KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

AND

STATE LIBRARY OF WESTERN

Transcript of an interview with

Hon. Dr.

STATE LIBRARY OF - ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION DATE OF INTERVIEW: 2017 INTERVIEWER: Jennie Carter TRANSCRIBER: HANSARDS –PARLIAMENT OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA. DURATION: 10 hours REFERENCE NUMBER: OH4378 COPYRIGHT: Parliament of Western Australia and the State Library of Western Australia.

KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

NOTE TO READER

Readers of this oral history memoir should bear in mind that it is a verbatim transcript of the spoken word and reflects the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Parliament and the State Library are not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein; these are for the reader to judge.

Bold type face indicates a difference between transcript and recording, as a result of corrections made to the transcript only, usually at the request of the person interviewed.

FULL CAPITALS in the text indicate a word or words emphasised by the person interviewed.

Square brackets [ ] are used for insertions not in the original tape.

KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

CONTENTS

Introduction

Interview -1 1 - 23

Early life; parents; lived in Derby; father – stockman (Napier and Kimberley Downs stations); born KEMH; memories of Derby; siblings; grandparents-Liberals; father employed on Kimberley Downs station; father studied medicine; effect of sisters death; school memories – Guildford Grammer; parents separating; mother supporting household; relationship with father; University -studied medicine.

Interview - 2 24 - 55

University - vacation employment (mining - , Koolan Island, Cockatoo Island); graduating; marriage; residency -Royal Hospital; Fremantle Hospital; GP training; Bunbury medical practice; father’s medical practice; own medical practice; children; running for local council; Councillor - Baywater Council - John D’Orazio, Adele Farina; Council programs and developments - Galleria shopping centre, library, recreational centre, garden programs, recycling bins; joining local Dianella Liberal Party Branch; Father Brian projects.

Interview - 3 56 - 74

Decision to run for State politics; Noranda Branch Liberal Party; preselection- Midland; Dianella Seat; Perth Seat; disunity between and Bill Hassell; Young Liberals; Keith Wilson; winning Dianella 1993; relationship with Court and colleagues; Noel Crichton- Browne faction; Fred Chaney faction; ; 1993 Election; Graham Keirath and Workers Compensation Legislation; 1997 – Minister; new seat – Yokine; Balga re-development; Homeswest Housing; Aboriginal Affairs- Cedric Wyatt

Interview – 4 75 - 106

Ministerial period 1997 -2001; Committee work - Science & Technology Committee, Recycling & Waste Management Committee; factional politics; desalination plant; Aboriginal Affairs management and reforms – RAESP; Dimond Gorge; Housing programs and changes to Homeswest; loosing government -Doug Shave/ Bloffwitch & Kingstream, Save the Forest campaign, One Nation Vote; ; ; Aboriginal Heritage work; loosing 2001 Election; Dawesville Electorate; Deputy Opposition leader; ; ; .

Interview - 5 107- 134

Period out of Office; association with Mandurah; Shadow Minister for Health; 2005-2008 period; Matt Birney – Leader of the Opposition; state of health system; Jim McGinty; ambulance ramping and bed blockage; Roger Cook; period in Opposition – change of leaders; Troy Buswell; elected Deputy Leader; Neal Fong; Geoff Gallop Premiership;

KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Alan Carpenter government; John D’Orazio sacking; Diedre Willmott; elected leader; 2008 Election ; - National Party declare independence from Liberals; Royalties for Regions; Minister for Health new policies – 4 hour rule; Aboriginal issues.

Interview – 6 135 - 156

Troy Buswell; Abortion Debate; Colin Barnett government; Minister for Health and Tourism; building of new hospitals; Royal Perth Hospital; Reid Review; new hospitals; hospital boards; 2012 –health workers wages and conditions agreement; relationship with AMA; part privatisation of hospitals – Fiona Stanley, Peel, Royal Perth, Joondalup Hospitals; 2008-12 achievements.

Interview -7 157 - 187

Royalties for Regions program; relationship with Nationals; revitalising country health; Royalties for Regions program spending; success of program; Brendon Grylls – policy to increase mining royalties; Apology to Mothers; 2012 Election – impact of Rudd/Gillard government; loss of Tourism portfolio; Minister for Training and Workforce – TAFE funding cuts; budget – debt and deficit problems; GST; health budget and wages; difficulties with hospital building program; appointment of SERCO; Healthway Program; Tourism WA – Gourmet Escape, negotiating with Chinese; Rottnest Island developments;

Interview – 8 188 -204

2012-17 Parliamentary career – role of leader; return of Yagan’s head – Ken Colbung; relationship with colleagues – Rob Johnson; Chair of Public Accounts Committee; retirement - farm Donnybrook, medical practice.

  

II KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

INTRODUCTION

Dr Kim Desmond Hames, MLA, was elected to the Legislative Assembly to represent the State electorate of Dianellai in 1993 for the Liberal Party, Western Australia. When Dianella was abolished in the 1994 redistribution, Kim successfully contested the newly formed electorate of Yokine in 1996, but lost it in 2001. In 2005, he was elected as the member for Dawesville,ii a position he held until his resignation from Parliament in 2017. He served as a minister under both Richard Court and Colin Barnett, and was Deputy Premier from 2008 to 2016.

Kim was born at Subiaco on 24 March 1953 and is the son of Reginald and Eunice (nee Jackson) Hames. He spent his early years in Derby where his father was working. When Kim was five years old, the family moved to Perth so that Kim’s father could study medicine. Reginald qualified as a doctor in 1964. The family first lived with Kim’s maternal grandparents in Bassendean and then moved to Dianella. Kim was educated at Bassendean, Victoria Park, Mandurah, and Dianella primary schools and completed his secondary education at Guildford Grammar School, where he matriculated in 1970. He graduated from the University of Western Australia’s School of Medicine in 1976 and became a General Practitioner. The following year Kim married Stephanie and in 1981 took over his father’s practice in Inglewood. The first of Kim’s and Stephanie’s six children – three sons and three daughters – was born in 1981.

The family settled in Dianella where Kim became involved in community issues and was elected as a local government councillor for the City of Bayswater, serving from 1985 to 1993. On 6 February 1993 Kim defeated Labor's Keith Wilson to win the seat of Dianella. In 1997 Kim was made Minister for Housing, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, and Minister for Water Resources in the Richard Court Liberal Government. In 2001 the Labor Party under Geoff Gallop formed government and Kim was defeated as the member for Dianella by Bob Kucera.

Kim retained a life-long interest in Aboriginal issues and established the Hames Consultancy Group which undertook Aboriginal heritage surveys between 2001 and 2005.

On the retirement of Liberal member, Arthur Marshall, Kim won preselection for the electorate of Dawesville and successfully contested the seat in 2005. Following a snap election held on 6 September 2008, the Liberal Party formed government KIM HAMES INTERVIEW under Colin Barnett and Kim was made Deputy Premier, Minister for Health, and Minister for Indigenous Affairs. In 2010 Kim relinquished Indigenous Affairs to take up the Tourism portfolio. Kim resigned as Minister for Tourism in 2013 and took on Training and Workforce Development. He reclaimed the tourism portfolio in a December 2014 reshuffle, but a year later announced his intention to resign as deputy leader of the Liberal Party (and thus also as deputy premier) with effect from February 2016. He retired from parliament on 30 January 2017.

Kim talks about his early life, medical practice, marriage and family life with his wife Stephanie, his work in the community, as a local government councillor, and as a candidate for State Government. He discusses his role as a minister in the Liberal governments of Richard Court and Colin Barnett. Kim was the longest serving health minister in the state’s history, the longest serving Liberal Deputy Premier, and the fourth longest serving Deputy Premier. Some of Kim’s notable achievements and initiatives while in office were the establishment of WA’s first desalination plant in WA and the Aboriginal Swimming Pool scheme. While Health Minister he oversaw the planning and construction of Albany, , Fiona Stanley, Midland, Karratha, Newman, Onslow, and Warren hospitals as well as the new Children’s Hospital. He also delivered an apology to mothers whose children were adopted under coercive practices common in the years up to the 1970s. In Tourism, he championed the Rottnest Island upgrade.

Dr Kim Hames was interviewed by Jennie Carter over the period 5 July 2017 to 23 November 2017 for the Oral History Program of the Parliament of Western Australia and the State Library of Western Australia -J S Battye Library of West Australian History.

Total 10 hours of recorded interview. In consultation with Dr Hames, this transcript has been edited for consistency, accuracy, and readability

______i. Dianella is located in the North Metropolitan Region. The seat was abolished in 1996 and split between the seats of Maylands and Ballajura. The suburb of Yokine was transferred to the new seat of Yokine. ii. Dawesville is located south west of Perth in the Mandurah region. KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Interview 1

Ms Jennie Carter: This is recording 1 of an interview with Dr Kim Hames who was a member of the Legislative Assembly for 20 years during the period 1993 to 2017 and a minister both the Richard Court and Colin Barnett governments. The interviewer is Jennie Carter and the interview is being conducted on 5 July 2017.

Ms Jennie Carter: Now, Kim, can you tell me a little bit about your early life, your date of birth and where you were born, and your parents?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: My parents are Reginald Desmond Hames and Eunice Yvonne Jackson. Eunice, who called herself Yvonne, hated Eunice, was born in Narembeen, where she and her four sisters, and at the last stage of their lives, a brother, were on a little farm. My maternal grandfather was a war service veteran, so he was allocated land after the First World War out at Narembeen. Mum was working on the farm. My paternal grandfather was a butcher in Katanning and dad was working with him, and somehow mum and dad met at a social. After they were married, they went to Derby, where my grandfather worked as a butcher and dad worked as a stockman on Kimberley Downs–Napier Downs Station and for Main Roads. He boxed. He worked on Cockatoo Island. My uncle was a shotfirer, so my father helped. I gather they laid the first ever charge on Cockatoo Island. In amongst all that, I was born. I think I was probably conceived when dad was a stockman on Kimberley Downs–Napier Downs Station. I’ve seen pictures of my sister with two Aboriginal twin boys when she was about one and I was born a year after that, and they were on the station at that time.

Ms Jennie Carter: What was their job on the station?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: He was a stockman. Mum’s actually had a story written in the Australasian Post magazine telling the story of those early days. She told the story of being in a little tin shed with dirt floors and no windows. The stove was a circle of stones outside. Dad would go off with all the stockmen to do the muster, and mum was left. There was an Aboriginal camp next door, so she had a lot of help and support from the Aboriginal women from that group. I think that was where I was conceived. In those days, Aboriginal women delivered in the Kimberley, but non- Aboriginal women didn’t, so my mother was sent to Perth on the old state ships that

1 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW used to go between Perth and Derby, and I was born at King Edward hospital, on 24 March 1953. I was their second child.

I’ve seen a picture of myself in the nick with dad’s boots and his hat on that I gather was on Cockatoo Island. I look to be about one. Presumably he was over there. But I’ve got lots of memories from age four of staying at my grandparents’ house in Derby. They had a butcher shop there which has gone now. There’s an Elders store there now. Right next door was a deli that my grandmother ran. She used to make meat pies with grandad’s meat for the old picture theatre, which is still there, which was about two doors away, and then next to that was our house. I have lots of memories of playing in the house, visiting people and doing stuff around that house in Derby.

Ms Jennie Carter: And your siblings were born there or —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, they weren’t. We left when I was just aged five. As I said, I have lots of memories of being four in Derby. I remember the swimming pool really well. I remember a big boab tree across the road. That is still there, by the way. It doesn’t look any bigger, so it shows how old those trees are. I remember climbing that tree. We had a shed out the back and Aboriginal families used to sleep in the shed when they were working. I had a lady called Daisy, an Aboriginal woman, who mostly looked after me. That’s the way it was in those days. She would help my grandmother doing all the cooking in the kitchen for the deli, so I used to play with her kids.

A couple of incidents I remember well. Once they had a big pile of cardboard boxes, for some reason, out the back near the shed. I was playing chasey and running over the boxes. Then, I remember, as if in slow motion, a box slipping and there was the rusty lid that had been cut out of a middle-sized drum right there as my foot came down and my foot slid along the side of the rusty drum. I’ve got quite a big scar now on my foot from that cut. I’ve got another big scar on my backside. Again, I remember it like it was yesterday. My cousin, myself and my sister were sitting on boxes drinking homemade lemonade in a little circle, talking, and my box fell over. I thought nothing of it, stood it up again and sat on it again, and it fell it over again. The first time it must’ve knocked my glass over. The second time it broke and the spike from the broken glass went right into the cheek of my buttock. I remember

2 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW standing there still in my grey school uniform—I went to preschool there—and I can remember the blood running down my leg from the cut.

So they took me to the local hospital and stitched me up, which didn’t bother me too much. I’ve learnt since as a doctor that when you inject into the fatty tissue, the local anaesthetic doesn’t sting, so I didn’t feel anything. But I clearly remember seeing them come at me with the needle—that was obviously a tetanus needle—and I was scared of needles. I was screaming and my dad reassured me that they wouldn’t give me the needle. The three of them picked me up and halfway to the door they stopped and the needle came. I remember screaming at my father, “You promised! You promised!” while they jabbed the needle. I’ve had a son since who was scared of needles like that, so I know what I must’ve been like. Now, as a doctor, I have no fear of needles. In fact, I give my own, or I used to when I was a GP. If I needed a vaccination, I’d give my own needle. But in those days, I was super scared.

So, I remember things like the local swimming pool at Derby, little incidents with the family and friends of my mother coming around. My sister went to, I think, a Catholic school in Derby. At some stage, I remember being at that school. When we came to Perth, I was still only just starting kindergarten, so perhaps it was the very start of that year when I turned five. In those days, everyone used to get milk to start the day at school, but up there, of course, there was no milk, so we had Carnation milk. It was poured into this big stainless steel tank and watered down, and that was our milk for the day. It tasted awful.

Ms Jennie Carter: I can imagine [chuckles].

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: My uncle up there was a guy called Dumpy Jones. He was a famous truckie. He ran trucks. His house is still there in Derby, just down the road from the Boab hotel. It’s a two-storey house with a big shed out the back. He used to do trucking for goods supplies all over the Kimberley. His proper name was David Jones, but he was a small fellow, so Dumpy is what he was called. There are lots of pictures and stories of him bogged to the axle with big road trains trying to get through either at the beginning or the end of the wet to take supplies out to the stations, because without them, they didn’t survive. I clearly remember one day him coming around to the house, we were in the kitchen and all the women were doing the cooking, and he brought in a little crocodile. It would have been about a metre and a half long. He taped up its mouth and then let it go in the kitchen. This little 3 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW crocodile was scrabbling around the wooden floors and the women were all screaming and jumping up onto the chairs.

Derby was a great place. It was really hot and humid. I used to get prickly heat a lot—always itchy and always smothered in calamine lotion in the middle of the wet because it was so hot. But there’s a thing that I remember: my grandfather used to keep all his money in a room that was up a set of stairs. There were gaps in the timber floorboards, so we used to scrabble round in the dirt underneath trying to find coins that had dropped through. I’m sure my grandfather must’ve known and deliberately dropped some there, because we always managed to find an occasional coin in the dirt underneath.

Ms Jennie Carter: What was your relationship with your grandfather like, and your grandmother?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: They were big imposing people—my grandmother especially. How we started being Liberal is from those early days. My grandfather was asked to run for the Labor Party for the Kimberley, which was just before the time when Ernie Bridge won. Alan Ridge was the Liberal member [from 1968 to 1980] and previously it had been John Rhatigan [ALP 1953 to 1968]. My grandfather was asked to run by the Labor Party, to run against Ridge. He said no because we were Liberal. They said, “Well, you can’t be Liberal. You used to be secretary of the police union in Fremantle”—when he was a police officer previously—”so how can you be Liberal?” What they didn’t know was that my grandmother wore the pants and she used to go to musical evenings with Sir in, I forget the suburb— to Claremont, but in close around the Mt Hawthorn area. They used to have these musical evenings when my grandmother was about 16 and Sir Charles was at them with his trumpet, I presume, and so they became good friends. When Sir Charles became Premier and he used to visit the Kimberley, he either stayed with us or with the Rowles family. There is a Rob Rowles, who’s the son from that family. They used to own a hotel up there. I just found two weeks ago, at a ball, there’s one of the Rowles family whose middle name is Kimberley. (I was named Kim because dad was on Kimberley Downs Station in the Kimberley.) His middle name was Kimberley and his family, the Rowles, used to own Napier Downs and Kimberley Downs Stations. So what a small world that is—that his middle name is the same. They were friends of the family, I gather, in Derby. That’s probably how dad got the job working on their station in the first place. It’s an intricate web of connections. 4 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Anyway, when I was just five, the first medical school in Western Australia was opened.1 Before then you used to have to go to South Australia. Dad only had his Junior Certificate (from Hale School, I presume), but for some reason decided he was going to do medicine. So he came to Perth with my older sister, Kerrin. (I had a younger sister called Kay who must’ve been born around that time, because she was a small baby when we came to Perth.) Dad went to West Leederville Tech and did his sub-leaving, leaving and matric in the same year, and then went on to do medicine at WA uni.2

Ms Jennie Carter: So he went to night school or was it day school? How did that work?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I don’t know. He did it in one year, so he must’ve been full time. We had a house that was provided. My grandfather on my mother’s side had been a carpenter and had built a house in Sixth Avenue in Bassendean. It is Lord Street now. It is an empty block right next to the railway line, just down the road from the Swan Districts footy club. We moved there when I was five. I went to a kindergarten for half the year, so it must’ve been halfway through the year when we moved down. Sadly, at that time, my sister died. She had an accident and fell out of her pram and hit her head. I remember seeing this huge lump on her forehead from where she’d hit her head. They took her to PMH but PMH sent her home and said she’d be all right. But she died that night of a brain haemorrhage.

Do you notice the connection? It was Kerrin the first, Kim the second, Kay the third, so they did all “K”s. They subsequently had two further children, but they changed away from “K” to “G”. I had another brother Gavin, who was next, about five years later, and then Glen two years after him. My sister’s death was very sad. We didn’t know at the time; we were just little kids. In fact, my sister and I were probably responsible; we were fighting over pushing the pram on the verandah. In those old days, the timber verandahs had a drop off. The pram went over the edge and that’s how she hit her head. I’ve always felt a little guilty over that, but I do recognise that we were just children and probably shouldn’t have been allowed to play with the pram near an edge like that anyway. We both wanted to push the pram with our sister in, and over it went.

1 The University of Western Australia School of Medicine was established in 1957. 2 Reginald Hames graduated in 1964. 5 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: What effect did that have on your family?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, we were too little to really understand or to see our connection in it; although, I worked that out many years later, because I remember clearly the incident with the pram. I worked out later that that is what must’ve happened. My parents didn’t have another child for about three years, I think, so it probably affected them a fair bit. And dad getting in to medicine, I’m sure he felt let down, having taken her to hospital and having her sent home and then dying at home. It must’ve been fairly traumatic for them both.

