It came as a shock to hear that former Senator Ron Boswell passed away this week. Ron was 85 years old and had many close health shaves in recent years. But you felt that nothing could stop Ron.
While Ron formally retired from the Senate 11 years ago, in practice he continued to work as a Senator in all but name right up until the end. Ron was constantly on the phone trying to help this or that person. It has not been uncommon to hear people say this week about Ron that he would often call them three or four times a day to get an outcome.
Just a few weeks ago Ron had penned an article in The Australian on Barnaby Joyce’s defection from the Nationals party. In that article Ron wrote that “[The Nationals party] are a grassroots movement. We hear the complaints, too, loud and clear, but we don’t wallow in them or become frozen by them. We act. We are the ones who take the issue, roll up our sleeves and get to work.”
Ron understood that politics is a vocation that requires action to solve problems. You do not need to write long treatises or focus on what title is before or after your name. To do your job as a Member of Parliament you need to help people.
Ron wrote an autobiography a few years ago, although the book was not really about him. The book was a series of small chapters with titles like “Wool and Wheat”, “Indigenous title”, “Pharmacies”, “Sugar Seats”, “Have I Mentioned Fishing?”, “Bananarama” and “Ginger Groupie”.
All of these chapters relate how Ron would tackle a problem like native title rights, the threat of fishing closures costing jobs and even exotic diseases that threatened banana and ginger production. The script was almost always the same, Ron would just make calls, invade the offices of Ministers and just do whatever he had to do to get a result. And, Ron almost always got a result.
I used to say that Ron’s career wrote the book on how to be a good Senator but we are lucky that he left us an actual book. It remains the best “how to” guide for any budding political representative.
In the book Ron wrote that “Today, focus groups lead us into the tyranny of small ideas.” Ron made a career of looking after the small, the small business, the small farmer and the family, the smallest unit of society. But Ron did not think small. There was no problem too big for Ron to take on.
I first became aware of Ron when I asked Barnaby Joyce why the Renewable Energy Target was supported by all parties when it was the worst of all energy policies? Barnaby replied you need to talk to Ron Boswell. So I did.
Before entering politics Ron had been a successful but humble paintbrush salesman. He had left school at 14 to support his family.
But here was someone who understood the folly of subsidising an unreliable power source better than all the intellectual class in Canberra. Ron has been proven right about energy. Ron wrote in the Australian Financial Review last year that an Australian Government energy white paper published in 2004 said that Australia “enjoys some of the lowest stationary energy prices in the developed world”. The paper noted that Australia’s electricity prices were 30 per cent lower than those in the United States.
Today, Australian businesses report that our electricity prices are three times that of the United States.
This tragic outcome is an indictment of our political class that have followed the focus groups not common sense.
We no longer have Ron to help fight against this intellectual groupthink. It is about time the current generation of politicians show the same guts and gumption that Senator Ron Boswell personified.
