a change and not an ending that I want to get the thankyous right out of the way before I move house. I would be nowhere in this chamber without my staff. Rachel, Stephanie, Jaguar and Brandi have been, quite simply, awesome, and I intend to keep testing their patience for a good while yet.

To the Parliament’s own, Sally, Bridget, Greg, Adam, Peter, Grace, another Rachel and, yes, even Trish, and so many more I cannot fit into the time allowed, thank you for the quiet work that makes this loud place run. If I move to another chamber, you may see rather less of me from here on. I suspect that that alone might count as thanks enough.

President, your example has been one others can, I hope, learn from. Allowing the cut and thrust of respectful debate, no matter how loud, is not to be scorned but valued in my opinion. You have walked that line and done so with grace and patience, allowing grown-ups the time they need, including me, to act like it. Expressing our differences freely in the form of words is always preferable to the alternative. I have worked in those countries where the alternative prevails, and it never ends well.

There is one debt, though, I still have not properly settled. It dates back to my very first speech in this place. I stood here four years ago making a maiden speech I will charitably describe as somewhat lecturous. It was not the time then for thanks; it was the time for some home truths – a lot of them, as it turned out. Now is the right time for proper thankyous to the tireless volunteers who put me here to begin with. You all know them and label them as the people to blame. My thanks to Jackie Douglas, Susan Turner, David Tatum, Nick Brown, Paul and Shirley Beraldo, Catherine Seagrave, Bruce Woodhouse, John and Cassie Mignano, David Vadnech, Chantelle Vidler, Jill and Keith Duncan, Michelle and Peter Penson, Brooke Lord, Sue Roche, Matthew and Renae Guy, Peter Perechi, Eve and Argy Leibe, Jeff Allan, Deirdre Diamante, Michelle Pavlo and Vi Hurley. You stood on roadsides when the margins were double digits and the outcome was anything but certain.

To everyone who helped me whenever I stumbled in here, my family, my friends, colleagues across the aisle and every constituent who trusted me with their story, thank you.

To my colleagues: in ways that you may never appreciate, you have kept me going. You have tested me just as I have tested and likely frustrated you. For those who I have trespassed upon and had less complimentary moments with, I am truly sorry. The journey has never been straightforward nor easy, though it has led us to a clearing where the promise of what can be achieved and what good can be done seems almost tangible and perhaps within reach.

To my family – saved for last because the best things always are. To Emmett, Aisha, Abram and Alison, you are the reason any of this had a point at all. Every early morning and every late sitting was a debt against your patience. I hope in whatever years the next seat gives me – or stage – I can begin to repay that properly. I seldom, in fact almost never, mention family because their lives are their own. They have not chosen this path; I have. I know that in whatever path you choose you will each follow your heart, fail big time like me and be kind. You each are everything your mother and I ever wanted you or needed you to be – simply perfect. A beautiful daughter, two beautiful sons.

There is a story far older than this building and older still than settler Australia of Cheng Tang, first king of China’s Shang dynasty – a dynasty so far back in time that most of what we know of it comes from bones and bronze rather than books. He is said to have inscribed on his wash basin, of all places, the words, ‘If you can in one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation’ – not a grand pronouncement carved for a temple wall, just a private instruction read each morning by a man to himself before anyone else was watching. I rather like that better than the more famous lines people reach for at moments like these. It asks for nothing heroic, only that you begin again tomorrow in whatever small way tomorrow allows. I have tried in four years to do that here. I intend to keep trying, whatever Ringwood decides. In that older spirit I can find not an ending but a daily renovation.

Members applauded.