Ms Jennie Carter: How far along was he in medical school? Or you wouldn’t remember that.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I don’t remember. I don’t even remember the exact year that it was, only that we were little, so I probably was six, maybe. So he would’ve been just starting, I would think.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did he fund himself through medical school?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: He had a scholarship of some sort, so that provided a basic income for us, but we were pretty poor. We didn’t have much spare money, I’m sure, but we lived all right; there was always food on the table—some I liked, some I didn’t. We had this huge mulberry tree out the back. Sadly, the people who bought the house cut it down, but it was a beautiful big mulberry tree, so we used to eat lots of those. I bred silk worms and tried to spin silk, but it wasn’t very successful.

I went to Bassendean Primary School. I used to walk there as it would’ve been 500 metres away. Interestingly, in those days—I would’ve been six years old that first year—we were just shown the school and off we went. I don’t remember ever being escorted by my parents to school; we were just sent down the road. We got there. There were two of us—my sister and I. We used to walk past the Swan Districts footy oval and see them playing there. I went to school and remember being quite offended because they put me in the B class in my first year, and I was there for about a month, I think. Then they put me up into the next class. It was a good school. I enjoyed it, but don’t have a lots of memories of it or the people who were there. 6 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

I did have an incident where I injured myself. They used to do the sports on a little oval that was too small. I don’t know if we were doing 100-metre sprints or 75-metre sprints, probably the latter at that age, but it wasn’t big enough. At the end there was a fence, made out of galvanised pipe, going around that was about three foot off the ground, and I was always very small. In the race we had to get to the end of the race and veer off because they’d opened the pipe out the side, but straight ahead it was still in place. I forgot to veer. I was pretty fast as a runner and so I was busy looking back at everyone else over my shoulder, turned back to the front and ran straight into the pipe. It split my lip and chipped my tooth, so I had to go to the dentist and get sewn up inside. Then I had this massive swollen lip with this big scab on it. All I could eat was through a straw, so I had to have all my food liquefied so that I could drink it through the straw for—it seemed like forever but I presume it was only a week or two.

But they were good days. Friday was chips day, so we used to be allowed to leave the school at lunchtime, walk down, and in Old Perth Road there was a fish and chip store, and we had a shilling. So a shilling would buy a rolled-up packet of chips for our lunch. You’d tear a hole in the top and put lots of salt down and shake it all up, and that was lunch on a Friday. It was fantastic. We used to love that chip shop. I still like eating chips like that, just from the memories of old.

So I got to year 10, and year 10 was—my parents —

Ms Jennie Carter: Let’s go back a bit. This is primary school.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: And you don’t remember any of your teachers or companions at all?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No. I remember —

Ms Jennie Carter: And then you went to—sorry.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: — a girlfriend, around say 10, but, you know “girlfriend” in a very loose sense of the word in those days. Her name was—actually I can’t 7 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW remember but it started with a K. It couldn’t have been Kay as well but it was something like that, Karen or something like that. Grade 4 was when we left.

Ms Jennie Carter: Right. When you were 10.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: When I was 10. So, I went to four schools that year, because my parents were building a house. They’d bought a block in a new subdivision in Dianella up near Channel Seven, Channel Nine, in a street called Golding Street. While they were building that house—already they’d sold the old house, I presume to get the money to build the new house—we ended up going to stay at other places. So, I did the start of that year, about a month or two, at Bassendean. Then my mother’s parents lived in Mint Street in Vic Park, or around that area, and I went to the school—it must have been just close to that area, but at the end of the street was the Mint Street primary school. So I went there, for a term probably. But I think I was a bit of a devil of a child, because I must have been causing my grandparents trouble. My grandmother, Granny Jackson we called her, was not a big woman, small, and not frail, because she lived into her 80s, but not that robust. My grandfather on that side had been injured in the war and he died quite young, I think in his 50s or early 60s, probably from war-related injuries. So anyway, I was shipped off to my grandparents.

Ms Jennie Carter: Just you?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, just me. My other grandparents, the ones who’d been in Derby, had moved and gone down to Mandurah, to Avalon. They’d retired to Avalon. So I was sent to their house to stay for another term, and went to Mandurah Primary School. I used to catch the bus to get to Mandurah Primary School. It’s interesting because that became my electorate, and it was part of the story we told to get preselected for the seat of Mandurah in 2005. I used to ride my bike down Yeedong Road, leave my bike there and catch the bus with a mob called Bassett-Scarfe who owned a big farm opposite; Bassett-Scarfe’s a famous real estate name down that area now. One of the brothers used to catch the bus with me and then we went to Mandurah. But again, I didn’t get to know anyone because I was there for such a short time.

I then finished the year—the house had been built in Dianella, so went to Cleveland Street Primary School when I was still 10 – grade 4. So, four schools in the one 8 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW year. I did the last term at Dianella Heights Primary School, which is now a Muslim school. It was sold off by the government, but in those days that was our school.

Ms Jennie Carter: That was a very disrupted year for you.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Sure was, yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: And just you alone went to —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, I think I was just causing so much trouble. So, if I was 10, yes, my brothers must have been born by then, so they would have been little kids. It was probably a fair handful, four children staying with two grandparents and two parents. It would have been a very busy house; it wasn’t a big house in Vic Park, so it must have been difficult for them.

Ms Jennie Carter: Now, Kim, this was a very disrupted year. After that you went to Dianella Heights Primary School, and you stayed there. Would you like to tell me about that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. Well, my last term of grade 4 was at Dianella Heights, and so then I did year 5, 6, 7. I remember nothing about year 5, except, again on the sporting field, because I was pretty fast. I was often in the top two, but there was this guy whose name was Kim as well, Kim Trotter, who I used to beat all year round except when it counted. When we had the actual race to see who was in the first team in the interschool sports, he always used to just beat me. He was quite a tall boy and, as I said, I was still very short. So his longer legs used to carry him over all the time except, I think, in grade 7 when I think I managed to beat him. He was, you’d think, the best at long jump, but I managed to do a huge long jump—I can still remember the distance; it was 13 foot-something. That got me into the interschool sports as the leading long jumper.

But school was fairly unremarkable. We had a teacher called Mr Saar, and in fact I ended up having a surgery later next door to his ex-wife; they’d split by then. He was a great friend of Harry Butler, so he used to send us out looking for particular things, birds especially. If we saw a bird that was unusual, we’d go to Mr Saar and tell him about it and he’d come out to take photos and see these birds. He used to bring bobtail goannas in to the class and teach us how to hold them and how to let them 9 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW bite us without it hurting, which you can do, as long as you don’t pull your hand away; their jaws aren’t strong enough to actually break the skin.

In those days, I got sent out of the class fairly often for talking too much. When you were sitting outside the classroom and the headmaster came around and he saw you there fairly often, he’d say, “Okay, off we go.” He’d march you off to his rooms and you’d get a ruler across the palm of your hand two or three times. They’d give you an almighty whack with the ruler for getting into trouble so often. As I say, other than that, it was unremarkable. It was a good school, but nothing specially happened while I was there. We used to play marbles all the time—that was the thing, in-between classes. My wife-to-be’s brother was there, a year older than me, at the same time, so I got to know him at that early stage. But, otherwise, nothing special.

I finished school at Dianella Heights Primary School. That was the closest. We lived in Golding Street and there’s two schools that are now closer—Sutherland Dianella Primary and Dianella Heights Primary School, which was straight across the road. I think I might have called the Cleveland Street school “Dianella Heights” before, but that wasn’t; that was just Dianella Primary School. Dianella Heights was across the road, so my two brothers went to that school, but it wasn’t in existence when I was there so I went to Dianella.

My father had, at some stage in his life, gone to Hale School and wanted me to go to Hale as well, but from Dianella it was impossible to get there. So he sent me to Guildford instead. I started at Guildford, it must have been about —

Ms Jennie Carter: Is this Guildford Grammar?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Guildford Grammar School. It must have been about 1960 that I started. But to get there was still pretty difficult. I used to ride my bike from where we lived up near Channel Seven all the way down Grand Promenade, as you had to in those days, to the Meltham train station. I used to park it behind Dubrovnik, a butcher shop there that was famous for its smallgoods, right opposite Meltham station and catch the train into Guildford. Of course, in those days we had boaters. Riding your bike with a boater and being on a train with a boater was always difficult, especially if other kids managed to be around, because people always wanted to put

10 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW their fist through the top of your boater and break them. Most of us had sticky tape holding the top of our boaters together, because they were quite expensive.

The first year at Guildford Grammar I was in Stirling House. There were two day boy houses—Stirling and Woodbridge—and I was in Stirling. At the end of first year— and I’m not sure what happened at home, because I think mum and dad weren’t getting on that well, and dad went and boarded wherever he was studying medicine and wasn’t home very much at all. I’m just trying to think when they actually broke up, because when dad graduated—he did seven years; so six years of medicine plus a year you’ve got to do post. When he’d finished that, he and mum separated. He went to work as a doctor down in Wagin and mum was left at home with the house and the mortgage, and with the car and the loan. It was difficult times, because dad paid for all my fees at Guildford, and he must have paid some maintenance to mum, but most of that went in paying off the loans. So we had very little to live off. One of my jobs in those days was—before, supermarkets used to only open until lunchtime on a Saturday. The Dianella Plaza had been built by then. Woolworths used to have a big bin out the back that they’d throw all their vegetables that were damaged into. So my job on a Saturday afternoon was to climb into that bin and find whatever I could in terms of vegetables that hadn’t been damaged, and that contributed to our food.

Mum was very resourceful, so we never lacked for food. She used to go to the Peters factory, and where the skins were torn on the chickens, they’d sell them cheap. She’d do the same for the potato factory; if there were damaged potatoes, they’d sell them off cheap. We used to go up to the hills where we had relatives. My great-grandfather married a Strahan; they were the early settlers in Toodyay. We used to go there and pick mushrooms and we’d spend hours and hours and hours peeling mushrooms, and then mum would blanch them and bottle them. So, all year round we’d have bottled mushrooms. We used to go to the fruit orchards that were up there. You could get for nothing the fruit that had fallen onto the ground. So we’d get all the peaches—peaches particularly I remember—that had fallen from the trees. Again, we’d take them home and peel those and cut off all the bruised bits, and mum would bottle those as well. So we had fruit all year round. She was a very resourceful lady when we had no money.

There was never anything in the cupboard to spare, so bread and dripping was a big treat. Come home from school and get the black bits at the bottom of the dripping 11 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW and have it on a piece of bread. We used to love that. Occasionally we’d have chook but, you know, you had chooks in the backyard in those days but they were for the eggs, not for eating. You only ate them when they got a bit old for laying, and so old boilers—everyone still calls them that. My job was to kill those, so I must have been about 13 at the time. I used to chop their heads off and, kids being what we are, we used to let them run round the backyard with blood going everywhere. I remember that awful smell, because you have to put them in boiling hot water to be able to pluck them, so you’d soak them in there and the smell is terrible. Then we’d have to sit there, my sister and I, and pluck these chooks for the dining table. Of course, you have to boil them before you roasted them so that they were tender enough to eat. It’s nothing like today where chicken’s so freely available and so cheap. It just wasn’t like that then.

Food was hard to get, and clothing too. My mum used to scab jumpers off any of the neighbours that had jumpers that they didn’t need any more and pull them all apart and reknit them. She taught me how to knit, so crocheting and knitting I learned to do. That was just for fun, not for anything serious, but I can still do that if I had a set of knitting needles. I could still do it.

Ms Jennie Carter: Your mother didn’t take a job outside the house?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: She used to do lots of work outside, yes, and I used to go and help her sometimes on weekends. Things like spraying for fruit flies. We would have packs of spray on our back and you’d go from house to house. You could just go into their backyard, as long as they didn’t have dogs to eat you. But you were allowed to, and you still are. I mean, the legal requirements are that no-one can keep you out. So, to keep fruit fly down we’d have the spray—malathion, I think it was called—and we’d go and spray all these trees. That was one of the jobs she had.

She got a job at the Morley Tavern once, doing bar work. Dad was so angry with her, because that work wasn’t befitting a woman to go and work in a bar, unless you were a harlot. He was really angry about that. Mum had to do it to earn money. So she did. The final job she got was selling Tupperware. She was really good at it and very popular. She was the Tupperware champ and did it for the rest of her life, in Perth to start off with and later down in Bunbury. But she used to win all sorts of things—travel prizes and so many other things—selling Tupperware. That was in 12 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW later years. She started when I was 13, 14. I think dad left when I was about 12, so probably at the end of that first year. Because then I had to go and board at Guildford for second and third year, so I went to Freeth House.

Ms Jennie Carter: Do you know why their marriage broke up or?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, not really. It was funny, mum used to smoke and dad hated it. When they split he started smoking and she stopped [chuckles]. But, no, I think they just—whether it was my sister’s death that started it, I don’t know. He stayed away more and more and we didn’t see him home. Frankly, I was glad when he went, because he used to be—I mean, he was a bit uncaring. I’ve thought about it a lot since, because his father was terrible with him. His father would hardly ever talk to him. He would say to my grandmother, “Tell the boy to do this, tell the boy to do that.” So I think it was just that’s how it was. Dad always talked about how his older brother was the favourite. He was taller—I mean, he ended up being very tall. He was well over six-foot and his children—his daughters were six foot one; his son, who’s a doctor as well now, was about six foot four. Then dad was quite short in comparison, but in fact the same height he grew to as my grandfather, so I don’t know. But the rumour was that my grandfather thought my grandmother had played up, because the next child looked so much different from the first child. So granddad used to treat him very poorly. The next child that was born, my father’s sister, was Roma, and she was the same build as my uncle—slim and tall. Dad was the same size as my grandfather. I ended up being exactly the same size as my dad, so clearly the genes are strong. But he would never talk to him. So my father was the same.

Dad was better, I think, than my grandfather but, you know, he only ever talked to me to tell me to do something. Then he wasn’t home a lot at the end. I remember an instance very well where I had said something disrespectful and he called me over to the chair and just did a backhander right to the pit of my stomach and knocked the wind out. He told me, “Stop being a sook” and to go to my room. I’ve got a pretty good memory for seeing incidents in the past that have happened. I remember things very clearly. I remember that, again, like it was yesterday, that happening. So it always stuck in my mind. I mean, I got to know dad better later on and went and stayed with him when he was down in Wagin. I remember, he once in my life kicked a football to me. I was outside at the house in Wagin. He was going off to work, the ball was there, he kicked it to me, then off he went to work. That’s the only time in 13 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW my life I remember him doing that. So he was a fairly distant father. You know, I’m not a perfect dad, but I think I’m better than he was. There’s lots of things I don’t do that my kids would prefer me to do, and I say, “Well, every generation gets better. It’s your turn. If you don’t like what we did, then do it differently and improve yourself.” That’s the only way to change.

In fact, just talking about memories, there is an incident I forgot to say right at the start that I wanted to get down, so you’ll need to backtrack it in the story a bit. My first memory on Earth—again, I could just play it back like a videotape—was in Derby. It was an Aboriginal corroboree. I can remember a huge bonfire. It must have been as high as my parents and twice as wide. The Aboriginal, male dancers they were, were all painted up with white paint and wearing these things like aprons and big headdresses on their head—I’ve seen pictures of them since, so I know that memory’s correct—coming out and dancing around the fire. I can remember my mother’s leg and hanging on to my mother’s leg while I watched this dancing. I’m guessing I was either late being three or early being four years of age at the time, because that fits in with when I left and all the other memories I have of Derby. So, that was my first memory ever, from Derby. Later, becoming Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, my desire to do that was all triggered by those early years with the Aboriginal people up there, who are wonderful people, and Daisy, who looked after me when I was little, and her kids.

But anyway, back to Guildford.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes. And your relationship with your mother?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: That was always very good. I mean, she got angry with us sometimes. She ended up remarrying. I think I must have been at the start of year 11, somewhere around there, that she remarried. I boarded for two years at Freeth House. There were some Aboriginal guys there, by the way, which is interesting for later, because I now chair a group that do scholarships for Aboriginal kids. We had Johnny McGuire and Larry Kickett there, so both famous Aboriginal guys. They were in the same house as me in Freeth. I think they were a year younger. A guy, Dixie Scott, was our housemaster. He played a bit of football, too, but his two brothers were famous footballers with South Fremantle—the Scott brothers. Anyway, he was the housemaster. Of course, in those days you used to get the cane for doing anything wrong, on the backside. Not on the hand anymore; 14 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW you graduated to cane across the backside. So, yes, I remember Dixie giving me a few on occasions.

Then my mother remarried a guy called Don Menhennett, who was a policeman, and he had two children already. They moved into the house in Dianella. So I must have been sent to boarding school because, when dad left, I think I felt I needed to take over the role of being father, so I used to bully my two brothers a fair bit. I think to get peace and quiet I was sent off to boarding school to get me out of the house.

It was a great old house, that house in Golding Street, Dianella. We were there at the time when Eric Cooke—the mass murderer —was around.3 You know, everyone was scared. He was going to doors and knocking on them, and when people opened the door he was shooting them. Dad had gone by then, so that must have been when I was 14, probably at school holidays or something, and Cooke was on the loose. The police were warning everyone in Morley—we were right next to Morley in Dianella—to watch out for him. He was going around and they couldn’t find him. We were at home with just my three brothers and sisters and my mother, and suddenly the lights went out for the whole house when all this was happening. Of course, your meter box was at the front door and someone only has to pull a plug out to turn all your lights out. I remember mum raced up to the bedroom. She had dad’s old 303 rifle up in the cupboard, but no bullets. So we were peering around the corridor, looking at the front door to see. Mum was ready to shoot him [chuckles], except she had no bullets. That was the night he was caught, and he was caught in the Morley-ish area somewhere. So it could easily have been something.

Anyway, my mother remarried, as I said, the policeman, so they moved in to the house at Dianella. They did some extensions out the back, because they obviously now had a second income, and my stepbrother and stepsister moved in. We weren’t there that long, because Don got transferred to Kalgoorlie to work as a policeman up there, and so of course mum went with him. I don’t know what happened to my first younger brother, Gavin, but I know the youngest, Glen, ended up going to school, finished primary, and then I think high school in Kalgoorlie. They got posted up there, so I had nowhere to stay again. But the people who’d lived next door—and I always get confused about these years, because I stayed there at different times, but my wife-to-be lived next door. I used to give her older sister, Sandra, a hard

3 From 1959 to 1963, Eric Cooke terrorised Perth killing eight people. He was captured in September 1963 and was the last man hanged at Fremantle Prison on 26 October 1964. 15 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW time. She still remembers me teasing her and trying to sic the dog onto her. They said I could go and stay there for a year. So I did that in year 11 high school—I went and lived with them next door. A lady a couple of doors down used to give me a ride down to the station, so I got to school that way for a year.

Ms Jennie Carter: So you lived in the house —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Next door. So we were —

Ms Jennie Carter: — next door, where your wife-to-be lived?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. So we were 89 Golding Street. I think I said, “7” before, but I got my numbers mixed up. We were 89 Golding Street and they were 91 Golding Street, so right next door. They had an elder sister, Sandra, and she went to St Thomas Aquinas school down in Bedford. Then the brother that I’d been in primary school with was the next, and he was a year older than me. Then my wife- to-be, Stephanie, was the third—sorry, there was another boy, Chris, who was older. He’d moved off. She was the fourth child. My wife’s parents, the mother was English but the father was a Hungarian immigrant who’d escaped from the Russian side of the border after the war. His English wasn’t so hot but he was a really hard worker. In fact, he did two jobs—one with the railways down in Midland at the Midland Workshops and one carting furniture, so he was a hard worker. They were very goodhearted, so they took me in for a year because I had nowhere to go. But then at the end of that year, I think they were concerned with the relationship that was developing between Stephanie and myself, so at the end of year 11 they decided it was time for me to go.

The people who’d bought our old house, he’d been a priest and she’d been a nun and they’d fallen in love, so they both left the church to marry—I mean, not the church, but left being a brother and a nun to marry and have a child. They had lots of spare room because of the house that we’d extended, so they took me in for one year in year 12 and I lived with them. So, yes, it was an interesting set of arrangements. I haven’t lived at home since I was about, well, 14, if you count living all the time, but I still used to go to my parents during holidays. Mind you, they would ship me off to the country all the time.

16 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Every summer holidays during those high school years I got sent to my uncle’s place. He was a farmer out at Bencubbin. I loved those years, I loved being on the farm. So, summer for me was in the dusty plains of Bencubbin and around it. I used to spend a lot of time shooting, actually. I was allowed an air rifle to start off with, and then a .22. In those days, cockies and twenty-eights were declared pests so they used to do a bounty of a penny a beak for a cockie and a ha’penny a beak for a twenty-eight. So I would spend the whole day—I never got any of the money because I’d be back at school by then, so my cousins used to get it, but I used to go hunting, spend the whole day walking, hunting cockies or twenty-eights. We used to shoot the twenty-eights but the poor old cockies, those days you’d get an old bedframe and put a bit of timber holding one side of it up with a rope attached, and we’d be at the end of the rope. You’d put bird seed, some wheat, under the frame and when the cockies came in you’d pull the stick away and the frame would collapse on the birds and then you’d belt them over the head with a bit of stick to kill them. So, pretty ruthless in those days, pretty bloodthirsty. The animal cruelty people would—and at school we used to trap rabbits the same with the old rabbit traps, put them out.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes. So your chicken-killing days [chuckles].

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, we used to—well, you know, you’re just brought up like that. But it was great memories of my aunty, Aunty Nell her name was, and she was fantastic, and Uncle Jim, who was a bit stern and distant. But, you know, he used to call the cows in at the end of every day or at the start of every day and go and milk them, and we used to have fresh milk and it had that thick yellow cream, and my aunty would make the butter from it. But particularly scones and bread with jam and fresh cream, or with cereal as well with cream in the mornings, is just to die for. You know, they’d knock off their own sheep for food as well. They were a bit more generous with the chickens because they had more space, they could grow more. But they were just good times, going away, and I got to love those farms. And later on two other uncles had a farm at Salmon Gums, so I used to go down there instead, and again hunting. Hunting was the thing that you did in those days. I used to love going out and hunting rabbits. But they were very poor as well, and they moved at the start of what turned out to be a seven-year drought, and I think about three or four years in they lost the farm because they just had to walk away. They lived on kangaroo and rabbit; there was nothing much else. They had pigs, but they were for special occasions, for Christmas, and the same with the chooks—the 17 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW chooks were for laying. So we had rabbit and kangaroo lots of different ways [chuckles]. I still like it; I still eat it now. I was never put off. But almost every second night you’d be out hunting to get food for the table.

Ms Jennie Carter: Right. I might stop it there.

Ms Jennie Carter: Now, Kim, getting back to your schooling at Guildford Grammar, what can you tell me about it?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, started at Stirling, as I said, and then moved to Freeth to board for two years, and then when I became a dayboy again for years 11 and 12, I stayed at Freeth House, so I’m the first ever dayboy to be in a boarding house. They’d never done it before that. But I don’t have lots of memories of the other kids there. I remember a few of them. I had a couple of good friends, but the rest I don’t remember too much. I remember some of the teachers -- we had a teacher called Willie Waller, he was also in charge of the hockey team as coach and whose sons, I think, still play hockey. And before that, Major Calendar, who was an ex-Army major, he used to teach us maths before Willie Waller. We had John Inverarity, who became famous later I guess as head of Hale School, but he used to teach us maths as well. So we had various maths teachers along the way. But I enjoyed school and I always did okay, and I was always second or third in most classes, but never the top. We had a guy called Patrick Alexander who used to be—and he was the only guy I think around that was smaller than me. He was really smart in everything and I think he ended up becoming CEO of a bank in Hong Kong. His brother was Ian Alexander, the member of Parliament, who I ran against once in an election and nearly, nearly, beat him. That was his brother. Patrick used to win everything and I’d be second or third depending on what the subject was and I was reasonably good at most of them.

Ms Jennie Carter: What subjects did you take?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I can’t remember now, but we did English. At some stage we did economics, although I wasn’t so good at that. Biology, which I loved. We did history up to junior. In the old days—they messed us up a lot in maths. We started doing maths A and B, and I loved maths A and B—trigonometry and calculus and all that stuff. In those days we used to do the junior exam, which was as big an exam as leaving is now; it was a really important exam. I remember coming out from the 18 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW maths exam and remembering that I’d got an answer wrong. I knew I’d got the answer wrong and I remembered the right answer just after I came out, and that was the only one that I got wrong in the whole exam, so I got 98 per cent. That was a two-mark question and I knew I’d got it wrong afterwards. So I got 98 and 94 for the maths A and B. I think we did that up until about the end of year 10, and then starting year 11 they decided—or maybe it was even year 12—they’d switch us to maths 2 and 3, which was just so totally different. They tried—we sort of had to catch up. I think it must’ve been year 11 we started, but we had five years—three years that we’d missed, and the final two years. So we had two years to do five years’ worth of learning, and the whole class struggled. So, I think for leaving I got in the fifties for maths, for what had always been my best subject, and it was so annoying trying to learn this stuff. And probabilities, I still can’t do probabilities. It was just beyond my reasoning to work out, you know, if you walked a hundred metres backwards on your head, where would you be in three days?

I always did reasonably at English; 65 was my standard mark. We had to do religion up to junior, and I still remember so much of that stuff. I think I got 79 for junior religion, which was one of the better marks in the class. We also did Latin for the first three years. You had a choice of French or Latin, and Mum wanted me to do Latin because she wanted me to do medicine and she thought it would be a benefit. Turns out it wasn’t. But our Latin teachers were terrible, and I remember especially the last year we had a guy who was Viennese who couldn’t speak English properly. So he couldn’t teach us because we couldn’t understand what he was saying, and the whole class failed junior Latin, the whole class. I got the second-highest mark at 43. Patrick Alexander got 47. But the whole class failed.

It was a bit of a shock. In fact he got sacked right near the end, before the exam, and we ended up doing Japanese for a few months. So I can still count to 10 in Japanese and say, “Morning”, “afternoon” and all those things just because this person filled in. But our Latin was hopeless but, well, I did okay. For leaving matriculation, most of my marks were in the 70s or 80s somewhere, I can’t remember exactly what they were, but it was enough. Particularly I got a good mark for leaving physics, which was really good, because when I did first year medicine, if you got more than 75 for physics, you didn’t have to do it again. I didn’t mind physics, but you could pick another subject. I chose to do maths instead. So that was a good result, although we were lucky to get it. Again, we had trouble with the physics teacher. It wasn’t his fault; it was our fault. He had a terrible stutter. We just 19 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW used to tease him all the time. The whole class used to tease him about it. We were dreadful. But anyway, we got up and did our mock leaving—no, it couldn’t have been that late. But we did some exam early and the whole class was doing terribly. So it ended up that he left and they brought a new teacher. I think it must have been the end of year 11. So we had a new physics teacher for the last year. I can’t remember his name, but he was a really good teacher. He ended up at university lecturing in physics after he’d left Guildford. He clawed us back up again, so that’s why I got a reasonable mark.

In those days you had to do a leaving exam and a matriculation exam, which was again much harder. So, I got enough to go to uni. They didn’t have the way they do now where your results count to get into medicine. In those days, 180 of us were allowed into first year medicine, and you had to be in the top 90 to go into the second year. So pass or fail didn’t matter; you just had to be in the top group to go through.

Ms Jennie Carter: So, your choice of medicine, was that decided long ago by you, or —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Oh, no. I got towards the end of year 12 at Guildford and had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I wanted to be on a farm. I forgot to mention, but when I was about 14, after mum and dad had split, one of the first things he did was buy a farm at Boddington. So, a fair way from where he was in Wagin, but I used to go with him during some of the holidays. During the year I would go to his place for holidays rather than to the farm, and go to our farm visiting. I got to work in at the farm and also learned to play golf down there on the old Wagin golf course, which was a sand green golf course. Someone told me yesterday it’s a housing estate now. Because dad was always working; he’d never get free time. I say he only kicked a footy once. I used to play golf with him a few times, but every time we were playing, a car would come out onto the course and pick him up. There were only two doctors in town. If he was needed, he had to go. If there was a car accident or someone went into labour or one of his patients was sick, he’d have to leave and go. I can hardly ever remember finishing a round of golf. But we used to go to the farm quite often, and that was a good experience.

Ms Jennie Carter: When you say, “we”, was it you and the family?

20 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, no, just dad and I.

Ms Jennie Carter: Just dad and you. What about your brothers and sister?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Don’t know. I guess they stayed in Perth with mum. Yes, interesting. You’d think my sister would have come down. She used to love riding. Because dad had been a stockman, he was obviously a very good rider. They used to break their own horses in and ride pretty wild, rough horses. When we first came to Perth, in the very early days, my sister used to go to the Springfield Riding School in Bassendean with Diane Bennit, who, again, herself became famous later, but I was too young to go there. Then he bought this old nag horse that he used to keep out Forrestfield way somewhere, so we used to go down there sometimes, more after mum and dad were divorced, so my stepfather used to take her down and she used to ride a bit, but it was an old horse. We learned a bit to ride, but my sister much better than me. But, yes, I don’t know why she didn’t go down there. You’d think she would’ve, or my brothers, but no, it was just me.

So, dad was in Wagin for a while, then he went to Pingelly. He was in partnership with a doctor in Wagin and then, when he wanted to split from that partnership because they didn’t get on anymore, he had a clause in his contract saying he wouldn’t set up a practice within so many kilometres. So he went to Pingelly instead and stayed there for a couple of years. But he loved Wagin, so as soon as that time expired that he had to stay away, he went back and set up his own practice back in Wagin.

Ms Jennie Carter: So you used to visit him holidays and —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Just during the year. I’d go to the farm on the long break in summer, but I’d go to dad’s in the two holidays during the year. I must’ve been terrible at home, because every break I got sent off somewhere. I was talking about being short, because I was really short—I was under five foot tall right through. I remember at the end of year 10—so third year high school—I was still one of the smallest in the school; not just in my year, but in the whole school. And then I started growing in year 11. Between year 11 and year 12 I grew about nine inches, I think. I just shot up in that time. So I’m five nine now, but I know I was just under five foot. I did cadets. You do cadets for year 10, 11 and 12. I started in year 10 and I was still really short, but then I grew after that. It was compulsory to do cadets for 21 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW two years, and the final year was optional. What the kids would normally do is they’d do their first year in year 10, and then they’d go and do a course to become a sergeant or something and then they’d be a sergeant in year 11, and then if they stayed on in year 12, they’d be an officer. I wasn’t going to do it, so I stayed as a cadet for year 11, but then I decided I really liked it so did the sergeants’ course at the end of year 11—I actually won the course—and then became a sergeant in year 12, which was good fun. Afterwards I went on and I did lots of Army Reserve stuff as well in later years. It all stemmed from those early years of doing cadets at school.

Ms Jennie Carter: All right. So, you graduated in 1970 from Guildford Grammar.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. I did a lot of sport during school; it was compulsory, of course. But I was mainly into winter sports. I started hockey early. I was in the top team each year but I was never a star player. I was just an average player, but I stayed in the top team all the way through year 12, and again that was my sport afterwards. I played hockey for many, many years to follow. In the summer we had to do something, so I did a little bit of and a little bit of tennis, but I wasn’t very good at either, so neither became a passion. We’d just look forward to the winter season to play hockey every year. It was quite funny one year, because Willie Waller was the coach and his sons both played hockey, and they were very good. I always played left wing, because my skills weren’t that good but I was really fast. That’s where you put someone fast with not great skills, is out on the left wing. Willie had me out there all the time. I was okay; I made reasonable contributions. But then we always had these inter-house competitions, so whether you played or not you’d be in the team. So because I was a regular player, I was in charge of the Freeth House hockey team. We played the Woodbridge House hockey team, where Willie, who was our hockey coach, was in charge and his kids were playing. So I put myself at centre forward just for a change. After the first start—you’d do hockey one, two, three in those days—I took the ball all the way through all of the defence and scored a goal. Willie says, “Why don’t you bloody do that when you’re playing in our team?” They were good teachers, and he was a good teacher, Willie Waller.

Ms Jennie Carter: You were saying that your interest in medicine wasn’t formed at that stage.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No. I forgot about that. No, I wanted to do ag[ricultural] science, because I wanted to own a farm. So I was going to go and do ag science, 22 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW work for someone until I had enough to buy my own farm, and then run a farm. Then dad said to me one day when I was down there, “Why don’t you do medicine and then you can buy your own farm?” So, I thought for five minutes and said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea; that’s what I’ll do.” So that’s all it was—a five-minute conversation and I decided I was going to do medicine, solely for the purpose of buying a farm. And I didn’t end up buying my own farm until about three years ago.

Ms Jennie Carter: [laughs]

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So, all those years. I could’ve, but so many other things, you know? We had six kids and I was on council and working and all those things. There was just never time enough to have a farm. I’d look often, and never bought one.

[Mobile telephone rings]

Ms Jennie Carter: Okay. Well, this might be a good place to stop here.

End of interview 1

23 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Interview 2

Ms Jennie Carter: This is recording 2 of an interview with Dr Kim Hames. The interviewer is Jennie Carter and the interview is being conducted on 26 July 2017.

Now, Kim, would you like to carry on from where we finished? You were just starting school and university. Can you tell me more about that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. When I finished high school—I graduated in 1970, I think it was—I then moved on to university. At that stage I went to stay at a college at university, Kingswood College, now called Trinity College, and boarded there for a couple of years. Then we moved out and rented my mother’s old house for a year, a group of us.

Ms Jennie Carter: And that was in —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: That was third year medicine.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, but where was the house?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: At 89 Golding Street in Dianella, and Stephanie lived at 91 Golding Street, next door, but we were not going out in those days. We had had a little semi-attachment when we were still in high school, but after that we went our separate ways for a while.

Ms Jennie Carter: I might pause it there.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I was getting a government allowance, which was something like $32 a week to live off, and board was, I think, $28 a week at Kingswood College, so we had a few dollars left to pay for girls, for petrol for the car and for cigarettes, because by then we were smoking. You had to work during the university holidays, so each holiday I went somewhere and worked for those full year’s ending, starting after high school. Luckily for me, my stepfather and mother were in Kalgoorlie and my stepfather was a policeman, so he had very good contacts. He got me jobs in different areas. The first year, at the end of high school, I worked about 70 kilometres south of Sandstone with a geologist, taking ore samples. They

24 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW would dig a trench and we would sit in that trench the whole day, getting samples every metre or so, up and down all these trenches. It was fairly hard work, but interesting enough. Interesting things were going on around. We had a cook who had been working at a major hotel in Perth but had had an argument and was kicked out, so they employed him there. We were just staying in caravans. He was a fabulous cook and I enjoyed the food, but he used to put a lot of fruit in his cooking, as you do nowadays—it is quite acceptable—but the other guys who were working there, they hated it with all the fruit in it and the fancy cooking. They just wanted steak and chips and eggs and that was it, so he ended up having a big fight with them and leaving, which was enormously disappointing for me. But anyway, it was a good job.

The following year I worked on a drill rig up near Agnew, drilling for nickel. You would have two of you on a rig, the driller and the offsider. Amazing! We just worked over summer, so it was extremely hot. Remember, all we wore was boots, shorts and a hat, no shirt. I burn easily, so how I got through that, I do not know. But at the end I was really brown, with freckles more than brown brown. We were just out in the sun the whole day, unless you did night shift, of course, but if you did night shift you had to sleep in a caravan. It had an air-conditioner, but it just broke down all the time, so you would wake up in the middle of the day just soaking wet from sweat in this little oven of a caravan. But again, it was a good job. It was the only job I ever got sacked from. I was only working for the three months of school holidays, so I was a bit expendable, but they put me with this old, skinny pommy guy who no-one else would work with, he was so cranky all the time. I had been there probably two or three weeks, coming ready for my last break and then I would have been back for a couple of weeks afterwards, and that was all. I got in a fight with him. He wanted me to get off his stool, which was just a box, and I told him I wasn’t getting off and it led to us having a fight. He grabbed an axe and wanted to come at me with an axe, so I skedaddled out of the way. He ended up getting me sacked. He said he wasn’t going to keep working unless I was sacked. Offsiders were easy to get, but drillers were hard to find, so I was expendable. I got told not to come back at the end of my break.

Ms Jennie Carter: How did you feel about that?

25 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I was pretty angry because it wasn’t my fault. As I said, no- one else could work with this guy; he was just dreadful to work with. But them’s the breaks. That’s life.

Jobs were a bit harder to find the following year, so I started working in Perth where the big shopping centre is in Warwick, I think on Eddystone Avenue. I was digging foundations in this awful grey dirt. There were no trench diggers then, it was all manual labour, so with a shovel you had to dig out the trenches for the concrete for the foundations. I did that for two or three weeks, but then Don found me a job up in Kalgoorlie, so I was pretty quick getting up there because it was more money and a better job. But that was the opposite; instead of being above ground in the heat, it was underground. I was 1200 or 1300 feet underground. Another young bloke who became a friend started with me on the same day. It was called the North Kalgoorlie Mine; it is part of the pit now, so the whole mine has disappeared. It was right next to the pit at the time. You would go down to the 1 300 foot level. Every 100 foot is the level where they’ve got the railway tracks and the little carriages that carry the ore, and they mine in between those levels. They have a chute coming down through the roof. Our job was to get the ore running into these little carriages and then tip it over and it would go down another chute onto a conveyor belt, and that would take it to the crusher.

That was our job, moving the ore. You had a huge hole in between the levels and one of the miners would work in there. People would come in, drill holes, blast, and he would scrape all this into a hole in the floor. The hole in the floor would go down and come out above us. We would have to jump, first, about seven or eight foot up onto a timber platform that the railcars could get underneath, and then there were steel bars, like railway track bars, across to stop the big rocks going down. Then 20 foot above us was like a chute and a hole in the roof where the ore would come down, when he scraped it down. Our job was to get that ore flowing and going down through the iron bars into the carriage, and then go and empty the carriages. But what happened is sometimes rocks that were too big would come down and sit on those iron bars and not go through. On that first day we were shown how to get gelignite, put it on top of the rock, pack mud around it. We’d light it, jump down, run around the corner and blow the rock up to go through. That was our first day. On the second day we were on our own, the two of us, in separate chutes. We were actually the only people on that level and we had our own box of gelignite—not a couple of sticks; a full box full of gelignite. 26 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: It sounds dangerous.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: What happened sometimes is the rocks would stick as they came through the hole up in the roof—20 foot might be an exaggeration; it might be 15—but we’d have these long wooden poles. What we’d do is tie the gelignite to the end of the wooden pole and light it and then try and poke it up into the rocks up the top. All these rocks are hanging over the top of you, so if they come down, you’ve got to jump out of the way pretty quick. But sometimes you couldn’t get the lit gelignite into a little nook so it’d stay up there; it’d fall back down on you. At the end sometimes you’d grab it and just throw it up the top and leap off and run around and then it would blow right behind you.

There was another episode—just to show the danger; no occupational health and safety in those days. Some of the rocks were falling off one of the roofs onto the tracks where the carts had to go. They got myself and the new guy, gave us hard hats and a crowbar. So we stood underneath the rocks and jabbed them with the crowbar to get the rocks to break off and fall, and jump out of the way when they fell and then load them into a cart. At other times, we were shown one of the areas where the guy was mining the ore in between. We walked through, had a look and came out. At lunchtime, that’s when the blasts go off so everyone comes out and sits and you have your lunch and you’d hear them blasting away in the tunnel. We went back afterwards and the whole wall had had a fault about half a metre in from the wall so the whole wall had just fallen sideways over where we were walking and where the guy was working to do the digging of the ore at the end. It was filled with risk. As I said, the book that I read by Bryce Courtenay called The Power of One has a section in there that’s very, very similar. In the book they talk about using nitroglycerine rather than dynamite, and, obviously, it’s more dramatised, but otherwise very, very similar to the episode that we had.

We did that for three months. We were happy; we enjoyed it. It was quite cool down the bottom over summer. That’s where I learnt to smoke; I hadn’t smoked before then. I think I was 18 or so. The other guy smoked, and so he got me going. We used to sit at 1 300 feet and we had Drum rollies. We’d roll our own rollies. We’d go to a dark bit of the tunnel and turn the lights out and turn our headlamps off and sit in absolute pitch black with just the glow of our cigarettes as we smoked down there.

27 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

So, yes, that was the start of a very bad habit, but I certainly enjoyed at the time smoking those Drum rollies.

Ms Jennie Carter: The sort of work you were required to do seemed awfully dangerous for very untrained young men.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, that’s where they got their people from.

Ms Jennie Carter: Is that usual?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. That was the standard of the day. There was no occupational health and safety as there is now.

Ms Jennie Carter: Were there any accidents while you were working?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Not that I heard of, but I can’t believe there weren’t.

Ms Jennie Carter: No [chuckles].

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: But, you know, we just worked our day and off we went. We didn’t get to mix with anyone else. As I said, for the whole time we were there—the three months, or two months or so that we were there—we hardly saw anyone. We saw other people in the lift, going down. But at 1 300, we weren’t the bottom level; I think it went up to 1 600 or 1 700. There were other people working on every other level, but on ours there were just the two of us, working our chutes.

Ms Jennie Carter: Was that the first time you’d been underground?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, it was. I’ve never been anywhere to go underground since. But it didn’t worry me; I enjoyed the work.

That was the end of third year. Then my stepfather got transferred to Cockatoo Island as the policeman. He was the last policeman on Cockatoo Island. There were two iron ore islands, Koolan and Cockatoo. Koolan became the dominant island later, but Cockatoo was at the time, the same island that Alan Bond bought and tried to turn into a tourist venue without success. It’s being mined again now, but at the time everyone knew it was going to run out because it’s all aboveground—lots of 28 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW iron ore, very high grades. We lived in the policeman’s house, which was up the top. I worked there for three years or so as a fitter’s TA for a couple and then a carpenter’s TA for one—perhaps only two years. But it was really good.

Ms Jennie Carter: Was this just in the holidays?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, just the uni holidays again.

I nearly caused a strike up there because of two things. One is the Scottish boys wanted me to join the union and I said, “Fine, I’ll join.” They told me what the fee was and that was the fee for a whole year and was like a month’s pay and I was only there for three months. I said, “No, I’m not going to pay that. I’m happy to pay a pro rata amount. I’m only here for three months so I’ll pay a quarter of the fee.” They said, “No, you’ve got to pay the whole lot.” I said, “Well, I’m not going to.” I think they would have gone on strike because it was fairly dominant, but my stepfather being the policeman on the island, I think, deterred them, unless my stepfather paid it and didn’t tell me.

Ms Jennie Carter: Is that likely?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It’s possible, but I’ve got no idea really.

It was a fantastic island. The clubrooms were overlooking the whole ocean, so right on the top of a cliff—an amazing place. You’d go up there after work and drink. My girlfriend at the time was a 16-year-old girl, I think she was—Vicky Cox—whose dad was a well-known character on the island and had his own crocodile as a pet. It was about a 12 or 14-foot crocodile that he had in the backyard of his house, which was just down below us. It didn’t deter me, I had to say [chuckles].

I turned 21 on the island, so I had my twenty-first birthday party on Cockatoo Island. It’s interesting to go back there, because I think I said in my earlier story that my father, when he was in Derby, when I was just one or two, worked on Cockatoo Island. He and my uncle laid the first ever charge on Cockatoo Island. For me to go back all those years later was very interesting. Great fishing off the island. The oysters were just massive, big enough to fit in a saucer. It was an interesting place to work.

29 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

I think in the very last year before I finished uni, I worked on our farm. Dad had bought a farm in Boddington when I was about 12 or 13, something like that. I used to go with him when I was down there, which was during the year. Christmas holidays, when I was at uni, I’d work, but holidays earlier when I was still at high school, I’d go to dad and go and work on the farm. When I was 17, I think—no, that doesn’t fit. Anyway, I can’t remember the year, but one of those years I went and worked for three months on the farm instead because dad needed someone to help look after it.

Ms Jennie Carter: And he paid you wages?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, he paid me wages; it wasn’t a lot. I could have earned lot more going and working where I had.

Ms Jennie Carter: Koolan Island sounds very interesting. Was it a bigger community there?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Cockatoo Island was where I was. Koolan was next door. You’d fly in, so you’d catch the plane from Derby. In those days, as uni students, we used to get free flights—two or three a year—north of the twenty-sixth parallel. I’d fly for free up there. Then the mine would fly me across to the island and we’d land on Cockatoo Island. There would have been 50 to 100—probably at least 100—houses there, but some were sort of barracks-style houses, but we had a very nice house. It was isolated from the rest along the road. There was only one house higher than the policeman’s house, which was the island supervisor’s house, which was just up the road from us. But you had magnificent views out over the water, the ocean. When the tide was out my mother used to go out and collect shells. I’ve still got some around. She’d get the big bailer shells and make things in them, so put a little mirror in the bottom to look like a pond, and little alligators, and use the coral and paint it to look like trees around the pond. She loved doing stuff like that.

So where to next?

Ms Jennie Carter: You said you had a girlfriend on Cockatoo Island.

30 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes; Vicky Cox, her name was, but it was a fairly casual affair just during the time that I was there. It was nothing serious at all, but we used to hang out a bit.

Ms Jennie Carter: Were there things like movie theatres?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: There was a swimming pool. I don’t remember a movie theatre, no. So not a lot to do—go to the beach and swim. There was a little enclosure there that my dad had actually helped to build, like a swimming pool, but it was built with rock walls, so it only filled with water when the tide was in. It would fill up with water and had rails around the top and a seat in the corner. As youngsters we’d go and swim in this pool. I remember once I was sitting up on the top and there were people in the water just below me and I saw this sea snake, swimming towards us—right towards the people. I just called to everyone to keep still and not move, and it just swam out between them out into the ocean. It was about a metre-long sea snake. Yes, things were a bit different up there but a beautiful place. The water was beautiful to swim in. I just love going back to the Kimberley; it’s just amazing.

As a fitter’s TA, we did lots of work with pipes, but we were also responsible for the conveyor belt. So our job was to keep all the conveyor belts well repaired, because they’d take the ore down to the ships that’d come in and load it. We had to do repairs on that. But right toward the end they’d a lot of trouble where the main chute came down where people would drop the ore that had been mined into the crusher. When it rained, the sides kept collapsing back down into the crusher all the time and get all this other dirt there. The guy that I was working with was a welder as well. They decided we’d put wire mesh all down the sides of this big opening in the ground and then they’d concrete it. We were given danger money, that was $5 an hour at the time, to abseil down the side of this big hole and weld all the mesh.

Ms Jennie Carter: How deep would that be?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I wasn’t welding, of course; I was just the assistant. We did this for two or three days, welding the mesh, getting it all ready for the concrete. Then we were off for a couple of days over the weekend. When we came back on the Monday, there’d been another collapse and all of our mesh was just tangled steel down the bottom. You can imagine what would’ve happened if we’d been on it at the time; we would have been in serious trouble. It was all ruined. 31 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: How deep was this? How high was the chute?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was 50 feet, maybe 50 to 100 feet.

Ms Jennie Carter: Right—quite substantial.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: We were hanging down about 20 or 30 feet down the side, abseiling to do the work, welding.

Ms Jennie Carter: You liked danger as a young man, did you [laughs]?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: And the $5 an hour danger money. It doesn’t seem much, does it? I think we were only getting paid $2 or $3 an hour at the time—it was the normal wage.

Ms Jennie Carter: Once you finished your work there in the school holidays —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Then I graduated.

Ms Jennie Carter: So back to university?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, back to university. I finished at the end of 1976 and graduated then. Normally you don’t start work as a resident till early the next year, so early 1977, at the start of the year, so beginning of January. We graduated in November–December sometime. But they had an opening for someone to do some work doing plastic surgery. They had a space, so I started early. As soon as I graduated, I started working at Royal Perth Hospital with a guy called John Teasdale who was the plastic surgery registrar at the time. That was fascinating. I loved doing that sort of work. We were doing lots of work on chronic wounds, on acute wounds, acute hand injuries in particular. I was just the assistant, so mopping up and passing things, but I developed a love of assisting in surgery. Doing those complicated tendon and blood vessel and nerve repairs was very interesting work. But I only got to do that for about six weeks, I think—six or eight weeks—until the official start of the year, which was in January, when we were all given terms. Remember, when you graduate, you have to do a year as an intern before you’re

32 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW able to go and work in the world—it’s a lot longer than that nowadays. But then you had to do a year.

My father, when he graduated and did his year, in those days they’d do about 140 hours a week. He got to do everything as a junior resident, particularly remove appendixes and all that sort of surgery. So, he went out after one year as a country doctor. He would do anaesthetics. He’d do deliveries. He’d do forceps rotations for babies obstructed. He’d do caesareans. He’d put screws in broken bones. They would just about do anything. I think he did hysterectomies as well, which is amazing. A gynaecological surgical procedure, how they learnt to do that in one year of training, I’ve got no idea—and anaesthetics as well. Nowadays it takes three to four years at least of training to get to that level. He was a very competent surgeon. I remember watching him doing tonsillectomies. For tonsillectomies, he would’ve got lots of practice, because just about every second person had their tonsils out in those days. But he could do them. I assisted ENT specialists at a later stage doing tonsillectomies, and they weren’t as good as Dad. He was so quick, so efficient, and such a great result—very little bleeding. I think he would’ve liked to have been a surgeon if he’d had his years over, but he was a mature-age scholar, and didn’t even start medicine until he was about 29. So, he needed to get out and earn some money.

Ms Jennie Carter: Were you interested in pursuing surgery?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, I wanted to be a GP, always. I was thinking of being a country GP.

Ms Jennie Carter: Why was that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I don’t know why; just what I wanted to do. I enjoyed surgery. I often thought later I would’ve liked to have done plastic surgery, but, no, I wanted to do—because by then I was married. I got married in 1977, so the year after I graduated, 2 April we got married.

Ms Jennie Carter: You were you still a registrar then or an intern?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I was never a registrar; I was still an intern.

33 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

It reminds me of a story, because I was at Royal Perth at the time for my intern year. When I was in sixth year medicine, the final year, I got to stay at Royal Perth in the old Ainslie House which was the boarding house for doctors who were staying; next door was the nurses’ quarters—not that I ever ventured there. We were doing the final medical. What you do is the written part first, which is seriously difficult, but, anyway I passed, I graduated, then you did the oral part of the exam. For the oral part of the exam you were taken somewhere and shown patients; you’d examine the patients and give a diagnosis. So they had people who had conditions that were easy to manage, that people could recognise—a heart defect, for example—for the medical exam. But on the night before I was to do my first exam, which was paediatrics, I got appendicitis. I went from Ainslie House at Royal Perth into—just walked down to the emergency department and said, “I’ve got this tummy pain that I think might be appendicitis.” Sure enough, it was. I had my appendix out that night. That was Sunday night, the Monday oral exam was postponed because I could barely walk at the time. Nowadays you’re only in one or two days in a hospital; in those days you were in the full seven days, waiting for the stitches to come out—it must have been longer than that because you leave them there longer than seven. But, anyway, you stay there for a long time. I went there, had them out on the Sunday night; the Monday exam was postponed. But Tuesday was the surgical part of the exam, which was in the same hospital. For the paediatric one I would’ve had to go to Princess Margaret hospital. But for the other one—I could get around a bit by then—they sent me down for my exam in a wheelchair, down to where the patients were. It was a lady with a breast lump. She was lying on the bed and I struggled out of my wheel chair and staggered over—I told her what had happened—to feel this breast lump. I was still in a fair bit of pain, so this lady said, “Look, sit down in your wheelchair.” I sat in my wheelchair and she came and leaned over for me to feel the lump in her breast. If someone had walked into the room, it might not have looked too good [chuckles]. Anyway, I still felt good at the time. You have pethidine for the surgery, and I’m sure there’s an after effect of pethidine. It’s only supposed to last eight hours. I felt so relaxed and comfortable that the more the weekend went on the more stressed I became. But, again, still, I got through them all and passed.

Ms Jennie Carter: Despite that, you passed all your exams.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Despite that, yes. While I was a patient in the hospital, Dr Teasdale, who was a huge bloke—he was very strong, large fellow—he’d put in 34 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW what was called a subcuticular suture. It comes up through the skin at one end of the cut and then you wind your way backwards and forwards, side to side, with the suture under the skin, so you pick up each side and then come out under the skin at the other end. When I was just about ready to leave, he decided it was time for the suture to come out. You have a little tag on each end, so you cut the tag on one end and put some forceps and grabbed it at the other and proceeded to pull it out, because it slides through. But it didn’t slide properly. He’s trying to pull it and I’m just about going through the roof as he’s pulling on this thread. He pulled so hard that he broke the thread inside, so half of the length of it. The end bit of it had gone under, but it broke under as well, so the other half of the suture was still under the skin. He just got his pair of forceps and broke open the wound at one end and grabbed the end of this thing that was just under the skin. It was extremely painful. He stopped then and said, “Give some pethidine and I’ll come back and pull it out later”. Well, as I said, pethidine is good stuff [chuckles]. I can see why people get addicted to it, because after about 15 or 20 minutes, I just grabbed this and pulled it out myself to save him coming back and doing it again.

Ms Jennie Carter: What did he say?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: He was happy. It was all done. I was good. Anyway, after that, back to work. I started my first residency in emergency department at Royal Perth—our training, as I said was nowhere near as good, because dad had been able to do all of these things. Before I worked in the emergency department, the only sutures I’d ever put in were into an orange. I started in the—I forget what it was called but it was called a fast track area now in the emergency department where people come in with acute simple injuries, lacerations, so almost the whole job is sewing up things or reducing dislocated fingers or fairly simple, easy stuff like that. We actually learnt how to suture doing it on patients in there. The poor old patients, I don’t know how they went. I did my first term there, which was orthopaedic surgery and emergency department.

We also did a Kalgoorlie session, so three months in Kalgoorlie, working in the emergency department there, and a medical component. That’s when we graduated but because I wanted to be a country doctor, you had to do a lot more, and I was trying to get obstetrics and anaesthetics and paediatrics. The Royal Perth hierarchy decided that year that they would make our second year a service year to sort of pay back for the hard work they’d put into us in the first year, so I had terms of 35 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW psychiatry and extended care—aged care and stuff like that. It was nothing of what I wanted to become a GP. Luckily, I found a young Asian graduate, same year as me, who was at Fremantle, and she wanted to go to Royal Perth, so we swapped our terms. She had beautiful terms. You had six months paediatrics with John Hobday, one of the best paediatricians in the state. I had six months anaesthetics. I had six months obstetrics that I did at St John of God and two sessions of emergency department.

Over the next year and a half, I worked out of Fremantle, still living in Dianella. Driving that distance every day was pretty tough. It was about half an hour’s drive to get there. Luckily I didn’t die once—because doing night shift you get so tired—I was driving back first thing in the morning after doing a night shift and suddenly I heard clack, clack, clack. I was coming across the Narrows Bridge and there was no barrier between in those days, and I was veering off the road, falling asleep, heading straight into the cars coming the other way and luckily pulled back onto the road. Those little things on the road that go clack when you drive over them saved my life.

Ms Jennie Carter: You had long hours you had to work when you were doing your internship?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: You did. They were long hours and switching from day shift to night shift is never easy either, you tend to have to rotate through. So, yes, it was a good hospital to work with. I was the table tennis champion of what’s called “blue room”, which is the doctors’ tearoom—lunchroom. I loved playing table tennis; that’s what we did during the breaks.

Ms Jennie Carter: What was the social life like?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Non-existent. We were just there to work and went home. There were no functions or gatherings. I think at Christmastime we’d sometimes have drinks, but that was all. I was only there for a year and a half, so not a long time. Then I graduated. I mean, I’d already graduated, but I finished the training I needed to become a GP somewhere. I think that must have been end of ’79. It’s hard to remember all those—so I worked ’77, ’78 and half of ’79. That’s what it was.

Ms Jennie Carter: But you were married to Stephanie by that time?

36 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, we got married in 1977, bought a house in Lincoln Road Morley and were living there.

Ms Jennie Carter: While you were doing your internship or finishing off your studies at university, you rekindled your relationship with Stephanie; could you tell me about that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I don’t remember much about that [chuckles]. I think we started—because I stayed there when I was in high school for the year, so that was year 11. It’s so far back to try to remember.

Ms Jennie Carter: I will just pause that for a minute.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: In year 11, as I said before, I stayed with Stephanie’s family and in year 12 moved out and stayed with the religious couple in the old house. Then I didn’t see Stephanie for a few early years of university, but then we must have got back together around when I was halfway through medicine. That’s when I stayed at their house again. So, I did a year at Kingswood College, then we stayed for a year at our old house with the other students renting it, but then maybe the next year—because I moved back in to the house and stayed at Stephanie’s at the same house, lived there again while I was working and that is when things got rekindled, so I was midway through. We were then going out for about three to four years before we got married, so married as soon as I graduated.

Ms Jennie Carter: And can you tell me about that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, we got married.

Ms Jennie Carter: Where [laughs]? Did you pop the question?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Stephanie’s father was Hungarian and very strict, so we had all these strict rules we had to try to dodge all the time. Even when she was in her twenties, we still had to be back on Saturday night by half past 10, I think it was. We just would go out together. I did put the question to her, but it was almost agreed; everyone knew that we were going to get married and that’s what was going to happen, and that’s as it turned out. It wasn’t an enormously romantic thing, because we were very compatible and liked doing the same things and enjoyed each other’s 37 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW company, so by the time we got to having been going out for three years, it was just, “Okay, when do we get married?” We got married at St Peter’s church in Bedford and my old medical buddies were my groomsmen. A guy called Grant Rigby, who’s a GP now; and Phil Montgomery, he was managing Royal Perth Hospital at a later part of his career; and Clive Heath, who’s a GP as well. Stephanie and I went on our honeymoon to Kalbarri. We stayed the night in what was what was called at the time the Sheraton Hotel and then drove up to Kalbarri.

Then I was back at work and, as I said, we bought our first house at 6 Lincoln Road in Morley. We never moved far, because remember, we grew up in Dianella from when I was 10 and then—well, it was Morley, but it was on the boundary of Dianella—because Lincoln Road comes off Wellington Road, which is Dianella, so about 50 metres away from Dianella. Then we brought a block in Bangalay Way in Dianella, in the new subdivision, to build a house—a house I designed myself and got a draughtsman to draft it up and went partners with a builder to build it, so we jointly built this, but all to my design. While that was being built, we’d sold our house and rented a place in Edison Way, which is, again, right next to Light Street, so near the Light Street reserve, and stayed there while house was being built and then moved into Bangalay Way.

Our first child was born in ’81, so I’ve jumped ahead a bit. When I left Fremantle Hospital, I wanted to go to become a GP, so I looked around to country areas and picked Bunbury. There were a good group of doctors there who would take me on as a locum, but we’d been planning an overseas trip for years and years after we got married and we wanted to go for a three-month holiday, because we’d never been away together anywhere. That holiday was one of these Contiki tour things, so an eight-and-a-half-week tour. We went all the way around through Europe. We started in England, took the ferry across to France, went through France, through Paris and then down to Spain to Barcelona, then back through Monaco into Italy, to Florence and Rome, and then down across by ferry again to Corfu, up then to Greece, to Athens, and then on a cruise around the islands—I think it was Lemnos and Mykonos—then back to Greece and up to Istanbul in Turkey, then back through Yugoslavia, through Dubrovnik, and down into Venice, that’s when we went to Venice, at the top of Italy, and then up to Switzerland and for the first time ever saw snow at the Eagle’s Nest, which was Hitler’s hideaway up in Switzerland, and down again into Austria–Germany and saw the dancing horses in Austria, then out to Belgium, and then back up to Amsterdam, and then from Amsterdam back to 38 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

England. So, it was an eight-and-a-half-week Contiki tour. Then we took the train from London to Basingstoke and hired a car in Basingstoke and drove all the way around the UK and Scotland and Wales. We went through Cornwall down to Land’s End, up through Wales, up to Loch Ness, up the top to Inverness. We’re partly MacPhersons and MacPhersons are just south west of Inverness. Then back to Edinburgh to go to the Edinburgh Tattoo, and then back right through the Midlands, all the way past Basingstoke, down to Brighton, where Stephanie’s mum had come from, and then back to Basingstoke. So that is the car hire. That was three and a half weeks of travel through there. A fantastic time away.

Anyway, when I went to Bunbury to work with this group of doctors—we were the five Hs: Howe, Harkness, Hall, Hames and a couple of others I can’t remember— they told me the whole time I was there that I said, “I don’t want to go away. I like working here.” My patient numbers had built up really quickly. I was added on as a new doctor but within a month I was up to 120, 140 patients a week, which is a lot of patients to be seeing that quickly. I said, “If going away makes a difference, I won’t go.” They said, “No, no, it’s fine. We’re happy to have you when you come back.” They were lying. The whole time I was there, they were advertising for another doctor to replace me and they picked someone from my year who had the same sort of personality as me, the same style as me. When I went, they said, “Sorry, bad luck” and he came in and took over all the patients that I’d established. I was extremely annoyed.

Anyway, when I came back, I found six months’ work up in Geraldton and worked with a group up there. The only one I really remember was Kim Pedlow, who is still a doctor there now. I worked there for six months. While it wasn’t the same thing that happened, again I was seeing lots of patients quickly. They had been a busy practice and added me in to grow the practice and I had lots of new patients, lots of additional patients. Again, as I came towards the end of the six months, I was busy and clearly earning them plenty of money. I said to them, “I don’t want to go through the same thing again this time. I want you to make me a partner in the business because I’m seeing nearly as many patients as you already or otherwise I’m going.” They ummed and ahhed and at the end decided that they wouldn’t, so I said, “Fine; I’m going.” About a month after I left, they rang me back and said, “We’ve changed our mind; we’d like you to come back.” But it was too late. By then, I’d talked to my father, who had moved from Wagin by this time and had come up to Perth in 1977. He established a practice at the civic shopping centre in Inglewood in Salisbury 39 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Street. This guy Ian Barron was the owner of the Lighthouse Chemist at the time. He subleased to my father right next door. Dad had a pretty thriving practice by 1981, so it only took him about four years. A lot of his patients used to come up from Wagin still to see him. He had to leave Wagin over an extramarital episode. He wasn’t married but she was.

Ms Jennie Carter: But he was married when he went to Wagin, wasn’t he?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: He divorced my mother and then he remarried and had three more children, but by then, they’d split up later on. He was single again but she wasn’t, and her husband found out and he had to leave in a hurry from Wagin.

Ms Jennie Carter: Who had the children?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: She kept the children, so my three half-brothers.

Ms Jennie Carter: Do you have a relationship with your half-brothers?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, very good. We get together every Easter. We get on really well. They’re all a fair bit younger than me, but they’re all grown up now. One’s an accountant.

Ms Jennie Carter: What are their names?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Paul, Bradley and Geoffrey. Geoffrey lives in Queensland. My brother went to Queensland and Geoff went over. They always got on really well. My brother’s married but the other is about to, I think. They went over there and we still see them all the time.

Ms Jennie Carter: So your father left Wagin —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: And came and set up in ’77. I bought the practice off him in 1981, not at a discount, I might add. Dad was never into doing stuff like that. He was going to retire—and I paid him—and just work his farm but he soon discovered, as I have, that farms are actually very expensive and you’re always wanting to buy things, so you’ve got to keep working to buy all the stuff that you want. You always need a new tractor or a new this or more sheep or whatever it is. Dad never did well 40 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW out of the farm. He would buy cattle when prices were up and have all these plans of how much money he’d get back and then the prices would collapse and when it came to selling them, he was nowhere near getting enough money, so he switched to sheep, and the same thing would happen over and over again. He could never just pick the right time to do things. But he liked buying things for the farm, as do I. He just had to keep working. He worked until just before he died, up to his mid-70s, I think.

Anyway, he decided he had to work so he set up a practice out on the other side of the river. What’s the area called? I can’t remember. As you’re heading south towards Mandurah, you go across Mount Henry Bridge and on the left out there, there’s the RSL accommodation—the village out there. Anyway, I cannot remember where it was. He set up a practice out there, and then later moved down; he bought 20-odd acres down in Ranford Road, which is now all redeveloped but it was a lot of farming land then, and worked at the Westfield shopping centre at a practice down there later.

Ms Jennie Carter: So that’s down Armadale way?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. I bought him out in ’81.

Ms Jennie Carter: This was the practice in Perth?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, in Inglewood in Salisbury Street. We were just down the road from what was Stephanie’s old school, St Thomas Aquinas, now part of Chisholm. Interestingly, I used to look after all the nuns, the old nuns who used to look after Stephanie when she was a child. Her and her sisters all went to St Thomas Aquinas.

Ms Jennie Carter: And it was a sole practice?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: To start off with, yes, but then paying more and more rent, Ian Barron, who owned it was a fairly commercial sort of fellow and prices kept going up, so I was looking around for somewhere to buy a surgery of my own. Straight opposite from where we were [in Salisbury Street Bedford] was an empty block which the council had decided they were going to sell. They had to build a new building; their old council building was really old and run down, so they decided to 41 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW sell it off under John D’Orazio, who was mayor at the time. He later became a member of Parliament and Minister for Police but sadly died. He had a heart condition and died very young. He was the same age as my wife. They were selling this block and I wanted to buy it to build a new surgery. I went through all the process of application and then the council changed their mind and decided that they wouldn’t sell this block after all because there was an outcry from the local residents about selling this empty block of land which was just bush, nothing on it. I went around lobbying all the councillors to try to get them to change their mind and support the sale.

Talking to John D’Orazio, I said, “The bloody council set me all up to do this.” He said, “Instead of getting angry at council, why don’t you get on it?” I said, “All right, I bloody will.” So I did. But in the meantime, the house next door was owned by this old Italian couple. It had a big vegie garden out the back, as Italians do, all reticulated vegetables. It was just an old timber house. So I went to see them and see how much she wanted for it. The price she wanted was way above the going price at the time. She wanted $55 000 and the market rate was valued at $45 000 and I wasn’t going to pay—$10 000 was a lot of money in those days—$10 000 more than the going rate. I fought and fought council to get the vacant block, but when I got on council, I realised that actually the best thing to do was to keep it. In fact, I got funds and we reticulated and greened the whole park.

Ms Jennie Carter: You changed your mind once you got on council?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I did; they were doing the right thing.

So I went back to the Italian lady and said, “I’ll pay it”, which I did, so I paid the $55 000 and bought the house and turned it into a surgery—put parking out the front and stuff like that. That became my surgery. When I moved across there, we had more rooms, more space, our numbers grew. I took in other doctors part time to start off with, but all working for me. Dr Steve Boehm, was one of the workers who, as we moved on and grew, became a partner. By this time I’d started trying to get into Parliament. When I finally got into Parliament in 1993, I sold him the practice, so it’s still there. He bowled the house down and redeveloped it; did a very good job. But some of the old doctors who used to work for me just kept working for him. So it’s a very busy family practice.

42 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: Can I bring you back to just before you started to run for council. You had your first child born in 1981.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, ’81. That is the year we came to Perth. Michael his name was. He was conceived in Stephanie’s aunty’s feather bed in the UK where we stayed the night. He was born on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1981—he was the first child—the same year we came back to Perth. The whole time we were living in Geraldton, Stephanie was pregnant and had him when we came to Perth at King Edward under a famous name—Professor Con Michael, who has delivered so many children around WA. He’s been head of the AMA, head of the medical board. I loved Con Michael and he delivered our first three, although he didn’t actually deliver them; the registrars delivered them because he was such a busy man. The first one, he was in theatre at the time and we actually nearly lost the first one, Michael. During , he had the cord around the neck, which is quite common and isn’t an issue but it locked. So as he was coming down, he was, in effect, choking to death. Stephanie was only at about eight centimetres dilated. At this time as a doctor I knew she was in deep trouble, or the baby was in deep trouble, because I’d heard the heartbeat drop from about 140 a minute, which is the standard, down to about 30 or 40. The only alternative is an emergency caesarean section. But even that, the delay between getting her from where she was in the labour room to theatre, he would have been severely brain damaged or dead. So the midwife said, “Just have a try pushing and see what happens.” Now you normally don’t push until you’re full dilation. It takes normally at least an hour to get from eight centimetres to full dilation and then at least half an hour afterwards. He would have been long dead by then. Anyway, Stephanie did a push and went from eight centimetres to full dilation in one go and then pushed two or three more times and out he came. He was very blue—very low Apgar—but recovered very quickly. He was out just in time. So we’re very lucky.

Ms Jennie Carter: So it was the midwife who delivered?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: There was a registrar around, I think, who probably did the delivery, but it was her advice to just do a trial push to see what happened, while they would have been madly off trying to organise an emergency caesarean section. It would have been difficult because, as I said, Con Michael was in theatre already operating at the time, so there was nothing he could do.

43 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

We decided we’d have kids every two years.

Ms Jennie Carter: Was that a conscious decision?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. We wanted them at the start of the year because, in my experience, children born early in the year do much better at school than kids born later in the year. Kids mature very quickly at that young age. The older they are in the class, the better they do. We wanted all our children in that first—since then they’ve actually changed when you go to school, so they’ve recognised that and moved the last half into a different cohort. Anyway, we decided we’d have the first one in March. My wife went off the pill at the appropriate time so that we could do that. The second one, Andrea, two years later, born in ’83, in April, and then the next one we decided we’d do March again, so two years later, on 15 March, he was born.

As a baby, he was an absolute delight. All the three kids were really good, easy to deal with, easy to manage, until Matthew, the third one. Up until two, he was gorgeous—big brown eyes. We went to Phuket on holiday—took the three kids on holidays—and he was just a little baby, six months old probably, at the time. All the girls who work at the bars—you know the ones I mean—just used to see him and they’d come running out to hold him and want pictures taken with him because he was such a gorgeous kid. Anyway, he turned into a little monster. He hit two years of age and he was dreadful. He was so difficult to manage, and still a nice looking kid. If you told him not to touch something, you could guarantee that he would do it. He just used to misbehave. In those days, we used to smack our kids because that was the thing you did—smack them on the bum when they misbehaved. We did that with all our kids. We didn’t have to do it that often until he hit two. We found ourselves at one stage towards the end, smacking him five or six or seven times a day. I’d chase him to his room, smacking him on the way, “Get in your bloody room, you little monster of a child!” Anyway, it was my daughter Andrea—we didn’t have a child at two years. We’d put off for a whole year having a child because we just couldn’t have another child when he was around. The next one was born three years after him. My daughter, who must have been so young at the time, said, “You can’t keep smacking like this; it doesn’t work.” We had a talk about it.

Ms Jennie Carter: This is your fourth child.

44 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, the second one, Andrea, talking about the third child that we were smacking all the time. She was two years older. This is by the time he must have got to four probably, because, as I said, after that, we had the next one. She must have only been six. It doesn’t make sense her saying that at such a young age, but I know she did and she said that she did. Anyway, we decided to stop smacking and see what happened and said, “Surely it can’t be any worse.” And it wasn’t; it wasn’t any better but it wasn’t any worse. We did other—putting them in their room and things like that. We stopped smacking. I don’t think I’ve ever smacked any of the kids since that date. I don’t know if that’s been for better or worse. Anyway, that’s what drove us to it—third child Matthew. So we had ’81, ’83, ’85. So the next one was three years later, so he must have been ’88.

Ms Jennie Carter: And what was his name?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: That was Benjamin. He was the next one out. By then, we had three boys and a girl, and Stephanie really wanted to have another girl. So we did all the right things to get a girl [chuckles], but it didn’t work, and that was Jonathon, so he was the next one out. But with Jonathon, he had difficulties from birth. He was born with abnormality, but we actually didn’t find out until he was about a year old, because with little babies it’s so hard to tell. But his bones were fused in his elbow, so he couldn’t turn the palm of his hand upwards; it was down all the time. He had this massive problem with reflux of food. So you’d be feeding him and get about a third of the way through feeding and he would just do a projectile vomit and vomit all over you, everywhere. And he would vomit every meal. He did this for about a year. He wasn’t losing weight. He was growing. He’s the tallest of our children, 6 foot 5 or something he is now, but very skinny. But he was unusual. The other kids are all very athletic. Stephanie and I are both fairly athletic, and they were the same. But Jonathon always struggled a bit because he was just a bit ungainly. If you had a race, Jonathon would never—he would get there, but he was always at the end. He has gone on to have trouble since, other trouble, mental health problems down the track. He struggled at school, so he had to go through special classes at school, and in high school we sent him to Trinity because they’ve got a great program there for kids with difficulties. He went through that, with his best mate, who had autism, and they went through the same special classes. It was interesting. Jonathon can’t tell the time with a normal watch. He can if it’s digital and it says, but he doesn’t understand the 24-hour clock, so he always struggled a bit with things like that. Yet when he was a teenager, 15, 16, 17, I played him a game of 45 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW chess, and I’m reasonably good at chess, and yet he beat me. So his brain obviously has the capacity to be really smart but just the channels don’t work properly and the internals don’t focus properly. But he’s a separate story and he’s had trouble ever since.

Then we had the one who’s probably listening upstairs at the moment, Tiffany, she was our last. She wasn’t planned, but very welcome nonetheless, because she was the sixth child who was the daughter that we’d wanted, and so if she’s listening, she’s been fantastic [chuckles]. Remember, all the others, I said we’d planned the dates, so we had two in March, two in April, and one in May because too many birthdays all at once. Tiffany was born on 30 December, so the timing wasn’t arranged. I think Stephanie was on contraceptives at the time but it was a little bit loose and sometimes the contraceptives don’t work, and it obviously didn’t, because the next thing she was pregnant again. So we got the girl that we wanted by absolute luck.

Ms Jennie Carter: So when the first of your six children were born, you were busy with practice?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: Were you still building your house or had that been done?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I think we must have been, yes. I don’t know what year we moved in but we were two or three years in the other houses.

Ms Jennie Carter: So it was a very busy time.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: And I got on council in ’85, on Bayswater council.

Ms Jennie Carter: So in ’85 you were elected to Bayswater council. You were encouraged to run by John D’Orazio, who was the mayor at the time.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: You served eight years on the Bayswater council?

46 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: You would’ve had to have done your campaigning while you were still with young children, very busy and so on. It must have been a hectic time for you.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was very busy, and Stephanie probably suffered the most from it because I was working pretty long hours in the surgery. I would do Monday to Friday. I don’t think I started until 8.30 in the morning and supposedly finished around five, but often you’re still going at seven or eight at night before you finish. I’d have a two-hour break in the middle of the day but that was to catch up; I hated being behind time. So that was partially catch-up, and I’d do my nursing home visits during the lunchbreak. And then I did Saturday morning. That was 8.30, again, until 12, but often you were still there at one. I was playing hockey at the time as well, so I’d have training two nights a week and hockey on Saturday. Then I did every fourth Sunday morning as well. This was as the practice developed. So by the time we got to about ’84 and ’85, that’s what I was doing. We’d do a Sunday morning session as well. Then probably after ’85, three nights a week doing council stuff, on average. So, yes, it was pretty full on.

Ms Jennie Carter: It certainly was. So tell me a bit about your time on council, because that would have been an interesting time.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: All right. I was in west ward, and we were a collection of people that were sort of all pulled together by John D’Orazio. He was the king. He was the playmaker, the personality that drove everything. He was a fantastic mayor. He’d become mayor at a very young age. The old council had been sacked for issues to do with—one of the councillors I know had links to it, who I think was the mayor; he was mayor but had a company doing slab paving for pathways. So the council was busy putting pathways all through the city and buying them off the mayor, without the proper tender process. They were all sacked, and then John was the new group that came in, the new breed that came in, and they were the ones that moved council buildings. They had to put up the rates enormously at the time because the previous council had kept them at a very low level but they couldn’t afford to pay the wages of their staff. That’s part of the reason they were sacked.

47 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

So there was a very big turmoil at the time. John was the new broom, and a group of us came in. We were a mixture of people that were part Labor, part Liberal, part nothing. Adele Farina, who’s still a member of Parliament, she was on the council as well. There was an argument at one stage as to who was going to become deputy mayor, because it had been planned that I would be the next deputy mayor, this was after about three or four years, and Adele wanted it. She had big ambitions to get into Parliament at the time. She was working with one of the state members in his electorate—Bob Pearce. She was working for Bob Pearce at the time but had big ambitions to get into Parliament, so she wanted the tag of deputy. It was going to tear our faction apart—half would have come with me and half would have gone with her, and John wasn’t sure where he’d go because he was friends with both of us. So I pulled out and said, “Look, it doesn’t matter that much to me.”

I don’t think I was planning to be in politics at the time. But I really enjoyed it. The reason I decided to go into politics is that working at a surgery is a fantastic experience and I really enjoyed it, but I was frustrated. I just didn’t feel that I had enough—even though I had a lot to do, it just wasn’t as fulfilling as I thought it would be. So I started doing other things as a GP. I became an expert in desensitising for allergies. I learnt from a guy called Dr Bandouvakis, who was an ENT specialist who used to do desensitisation. I’d get the base mixture from him and I’d make it up myself. I’d do the whole desensitising program with people. I was assisting surgery. I had an anaesthetic list for a while, but after about a year, I got a bit scared. Someone had serious trouble and I didn’t feel I was well enough trained, so I stopped doing anaesthetics. I did obstetrics as well. So I was doing about 50 deliveries a year at the time, mainly in the Mercy Hospital in Mt Lawley, but also in Osborne Park Hospital, and I was assisting a gynaecologist friend of mine, Bruce Leedman, doing surgery, but it just wasn’t enough.

I was really enjoying council work. I got on council and I ended up getting re-elected two more times. I got on the first time, again the next time and again a third time. They’re normally three-year terms, but I only did eight years because then I got elected to Parliament so I stood down after two years of that third term. But I became deputy mayor after a while. I think Adele got herself elected into Parliament, into the upper house, so I took over as deputy mayor. But we were a great team, and interestingly enough in the other faction was a lady called Marlene Robinson, who was working for Carmen Lawrence when she was Premier. She was working in her office. So we had Adele in our faction and Marlene in the other faction, fighting 48 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW each other. Since then, the same people have been there for a long time and the factions have gone every which way. But that is how it was at the time.

We did a lot of things in Bayswater. I can drive around Bayswater and point to just about anything that moves in my electorate, in fact in the whole electorate, that we did. The Morley sport and rec centre was something that I was closely involved in. All the land development plans for the whole of Bedford was stuff that I got put in place. The footpath replacement program, that was a long-term program to replace all of the slabs with continuous concrete because people kept tripping over slabs and getting injured, so I’d see them as patients coming to my surgery. So that was the first thing I put up as my initial program, and when I left after eight years, we’d done about 75 per cent replacement of all the slabs. There are lots of things in Bayswater I can point to that were things that I was involved in—development of parks and so on—that I’m really proud of. It’s great to walk around Bayswater and see all those things. As I said, when I got elected to Parliament, I stepped down.

Ms Jennie Carter: Which we’ll come to in a minute. The sorts of things that you were involved in, you talked about the rec centre, pavement replacement, the sort of improvements to the district; was that one of your main concerns or were there others?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I just enjoyed doing the work. I enjoyed the things you do as a councillor and being responsible for making decisions. We redeveloped the whole Galleria. That was our decision. John D’Orazio, he was tough as nails. We were negotiating with the developers of the Galleria at the time, I think mostly the Coles people. They’d fly across from Sydney and come to our meetings for discussions and we would demand things from them. So we were pretty tough on getting a return to the electorate, not just them making money out of their shopping centre, because we had to do a lot of rezoning of land and shops. Boans used to be there at the time, which “accidentally” burnt down. Rumour has it, it was an insurance job, that there were holes drilled in the glass to let air in to get the fire going well. So anyway, that burnt down. It had been empty and in bad condition for a long period of time. We desperately wanted this shopping centre, but there had to be a lot of roadworks around it—all the roadworks you see now where Wellington Road meets Walter Road and Russell Street, all those roads we wanted. We wanted a library for the community, so we demanded they build a library on the land and hand it over to

49 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW us, and we wanted space within the shopping centre for JPs to work to support people.

Ms Jennie Carter: From memory, that was the first time I know of that a library was put in a shopping centre.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Is it?

Ms Jennie Carter: I’m fairly sure. I could be wrong, but I remember at the time that being a very interesting concept. So you were part of all those sorts of negotiations?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. Anyway, they came to our meeting once, the final decision—that’s when we put those final conditions in place—they said, “No, no, we’re not doing that; we’re leaving”, so they walked out and flew back to Sydney, because John insisted that we stick to our guns with the demand, and we did to back him, but we were nervous. I said, “You’ve stuffed this whole thing, John; you’ve blown it.” He said, “No; they’ll be back”, and sure enough, a week later they phoned back, agreed to all the requirements, and we signed off on the thing.

So things like that we did. We had the footpath replacement program, as I said. We had a greening policy, the Bayswater gardens program. That, again, was started by John before we came. They reticulated all the lawns and developed them all. We called one John D’Orazio Park, which is on Guildford Road. He actually voted against it. He was dead against it, and I had to organise the numbers, so we got that voted, because he was the one that started the program, and now that he’s died since I’m really glad that I did. There’s one on the corner of Coode and Catherine Streets, Browns Lake Reserve, that I was responsible for. We put a big lake in there. We used to get play equipment and I’d go with the local residents and erect it. We’d buy the stuff in, get someone to supervise, and we’d put it up ourselves so people felt a part of their local park. I always told John they should name that park after me because it was all my work getting the lake, and we built the play equipment and stuff. So if ever they’re reading that, that would be a good legacy [chuckles].

We were the first in Australia to introduce the 240-litre recycling bin. We copied the recycling bin off a council in Queensland, who were the first in Australia to do one, but they had a smaller bin, a 120 litre. We decided we’d go for the bigger one. Stirling council always claimed they were first, but we were the first to sign up with 50 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Cleanaway for the supply of the bins. Of course the reason Stirling did it at the same time was that the mayor was Italian and a friend of John’s, so there was a fair bit of competition between our two councils. Tony Vallelonga always reckoned it was them, and I know that it wasn’t. But other things like that we used to do, the redevelopment. We planned the new swimming pool. That wasn’t done when I was there, but we did the planning.

Ms Jennie Carter: This is Bayswater Waves?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes; we did the planning when I was still on council. The rec centre, these two were the top priorities. That became the first. The rec centre we decided to do first and got quite a lot of state government money, and the same—a lot of state government money went into Bayswater Waves. We did the Benara Road development, the golf driving range, the swimming complex, the hockey grounds along Benara Road. That was a huge waste area, the old train park development. I was on the committee—in fact, I think I chaired the committee—that did all that development. Not the swimming pool—the swimming pool came later— but all the rest of that stuff.

Ms Jennie Carter: In eight years, that was a big legacy and a lot of work.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: A lot of things we did, yes. We were a really progressive council at the time. But I’d driven through Dianella and seen what the City of Stirling were doing, with every house getting bowled over and four units put in its place, and I hated it. So I initiated a total review of the zoning at Bayswater. And we went around, and areas like Embleton, where there were a lot of old houses of not good quality and big blocks and close to the railway line, we decided to zone that R40 so that it would encourage people to redevelop, and four units was okay to have intense dwellings around the railway line. But areas like Bedford that had beautiful old houses, we didn’t want to see them knocked down, so we zoned them to only allow two on the block, and you could only have that two if you retained either the house at the front or if you built a new house and made it look very similar to that old Bedford style and maintained the streetscape as well. So that’s why you still see all those houses in Bedford like that now.

We did different things in different areas. We zoned around the Galleria R80 to encourage higher density development. That never happened for some reason but 51 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW behind where all those shops are, opposite the Morley Galleria, behind that, that’s still all zoned R80 I think. I don’t know why it never gets developed. Those were the things we did on council, yes. That’s why I decided to do politics, because I enjoyed doing that so much. And I was just tired of being in the surgery every day, same thing. I could almost pick what was going to come in for the day and what you’re doing. A bit frustrated, too, because there was a lot of alternative medicine around, and while I didn’t have a lot of faith in alternative medicine where there was no proof of success, so all the anecdotal things—take this and you’ll get better—still I felt there was more to it than we’d been taught, and I felt that I couldn’t properly treat my patients without all that additional knowledge. Then I got tied up in politics. The first run I did —

Ms Jennie Carter: We might just pause it there because I’d like to do this in more depth.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Okay.

Ms Jennie Carter: Now, Kim, your training or your exposure to politics in local government, did that have an effect on your desire to go to state politics?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, I’d never been particularly political and I had no interest in politics. It was funny; when I was in high school, my best mate in high school could name all the Premiers, all the ministers, knew all about them—I didn’t know one. I didn’t know who the Premier was. I had no idea and no interest whatsoever. Our family had sort of been Liberal—I think I told you that before—because of the connection with my grandmother and Sir Charles Court. But we were never brainwashed and I think my parents voted Liberal but we never talked about it much. We never discussed politics at home at all. So I was pretty much, I guess, a swinging voter, though tending to vote Liberal. So, a soft Liberal, we’d call them nowadays. Then Brian Burke came along, and I wasn’t keen on Ray O’Connor, who was our leader at the time and Premier for a short time. Sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought.

Ms Jennie Carter: Politics —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: That’s when Brian Burke ran for Parliament. I remember I read in the paper that he had a list of things that he was going to do. It was a brilliant 52 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW ad. He just had a full page with the 10 things listed that that he was going to do if he became Premier. I read through those 10 and agreed with every single thing that he was going to do and said, “I gotta vote for him.” So, I voted Labor that year, the year that Brian Burke got in, which must have been ’83 I think he got in. So, I voted for him that year and I was actually quite happy. When he first got in, I thought he did a very good job. It was only later that he went off the rails and I think was overly influenced by particular people in large business and, as you know, ended up in jail. But that first year, I voted for him.

But then when I became disillusioned with him as the years went on with the things that were happening, I became more politically aware and because of the enjoyment on council, even though we weren’t political on council—as I said, we had Labor people in our group and I wasn’t Liberal at the time—I don’t know what it was that actually triggered me but I decided I was interested in running for politics and joined the local branch, the Dianella branch, of the Liberal Party. I think just through that exposure, through meeting with those guys and being part of a group that think and talk Liberal, I found that that’s where my values lay. Now, I’ve always been to the left of Liberal. Noel Crichton-Browne, for example, would be regarded as being on the right of Liberal. My dad would be to the right of that [chuckles]. His view was that if you don’t work, you don’t get the dole. You get nothing; you either survive or you fail, and that’s it. But, yes, I’m probably to the left of the Liberal Party and people to the right in the Labor Party would be further right than me.

I was pretty much interested in and recognised that people who can’t work—as a GP, I’d see people who didn’t work because they were lazy and didn’t want to work and were happy going off surfing, and those people always really made me angry. But at the same time, you’d see people who would love to have work, desperate for work, in desperate need of support, who weren’t getting it. So, during those same years and again around the mid-80s I got involved with Father Brian Morrison. Father Brian was a Catholic priest who was doing Christmas hampers at the time and I happened to be at a thing where he was putting together hampers. I don’t know how on earth I got to be there, but I saw he had a whole pile of medicines and they were nearly all out of date. I said, “What are you doing with all those medicines?” He said, “Oh, people started giving them to us to use for other people when someone had died and they didn’t need them anymore, so we’re trying to find a place to send them and we’re planning to send them overseas.” I said, “Well, you can’t send those. They’re all out of date and there’s nothing really of great value 53 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW there.” So he said, “Why don’t you come and help then?” So I started helping. I was delivering some of the Christmas hampers into areas like Lockridge at the time and got more and more friendly with him. Anyway, Father Brian—I’ve gone right off track, I know, but does it matter?

Ms Jennie Carter: No.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So during this time, Father Brian, he’d been kicked out of being a priest. He was a priest in Bayswater, had his own parish, but was evicted by the church for nobody knew what reason, although there were rumours, but was still able to practise as a Catholic priest. So, he started doing these aid things, international aid and local aid, particularly his Christmas function, and the more I got to know him, I thought of him as a loveable rogue. So, he was a bit—he didn’t always do the right thing, but nothing too disastrous. That’s my thoughts at the time. I have to tell you they changed a lot later on. In those days, firstly, I helped him collect stuff and do Christmas presents and then I managed to get on to a lot of medical supplies. There was a supply company that closed down and I got them to donate to us a huge amount of stuff, probably $100 000, $150 000 worth of good- quality medical supplies. At that time, they had these massive floods in Bangladesh, probably the worst floods that they’d had in many, many years—lots of people killed. So, Father Brian decided that we would take these medicines to Bangladesh. So, that’s what we did. That must have been ’87 or somewhere.

Ms Jennie Carter: That would have been an experience.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was a fascinating experience. We took with us a guy who was the photographer with the local press. Tony Ashby—that’s his name. Tony Ashby was a long-term photographer with The West. He turned out to be a really good friend. So, we went with the three of us and one other guy who was working with Father Brian. We took our medical supplies in a sea container to Bangladesh and while I was there, World Vision showed us around their centres. Tony took lots of photos. I’ve got some amazing photos he took of me and children with a stethoscope in the slums of Bangladesh. Just an incredible experience.

Ms Jennie Carter: How long did you stay there?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Only a few weeks, two or three weeks. 54 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Anyway, we did the same again a couple of years later. Around ’88 or ’89 or something, we went to Ukraine. It was the fifth anniversary of the explosion of the nuclear plant in Chernobyl and we went there. I’m not sure why Father Brian decided we’d go there, but we took medical supplies again to Ukraine. We landed in Moscow, went down to Ukraine and toured, and I think there’s a fair bit in that story that I’d like to tell. It’s a story on its own, because it’s got lots of twists and turns as we go. I think I might do that at another time as a package of Father Brian.

Ms Jennie Carter: That would be very interesting, and it probably is a good time to stop now then.

End Interview 2

55 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Interview 3

Ms Jennie Carter: This is recording 3 of an interview with Dr Kim Hames. The interviewer is Jennie Carter and the interview is being conducted at Innaloo, on Wednesday, 30 August 2017.

Ms Jennie Carter: Kim, we were talking about your first foray into state politics, when you contested the seat of, I think it was, Morley–Swan in 1987, and that was the by-election caused by Arthur Tonkin’s resignation. Could you tell me a little bit about what happened to make you want to run for that seat, and what were the machinations?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, I’d been on local government for a while, and working in the surgery I enjoyed it, but I have to admit I was getting a bit bored with the same thing, in an office every day, over and over again, and wanted something different, so I started doing extra surgical things. I helped Dr John Teasdale, who was a vascular surgeon, do operations, and then I worked for him doing ultrasounds of blood flow to legs and also injections of spider veins for women for cosmetic reasons, so little things like that on the side—assisting Dr Bruce Leedman, who was an obstetrician–gynaecologist, in surgery—so I was doing things outside. Then, I think I said before, I got into an argument with council and got on council and spent some time and I just really enjoyed the fact that every day was different. You had targets to achieve. Replacement of all the slabs in Bayswater was one of my policies going to get elected as a councillor, and so one of the things that I got done while I was there. The Morley recreation centre I had a fair bit to do with, the development of parks and roads and housing designs and all sorts of things. I enjoyed that different challenge of things that were outside my normal scope of work. My mother had always said, when I was little, because I used to argue a fair bit, that I needed to be a politician or a lawyer. It was too late to be a lawyer, but you don’t need any training to be a politician. You can come from any walk of life. There are no prerequisites in background experience, age, training, whatever. Any person who is on the electoral roll can become a member of Parliament.

I became interested, so I joined the Noranda branch of the Liberal Party and then, when the opportunity came, when Arthur Tonkin resigned and there was a by- election, I ran for the preselection for that. I think there were four of us running. I

56 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW didn’t know anything about factions or groupings or any of that sort of thing in those days. I had no idea, and so I just put my name down and happened to win it. Actually, one of the people that I beat was a lady called Tina Klein, who was very well known around Bassendean. She was on Bassendean council for many, many years and I think she thought she had it in the bag, because she was a councillor and well known in the area, but they picked me, which I was pretty happy with. Tina was good, and she helped out, but it was mainly June van de Klashorst, who became a member of Parliament herself later, and her team, who were, I think, the Midland branch or somewhere down around there, that did all the organisation and management, so all I had to do was doorknock. I took four weeks off and doorknocked. There was never any chance of winning; it was a staunch Labor seat, and I was just running to get better known, so that when a decent seat came along, I would have a better chance of winning. But we worked really hard in that election and got an eight and a half per cent swing our way, but it wasn’t enough to win. I forget the name of the man who won.

Ms Jennie Carter: Frank Donovan.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Was it Frank Donovan? No.

Ms Jennie Carter: He defeated the—that was 1987.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Okay, yes, I remember running against Frank, that’s for sure.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you know him at all?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No.

Ms Jennie Carter: And when you said that you got an eight and a half per cent swing, did you enjoy the doorknocking experience?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Doorknocking’s hard; it is seriously hard, especially when you’re going through, in those days, the flats in Lockridge. It was a bit scary. I remember, especially, one case—and you never know what you’re going to get and who you’re going to meet, but most people are polite to you. It’s not as bad as you think it is, doorknocking. People might tell you to nick off, or that they’re not interested, but mostly they treat you reasonably when you come to the door. They 57 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW are often pleased that you’re not a Mormon wanting to talk religion. But there was this one house in Midland I went to, in the heart of Midland, and it was unkempt, with dirt yards and a door falling off—a really old house, and one of the old houses with the corridor up the middle. I could see up the middle and I knocked fairly tentatively on the door, and some gruff voice said, “Who’s there?” And then this huge guy came stomping down the corridor. He was obviously a bikie, and he had all his leather gear on, and I was a bit nervous. I said, “Kim Hames here.” He said, “Oh mate, good onya; I’m a big Liberal supporter!” You just can never know what people are like when you knock on the door and they come out to see you, so that was a real eye- opener for me.

Anyway, we ran for that election and lost, as expected, but it did give me a higher profile, and people got to know me. The next time around I was looking for a seat that I could win. Keith Wilson was the member for Dianella, and Dianella was where I was well known. I went to primary school in Dianella. I was the GP covering—the Dianella electorate covered part of Inglewood, which was where my surgery was, so I was really well known in that Dianella area.

Ms Jennie Carter: Before you contested Dianella, you also ran in 1989 for the seat of Perth.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, that’s part of this same story.

Ms Jennie Carter: It’s not true?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It is true.

I wanted to run for Dianella, and the Dianella branch had collapsed. So I restarted the Dianella branch to get a branch up in the area that I wanted to run for. I got people like John D’Orazio as a member. He became a Labor minister but, at the time, John wasn’t fussed either way, so he and his brother Rocco and half his family all joined up to this branch, the Dianella branch. I put my name down for Dianella and so did Terry Tyzack. In that preselection group was a guy called Christian Allier, who later became my chief of staff, but was a patient of mine somewhere along the line as well. But they didn’t know what faction I was, and they were staunchly the anti-Crichton-Browne faction, and because I wasn’t part of their faction, they assumed I must be part of his faction. So, he in particular—someone who later 58 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW became one of my best friends and still is—voted against me in that first preselection which was just me against Terry Tyzack, and Terry won by a single vote

Terry subsequently ran for the seat of Dianella and had something like a one per cent swing in his direction, and remembering that Keith Wilson was a very popular local member, a very nice guy. Terry ran against him, and I was left without a seat, so next door in the seat of Perth, there was a vacancy, and I put my name down for that instead. I won that preselection to run for Perth, with the strong support of the Perth branch that were a very old traditional Liberal Party branch. I ran against Ian Alexander, and it was interesting because his brother Patrick Alexander was one of my main competitors at school. Remember I said there was one guy who always used to beat me? That was Patrick Alexander. I ran against his brother, Ian, and I needed a nine and a half per cent swing, so again virtually impossible to win. But I had worked out on every booth what percentage I needed to get, including near my surgery, where I needed 15 per cent to offset areas over in Highgate where I knew I couldn’t get a big swing. Labor were a bit on the nose at that stage, so the big swings were in the air, but it’s not like nowadays where you get massive swings. In those days it just didn’t happen like that. But I was on track to actually win the seat. I would have only won it by a whisker, but we worked out that the polling was showing we were going to win. That’s the year that, just before the election, in the last week before the election, Hendy Cowan and Bill Hassell had a public argument about how much money Alan Bond had put into the Labor Party campaign, and you could see the day after that argument in the paper, just everyone’s heads dropped. There was a big kickback against us because of that. They say that disunity is death and that disunity between Hendy Cowan and Bill Hassell cost us that election, in my view. It certainly cost me winning that seat. So I ended up getting an eight and a half per cent swing instead of nine. Just that argument cost one to two per cent, so not a lot, but enough that seats like mine, that if I’d won my seat—I think we only missed by a whisker. I think if I’d won my seat, we would have won government. It was very close. So anyway, we lost.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, it was a very narrow margin that you lost by.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: About one per cent, and interestingly the guy who ran—I’ll tell the story of the next preselection. The next preselection, I went for Dianella again. As it turned out, our branch was infiltrated by Simon Ehrenfeld and his cronies. So 59 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Simon Ehrenfeld had got all his Young Libs in there and it turned out he was supporting a guy called Cam Tinley, who I didn’t even know at that stage. But there was another lady—I think her name was Margaret Hewson, or something like that— who was part of the Ehrenfeld group that got signed up, but she thought they were supporting her, so when it came to the preselection, she had her name down and there was Cam Tinley, myself, and Terry Tyzack.

At the following preselection, I lost by one vote to Cam Tinley. But it went to state council, and state council wouldn’t endorse him as the winner, because of branch stacking, and certainly they had stacked the branches in our area to win. The Young Libs were a very strong power group at that stage. What they were doing is they’d have a Young Lib branch, they’d get people up for preselection because they were Young Libs, but they sent Young Libs out to all the branches as well to become members of the normal branch. They’d volunteer to do the jobs no-one else wanted to do like secretary, for example. They’d put their hand up to do that and automatically get a preselection vote as a member of the committee. So, they were getting extra votes like that.

Anyway, I lost by one vote but when it was overturned, there had to be another preselection and the woman who’d thought she’d been dudded by Simon Ehrenfeld and Cam Tinley pulled out with all her members, and she’d had six people, I think it was, on the preselection committee. They had to be replaced so we had another vote for replacements for her people on the preselection committee. By then I’d started to learn a bit about how it worked and what you had to do. Our team were still all members. In the meantime, I’d gone off and won preselection again to run for Perth because it did only need one per cent, but I wanted Dianella because that’s where I lived and breathed—Dianella. Having won Perth, I went back and at the same time ran for Dianella again. We had our people very disciplined in making sure they put the people in the right order down the page and we got two additional members in—more than Simon Ehrenfeld had. I think we won four and he won two on the way the voting system works. We had a gain of two so we went to the next preselection. Cam Tinley ran again but this time instead of losing by a vote, I won by a vote. At that stage, I was preselected for two different seats at the same time.

Obviously, though, I resigned from Perth and, interestingly, a guy called Hal Colebatch, whose father had been a former Premier won the preselection for that seat. Mind you, we had to tell Hal not to doorknock because he was something like 60 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW six foot six tall—a huge guy with really thick horn-rimmed glasses—and he just frightened people. No offence to poor old Hal—I don’t know what’s happened to him—but he reminded you of Lurch [chuckles] in The Munsters, so people were scared seeing him at the door. So we had to stop him. He only just lost that seat. He did a really good job, but just lost that seat next time around.

I got a good swing my way—I think about five or six per cent, something of that order—and against Keith Wilson, I think that was a great result. I think he was Minister for Health at the time. I doorknocked the whole of the time in between election campaigns, so I was very well known throughout the electorate. But he was a bit tired and his heart wasn’t in it. He had had a big argument with Brian Burke and had stepped down, I think, as Minister for Health, over funding in health. He wasn’t happy and he wasn’t happy with the Labor Party. He was a minister, I remember, at the time. Very interestingly, when I’d won that election—we were so excited and pumped up and got to bed. Anyway, there was a knock on the door early the next morning at my house. It was Keith Wilson. He just came around to say congratulations and well done and handed over everything in his office. Other people in the past—I could name names but I probably shouldn’t—totally destroyed their offices when they lost their seat in the election. Took everything, took the furniture out and left vomit on the floor, this particular woman that I’m thinking of from the northern suburbs. But Keith left everything [chuckles], including his campaign notes. He left pencils and biros and personal stuff even—just left it all for me to take over. He was an amazing guy.

Ms Jennie Carter: That would be very unusual.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Very unusual—incredible guy. That was when I got in and won that election.

Ms Jennie Carter: How did you feel taking over Dianella at that stage?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I loved all that area because I was, as I say, brought up there. I lived in Dianella since I was 10 years old. At this stage I was—whatever it was— thirtysomething or fortysomething. How old was I?

Ms Jennie Carter: Ninety-three.

61 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: And I was born in ’53 so I was 40.

Ms Jennie Carter: It’s still young.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. It means I had lived for 30 years in Dianella and I had worked as a GP since 1981. I had a lot of years learning about that area so I was really happy to represent that area.

Ms Jennie Carter: Would you say that your doorknocking, your practice, your living there made you very aware of what Dianella was like and people knew you?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: That’s right, they did know me—my patients in particular supported me. Some of them told me they weren’t going to vote for me because they didn’t want me to stop being their GP. In fact, when I won the seat, I had to keep working as a GP because I had six kids going to school and it was expensive. We had just built a new house and moved in to the new house, so we had a lot of expenses. The drop in income—I’d been earning about $120 000 a year after costs as a doctor, so I was reasonably well off with a good income. I think we went in at about $60 000-odd as a member of Parliament, so I had a huge drop in income. I kept working two afternoons a week. One was to keep my hand in as a GP, so I kept in practice. I’d taken on a partner in my surgery, Dr Steve Boehm. He was the one doing most of the work in the surgery. I was just doing two afternoons a week from 1993 to ’97. That first four years as a member of Parliament, I kept working in the surgery. I think I did some Saturdays as well. It did make it a bit difficult giving the service I needed to the electorate, but I had no choice. I couldn’t have survived financially without still doing that extra work.

Ms Jennie Carter: It must’ve been a decision that your family had to make for you to run for Parliament with all that involves and give up such a —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was pretty tough on Stephanie because I was already working fairly long hours as a GP and then probably three nights a week as a local councillor for Bayswater. By the way, I resigned from council in ’93. I started in ’85 so I had probably a year to go, but you can’t do both, so I retired from council once I got elected.

62 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

But we had most of our kids by then, I think, if not all. For Stephanie, who was staying at home as a full-time mum but still had six kids to manage, it was a pretty tough time. In fact, when my daughter was born—the one you just met here—she got postnatal depression. That’s when I was the member for Dianella, so I was working at the Dianella Plaza shopping centre. She got postnatal depression and she was very unwell. She was in hospital for probably, I forget how long, eight or 10 weeks or something—a long period of time. She was very depressed when Tiffany was still just a little baby. Luckily, her mother was in Dianella as well—remember, she was the next door neighbour, so didn’t live very far from us at all. What would happen in the morning for that period of time was I’d get up and get the children breakfast and get them to school. Then I’d drop Jonathon off, who was the fifth child, who was about two at the time, to his grandmother’s house and she’d look after him during the day. At the hospital where Stephanie was, which was in Yokine, they didn’t have the staff to be able to look after the baby in there as well, where Stephanie was breastfeeding. But then she was on medication and had to stop, so we had to bottle feed. But they were too busy in the morning to look after her, so once I’d dropped all the kids off I’d go and collect her from the hospital and take her back to my electorate office. So I’d be seeing people in my electorate, nursing the baby. I had to change nappies in between and stuff like that. I don’t know how people felt coming in but, again, there was nothing that you could do. Then at lunchtime I could take Tiffany back to her mother, so the staff would be able to help look after her for the afternoon and the night. I’d work until about 3.15 or something in the afternoon and then I’d have to finish work and go and pick up the kids from school and pick up Jonathon from my mother-in-law’s, then go home and feed them and get homework done and stuff like that. It was a difficult time but, obviously, much more difficult for Stephanie who was feeling terrible about all that. It wasn’t an easy time through that four years.

Ms Jennie Carter: 1993, that’s when the Richard Court government came in. What was your relationship with the Premier and your colleagues?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Very good. Richard was the other faction to me, so he had people like Norman Moore and George Cash and people like that, Doug Shave, were part of his factional base support group. When I say they are the Crichton- Browne faction, it’s not so much that they were run by Crichton-Browne; it was a just a voting bloc, if you like. Then there was the rest that didn’t have a factional group. I remember going to see Fred Chaney at one stage after I lost the preselection in ’89 63 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW and saying—the one before the ’93 election, the one that I eventually won preselection. I went before that to Fred Chaney because everyone talked about the Fred Chaney faction being the opposite of the Noel Crichton-Browne faction. I don’t think I even knew Noel Crichton-Browne at that stage, but I wasn’t impressed by their group and their behaviour. While Simon Ehrenfeld wasn’t so much locked into the Crichton-Browne faction, it’s just he was almost like another Noel Crichton- Browne in terms of his ability to control numbers. That’s the thing about Noel Crichton-Browne: it wasn’t his policies or anything; he was a numbers man and had all the numbers. He could get anybody into anything because he had the numbers. But then there was a growing movement of people against that and they were called the Chaney faction. But I went to Fred and Fred said, “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t have a factional base, even though people talk about it. I don’t do numbers like Noel does. I can’t help you.” Anyway, the numbers of people grew and when we were in Parliament after ’93, we called ourselves the “Anyone but Noel Group”. It sort of coalesced behind Colin Barnett, although Colin wasn’t a numbers person either, as has been proved numerous times since when he has tried to influence preselections and hasn’t been successful. But we called ourselves that faction group.

Ms Jennie Carter: When you say “we” —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Lots of us got in in 1993. There was a big group of us that got in at that same time or shortly after, so Michael Board, Rob Johnson—I can’t remember all the names, but there were lots of us. We called ourselves the class of ’93, as you do. We were probably eight or 10 or 12 strong, a bit like Labor is now with the new group in. So, we had a big group and we were a big voting bloc. A few of us, like probably Rob Johnson were part of the Noel Crichton-Browne faction. We all liked Richard Court, so even though most of us were the other faction, we didn’t even think about it like that, because we weren’t strong factional people. We more supported individuals. We liked Richard and we thought he was doing a good job.

Sadly, just as a little aside, when we lost the election later in 2001, part of the reason was the issue with Doug Shave and what happened with Doug Shave and— is it the superannuation scheme or pension scheme?—whatever that was at the time.4 It all blew up and he was the minister. The view was generally that if he’d

4 Douglas James (Doug) Shave (b.1947 d.2017) was Minister for Lands, Fair Trading, and Parliamentary and Electoral Affairs from 1997 to 2001. In 2000 an inquiry headed by Judge Ivan Gunning into a finance broking scandal in which many people, including elderly investors, lost funds, 64 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW been removed by Richard, we could have survived, but Richard wouldn’t do it because he was told by the people in his group that our group would all vote against him and vote for Colin Barnett and he’d lose his position. It just wasn’t true. We liked Colin, we thought he was a great deputy, but we preferred Richard as the Premier and thought he was doing a very good job. Some of those decisions he made at the end for factional reasons, I think, we would have supported him anyway, so he didn’t need to do things like that.

Ms Jennie Carter: When you all came in as the class of ’93, it was wiping out— Labor lost a lot, didn’t they?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Similar to what’s happened to us now, yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, very, very similar now. It must have been fairly exhilarating. The first time you’re in Parliament, you’re in on the winning side, as the government.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, it is, but that’s not a good spot to be.

Ms Jennie Carter: Why is that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Because when there are so many of you that come in, the chances of being one to get to be minister are very slim. In those days there was very little encouragement for us to talk; in fact, we were discouraged. So, unless you were saying something really important and the government needed you talking, you shut up. Talk about mushrooms, that’s what we were treated like—mushrooms. You’d stay there and shut up and just filled the numbers. When we were in under Colin, it was different; we were trying to encourage those backbenchers to learn and grow and develop all the time, but it wasn’t like that. Colin was the Leader of the House and Colin, when he got his cranky pants on, things weren’t good. I think John Kobelke was Leader of the House for the Labor Party and they just didn’t get on. They just could never reach agreement on anything, so the answer to that was just to sit longer hours. I have never sat longer hours than I did in that first four years. We would be there till four or five in the morning over and over and over again. I remember waking up once, I fell asleep in my room downstairs at about five o’clock in the morning and I woke up at six and the place was empty, so they’d finished and found that the government appointed board and the minister were ineffective in regulating the industry. 65 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW risen and gone [laughter] while I was still asleep downstairs. I had missed a division; that’s how I found out. I wouldn’t have even known when they’d gone, but they’d had a division in the end and I’d missed it and off they went.

Ms Jennie Carter: It must’ve been an exhausting time.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I remember Doug Shave where the Speaker’s gallery is used to just lie on the hard timbers up there and fall asleep up the back because no-one could see you up the back there. He would just go to sleep there, so if something happened, he was still in the chamber, or next door to the chamber, so he could come straight in. But we would sit these awful hours all the time, often there still for breakfast in the morning, so you’d go through the whole night. It was not an easy time.

Ms Jennie Carter: And Richard Court, how did you feel he managed his first government?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I thought he was very good; apart from those things at the end when things started to go a bit pear-shaped, I think he did a very good job. I certainly enjoyed working for him, especially when he made me a minister. There were only, I think, four of us who got to be ministers from that group that came in at the start of the second term. The first was—I’ve got a mental block for his name; he was the member for Albany; he was a lawyer.

Ms Jennie Carter: Kevin Prince?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Kevin Prince, yes, who was a lawyer was the first one promoted during the first term of government—right near the end, I think.5 At the start of the second term—we’d been working really hard. In that first four years, I got on lots of parliamentary committees, so I was a member of them and I chaired the recycling and waste management committee. Kevin was also Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and he got me to do a couple of special jobs because he knew I had an interest, and that helped me get my profile up. It’s all about getting your profile up and getting known.

5 Antony (Kevin) Royston Prince (b.1948) was Minister for Aboriginal Affairs (January 1994 to January 1997); Housing (from January 1994 to December 1995); Health (December 1995 to July 1998); and for Police and Emergency Services (July 1998 to February 2001). 66 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

I had this huge argument [with Graham Kierath]—not argument, not even a fight, but we had different points of view about workers’ comp legislation he was bringing in. As a GP, I was blocking him in the party room from getting this legislation through because it was just wrong.

Ms Jennie Carter: What was wrong about it?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: The basic principles. He did motor vehicles insurance trust and workers’ comp at about the same time because there were significant financial issues with both. Workers’ comp was becoming unaffordable with the numbers of claims coming in. The insurance companies were getting to the stage where the premiums were getting too high and it was too easy to get claims in under workers’ comp, particularly claims for negligence against the company for long-term injuries. It was also for motor accidents. Anyone who had a motor vehicle accident could virtually just by complaining about neck pain for a month or two get a payout from the trust. So he put a cap on that. It’s too long ago to remember all the details, but he put a cap on that, which was necessary, even though it was difficult. As a GP, I had a conflict because I was seeing lots of patients with injuries, but I could recognise that people were coming in to me complaining about neck pain to get the—I think a $10 000 payout was the standard amount that you got if you put in a complaint. People knew that and they were just doing it automatically. It was amazing, the numbers just dropped to almost nothing once that—it might’ve been a $10 000 cap. Unless you had injuries that were worse than $10 000 worth of claim, then you didn’t get anything, and people just stopped complaining unless they were really badly injured, which is what you were.

But for the workers’ comp, he was bringing in a schedule of disabilities, it’s called. So, if you have an injury, it is rated by the doctors in terms of severity. To be able to claim against the employer for negligence, you had to have a certain level that you reached to be able to claim. I think it was like 30 per cent. If you got to 30 per cent injuries, then you could sue the employer as well as your payout. So you would get your payout from workers’ comp, but you could sue them privately as well, and that’s what was causing all the difficulty. They were bringing in this new American schedule that was just dreadful. For example, if you had a back injury caused by the negligence of your employer, you had to virtually be paralysed to get to that 30 per cent. If you had severe sciatica with a bulging disc because your boss had made 67 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW you lift a weight that was much too heavy and you had bulged your disc and long- term pain and suffering and an inability to work, you couldn’t sue your employer because you wouldn’t reach that 30 per cent threshold. If you got severely burnt so you were incredibly disfigured but you could still physically go back to work, you wouldn’t reach the 30 per cent. If you’re a male and lost your testicles—that’s an example I used to the party room—because of the negligence of your employer, you didn’t reach 30 per cent because you could still work. You don’t need testicles to be able to work. It was just an awful schedule. There was an orthopaedic surgeon in Perth who had drawn up his own schedule that he was using—and it was common use amongst orthopaedic surgeons—that was much more reasonable. You know, if you had sciatica, you would make the 30 per cent. If you had severe burns, or the examples I gave, then you would make the 30 per cent so that you could sue. I lobbied and complained and bitched to the party room until I got my way. Kierath finally agreed to change. He just didn’t want a bar of it for months and months and months, and finally, because of the fight I put up, he agreed to change it and put in the local schedule not the American schedule.

Ms Jennie Carter: That was Kierath who was —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Graham Kierath was the minister for workforce development and all those things. Graham was pretty famous; it was during those years when we had those massive fights with the unions over changes to workforce laws.

Anyway, I won that. But someone said to me on the quiet, “If you ever want to be a minister, being too aggressive and complaining too much in the party room isn’t the way to do it.” It’s tough; you want to get noticed. When you have a party room of 30 people and you sit there and say nothing, you are never going to get anywhere, so you have to stand up. I read something once saying that people who talk too often, nobody wants to listen to them anymore—they disregard. If you are going talk, you have to have something profound and serious to say so that people will respect you for the things you’ve said. After that episode, because I was pretty full-on during that time—I would’ve done it again, because it was so important. But other issues that I didn’t necessarily feel strongly about that it was just chucking a spanner in the works of the government at the time because you could, because we had quite a bit of voting power and your mates would tend to support you if you put up a good

68 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW argument, I toned it down a little bit. In 1997, four of us got to be ministers—Mike Board, John Day, Rhonda Parker, and myself.6

Ms Jennie Carter: You had a fairly big portfolio, didn’t you.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I got water, housing and Aboriginal affairs, but they were the ones you got if you were new to being a minister. The people who had a lot more experience got the much tougher portfolios. Those were regarded—Water Corp was a pretty well run organisation and didn’t need a lot of guidance. The same with housing. It had Greg Joyce as the CEO; he was fantastic. They were pretty well run and Aboriginal affairs was where I had an interest anyway, so they were keen for me to do that. I got those three portfolios.

Ms Jennie Carter: And that was in 1997?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: In 1997, yes. I was down in Mandurah at the time when I got the phone call, after we won the election, to come up and talk to Richard.

Ms Jennie Carter: Before you get onto that—I’m sorry I don’t mean to interrupt—but getting back to when you ran in the 1997 election, how did you do then compared with the first time?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: That’s an important area to cover because there was a boundary redistribution, which was awful. All the area where I was well known was cut away. I lost all of Dianella and all that area of Inglewood around Bedford.

Ms Jennie Carter: So this was the new seat of Yokine?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, the new seat of Yokine. It had one-third of my old electorate in it, but it added in a lot of Labor heartland, of areas that were traditionally Labor voting, so Joondanna, Mt Hawthorn and a bit of—what’s just to the north of that—Tuart Hill. All that country was added in to Yokine. It added in Mt Lawley as well, which was good Liberal country, but that was the only one. Yokine had traditionally been more Labor and I had won that area, but only just. About 70 or 80 per cent of the electorate had been Labor not too far back in recent history. It

6 The four new ministers appointed in 1997 were Dr Kim Hames, Rhonda Parker, Mike Board, and John Day. 69 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW was going to be a really tough seat. At the end, the prediction going to the poll was that it was roughly 50–50. The people who ran were Nick Catania, because he lived in Mt Lawley and knew a lot of people through that area.

Ms Jennie Carter: He was very well known, too.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: He was because his seat had been lost as well through the redistribution. He had been in Balcatta, I think—further north, anyway. The only bit of his electorate that he had was that strip of, I think, Tuart Hill along the top, where Tuart Hill Primary School is. He had that bit along the top, but the rest weren’t familiar with him other than that he had been in the government. I think he had been a minister as well. Then Sam Piantadosi, because Sam Piantadosi was dumped by Labor from the upper house. He was pretty angry about that, so he ran as well and gave me preferences, which made Nick Catania—because he is another Italian— giving preferences to me seriously upset him. Anyway, it was a tough contest and a tough election and we worked really hard, and we won. Because Richard was doing so well after that first four years we were pretty popular, so we improved our vote that year. I won just about all those booths in the Labor Party area. Even in the Tuart Hill booth, which was in Nick’s own old electorate, I think we got 50–50 on that booth, which had been something like a 60–40 or 70–30 booth in the past. We got it up to 50–50.

Ms Jennie Carter: You must have worked really hard, though.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: We did. We doorknocked —

Ms Jennie Carter: When you say we —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Christian was helping.

Ms Jennie Carter: This is Christian Allier.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: This is Christian who had voted against me. He became my campaign manager for the Dianella election and ever since he has run my campaigns and we have been really good friends. We, together, went out and knocked and knocked and walked and walked and walked. We ran a really strong campaign. Booths, like a Joondanna booth—it was never strong Labor; it was like 70 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

52 or 53 per cent Labor—we got to 51 per cent or 52 per cent, something like that. So we were in front just in all these booths—in Mt Hawthorn and all these ones across. Yokine got up to 56, I think, so we improved that, and, of course, Mt Lawley was fairly strong—I forget, 60-something. So that gave us the win and I got in again. It was a good campaign.

Ms Jennie Carter: So, immediately you were elected you got into the ministry. You said that there were four of you from the class of ’93 that did that.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Myself, Mike Board, Rhonda Parker, who had been up where June van de Klashorst’s seat was later, up in the hills, and then we went for Ballajura against John D’Orazio later. John D’Orazio, incidentally, ended up running for Ballajura because he wanted to get it for the Liberal Party and he wasn’t given it. She [Parker] was given it instead because her seat had gone up in the north. She heads a big seniors organisation now.7 The teacup lady—remember, she got in big strife because her people bought that English teacup set. She got in. She didn’t get in at the same time as us in 1993, but she got in in a by-election shortly after. She was given that seat, so John D’Orazio said, “Well, stuff you”, and ran for the Labor Party instead, because he was pretty well known through that area. John Day got in as a minister, so that was four of us. Rob Johnson didn’t, and he was seriously angry at not, because he was part of the faction that Richard Court was in and thought he should have been made a minister, but he was made parliamentary secretary instead.

Ms Jennie Carter: So you were a brand new minister.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I got the call from Richard Court’s office to come up for a meeting. You knew that’s what it was going to be, because if you don’t get the call, you don’t come. I was hurrying up to this interview and something happened on the freeway and it was all blocked. I couldn’t get through, so I went out Canning Road instead, and I was so focused on this meeting that I got picked up for speeding along the way to get to this meeting with Richard. But it was worth it. I went in there and he offered me the portfolios. It was a pretty simple meeting. It was no great histrionics. It was just, “I’ve decided to bring you into the ministry. Are you willing to do it?” I said, “I sure am—sounds great [chuckles].”

7 Rhonda Parker is Alzheimer's WA chief executive. 71 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: Now a brand new minister, when did you meet your departmental heads?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: You do it very quickly. You have to be sworn in first. You’ve got no authority until you’ve been sworn in. So you have to wait about a week and then you are sworn in and you’re officially a minister and you’re given an office. Mine was in London House, at the time.

Ms Jennie Carter: That was in St Georges Terrace.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, opposite where the Premier was. They were on the corner at 197 St Georges Terrace and we were directly opposite in London House. Norman Moore was there a few floors higher than us. I think there were only about three ministers on that side. Water Corporation was headed by Jim Gill, who I got cranky with at a much later stage, but, at the time, I thought he was extremely good—he had an engineering background—and we got lots of things done. Roger Payne was head of the Water and Rivers Commission. As Minister for Water I wasn’t just Water Corp, there were two organisations. The department of water and rivers was the environmental group that had charge of water licences and water management and river management and all those things. So, one was the taker and one was the overseer, if you like. They were often in conflict, the two of them— Roger Payne and Jim Gill.

Ms Jennie Carter: Housing was?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Housing was Greg Joyce. Greg was just fantastic—nothing was too difficult. It didn’t matter what you wanted or how difficult it became, Greg would support you. I don’t know that that was necessarily always the right thing to do, because, you know, you can make errors of judgement and sometimes you need a CEO who will tell you that you are wrong. But we did a huge amount of good work together. A good example is that we’ve actually got a street named after myself and Richard. It’s called Hames Court. It’s just off Beach Road, on the corner of Beach Road and Wanneroo Road. We were doing all that public housing redevelopment that Kevin Prince had started in Lockridge, but we’d spread it out and done enormously more since then. All that area of Ballajura—not Ballajura.

72 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: Was it Balcatta?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, it was not Balcatta. It was north of Mirrabooka—Balga! I knew it was a B. All that Balga area we were redeveloping and knocking down the old blocks of flats and rebuilding new accommodation on it and rehousing all the people who had been in these old blocks of flats.

Ms Jennie Carter: That was fairly controversial, wasn’t it, at the time?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, it was very popular, because people were in these awful little flats in multistorey buildings—a bit like the ones still in Maylands—and terrible. A big collection of people on unemployment and disabilities, so a very low- socioeconomic area and all crowded in together. The policy later became one in every 12. So all the Homeswest houses, wherever they were built, one in 12 would became a Homeswest house to distribute people further out. People would get much better accommodation, often new accommodation. They had become ghettos—Lockridge, certainly, was very much like that—and big areas of crime. You go out there now and they are totally redeveloped. All the roads, the parks, the footpaths—it was a total redevelopment of a suburb done by that. Anyway, there was this block of flats that economically didn’t quite fit within the mix. Economically, it was reasonably viable because the value—some of these flats you would redo them and sell them off privately and then use the money to invest back into other housing elsewhere. We would do up a block of flats and put in a swimming pool and repaint them all and they would become private dwellings. Those suburbs were transformed by all that change. This one didn’t fit into the economic model, but the people there wanted it to go. They wanted it changed, and they lobbied and lobbied and lobbied me. Finally, I said to Greg, “Look, I can see their point. Even though it doesn’t quite fit the model, surely we can find a way to do it.” And Greg Joyce, “Yes, minister”, went and found a way, and we did. The people were deliriously happy. We drank champagne out on the front when I announced it they were so happy. Once all those were knocked down a new road had to be built to make a little cul-de-sac in the middle and they lobbied the council to convince them to call the street after myself, but “Court” was just an interesting little twist on the end because he was the Premier.

Ms Jennie Carter: Who was the Aboriginal affairs —

73 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: That was Ben Wyatt’s dad, Cedric. Again, Cedric was very good, very passionate about what he did and very knowledgeable. He was a great guy to work with.

I did those for four years and particularly into Aboriginal affairs we put a huge amount of time and effort to improve the conditions for Aboriginal people across the state. Labor people won’t agree with this, but I think history shows that even though Labor are the ones that Aboriginal people vote for, the feedback we get from people out in those communities is that they get more from a Liberal government when they are in than they do from a Labor government. I think that was certainly the case when we were there. We put a huge amount of time and effort and money into improving conditions, and some of those programs are still now in place all these years later—the ones that we started.

Ms Jennie Carter: Thank you, Dr Hames.

End of interview 3

74 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Interview 4

Ms Jennie Carter: This is recording 4 of an interview with Dr Kim Hames. The interviewer is Jennie Carter and the interview is being conducted on Wednesday, 13 September 2017.

Kim, we were talking about when you first came into the Parliament in 1993 and then in 1997 your elevation to the ministry. Can you tell me a bit about that time because it was when the Richard Court government was elected and it came on the wake of all the issues with the Labor government beforehand? What did that mean for your role in Parliament and Parliament generally?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Having been a backbencher for four years, getting to be a minister was fantastic. Being on the backbench is not nice. In those years, you know, we were mushrooms in the full sense, so we weren’t allowed to speak very often. Because we had large numbers and a good majority—sorry, in that early stage we didn’t have a big majority, but government didn’t want to get into any trouble and so backbenchers were discouraged from saying anything. We weren’t given many opportunities to talk about anything. Largely, we were just there to make up the numbers voting. So, it wasn’t a great time in that sense. I did lots of committee work. I was on a science and technology committee that was chaired by Bill Thomas, I think his name was, the Labor member, which was very unusual, incidentally. It was one of those things that Hendy and I managed to do while Richard was away one day. We organised for that committee to be put up with Labor being chair of it and I was a member of it.

Ms Jennie Carter: Why was that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was just Bill’s idea. The general theory is that it doesn’t matter who has an idea for a committee, if government has the numbers, government runs the thing. It was looking at science and technology particularly linking into South East Asia and Hendy had a very strong view in his role as Minister for Regional Development, I think he was, that we should greatly strengthen our ties with all South East Asia because that is where future economic opportunities would lie, so he was very keen on a committee, and our view was that someone else thought of it, “Well, good on them”, let them chair it. I think we still had the numbers 75 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW but we agreed that Bill was going to be chair. I think I was deputy—I’m not sure. Anyway, we established that committee, which was a fascinating committee to be on.

I also did a recycling and waste management committee that I chaired and we had, interestingly, people like Rhonda Parker, Arthur Marshall, Judy Edwards, , and for a short time, . All of them except Arthur became ministers or people who were fairly senior within the parties, but, at the time, we were all just backbenchers not doing anything in particular or in opposition at the time. It was a great collection of people. But the report that we did, which was a recycling and waste management plan for Western Australia, is, I think, still the benchmark that is used to determine management of landfill in WA, particularly management of waste into landfill and how those landfill sites are managed.

I can’t remember what else. I think I did another committee somewhere. That’s right; we did the Esperance lead committee. No, we didn’t—sorry, that was much later. Getting confusing with all the time. Anyway, I did those two and then, as I said to you last week, Richard gave me the call and in [1997] I was made Minister for Water; Aboriginal Affairs; Housing.

In opposition, things were tough for them because our government was going well and once we got re-elected in 1997 we had a much bigger majority, we were very strong and we improved our percentage. Opposition is a tough place. As you see, when we’ve been in opposition, you change leaders like shirts, almost. They had four different leaders of the opposition during that time. I can’t for the life of me remember who they were, because I get confused, I have to say, with the two periods of government that I’ve been in—the first time we were in and then the second time to follow. It was certainly Gallop at the end because he won the 2001 election. I’m pretty sure they had Ian Taylor in there. Ian, he was before Gallop, he was a really lovely guy. I have a huge amount of respect for Ian Taylor. His only trouble was that as Leader of the Opposition you have to be ruthless and you have to be nasty, and he just couldn’t and when he tried, he just sounded silly. We almost laughed at him trying to be grumpy and angry and stuff like that, because it wasn’t his real match up. He struggled a bit as leader. I think Jim McGinty was there for a short period of time, wasn’t he?

Ms Jennie Carter: Was it easier for him to be grumpy? 76 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. Jim was tough and hard and ruthless. I’ve got on well with him since then, but he had no trouble being ruthless. The conflict within the Labor Party, with all their factional arrangements, was hard work for anyone who was leading the opposition. The factions were ruthless. Anyone who wasn’t performing, not so much not performing, but who they didn’t think could win—I think that was the trouble Jim had; he wasn’t that popular in the electorate. People liked Ian Taylor, but he wasn’t performing well in Parliament. Jim was performing well in Parliament, but wasn’t that popular in the electorate. I don’t have any stats to back up those statements. If you look at stats they might not necessarily be true, but that is just the impression we had. I forget who the fourth one was. Do you know who that was? You said there were four before. I can’t remember who the fourth person was.8

Ms Jennie Carter: I can certainly find that out. We can come back to that one.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Unless it was Michelle Roberts at any stage—no. I know she wanted it; she’s wanted it all her life.

Ms Jennie Carter: Getting back to just before you became a minister, you were talking about, in the last election, the Noel Crichton–Browne faction and the Chaney faction.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Anybody but—Chaney, Colin Barnett, whoever it was.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did that impact at all on your management of your time in Parliament?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Only that you had to be cautious who you upset, because that faction had control, had the numbers and Richard was a part of that faction. If you wanted to be a minister, you had to be a bit careful of what toes you trod on and sometimes bite your tongue when you wanted to get a bit more aggressive in the things that you were saying. So, yes, it made a difference. But, you know, if you

8 Leaders of the Opposition: Carmen Lawrence (February 1993-February 1994), Ian Taylor (February 1994-October 1994), Jim McGinty (October 1994-October 1996), Geoff Gallop (October 1996- February 2001). 77 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW were working with anybody who had the potential to be influenced by others who didn’t like you, you’d tread carefully as well.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you feel you had to?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Not from Richard. I think, in retrospect, I didn’t because Richard made his own decisions and if he wanted you, he got you. But, as we saw with the Doug Shave thing later, he certainly was influenced in some things by people who were close to him.

Ms Jennie Carter: We’ll come to that later on. Okay, at the election in 1997, you became Minister for Water; Housing; and Aboriginal Affairs —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: The thing Richard said was that as part of the deal I had to stop working in my surgery. So that was the end of my two —

Ms Jennie Carter: How did you feel about that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Fine, because I went to a minister’s salary and so I didn’t have to worry about extra funds. While I was doing it to keep my hand in, it was difficult. Being a backbencher, people don’t think it’s that busy, but it is a huge amount of time, particularly if you want to win an election. So not having to take that time of being in the surgery, which was altogether about a day a week, was a big relief, although more away from the electorate. When you’re a minister you are enormously busy. I always equate what I was doing as a GP and on council as about the same workload as being a backbencher in Parliament. You wouldn’t think that is the case, but I was a busy GP—five days, plus Saturday morning, plus every fourth Sunday—three nights a week on council and that is the same as being a backbencher. That’s how hard you work. Being a minister is about double that. The workload as a minister is enormous. You have probably two or three hours of reading or signing to do after work every night. Some would stay in there and do it. Monty House used to stay at work. He would be working until 8.30 or 9.00 at night in his office before he would go home. Whereas I would go home when all the rest of the people in the office went home at 5.00 or 5.30 when there were no functions on that night. If I had no functions, I would take that workload home. That covers weekends as well. You’d have a much bigger bag on a weekend—two or three bags sometimes. You watch Yes Minister with him loaded with stuff, and it’s a bit like that, 78 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW but you just had miles of stuff to do. I would go home and sit in the lounge chair and just read and sign and read and sign until anywhere from 9.00 to 10.30 at night, every night.

Ms Jennie Carter: During that period 1997 to 2001, can you think of any particular issues that you were involved with that you found either challenging or exciting?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: There were a lot of things that we did. I mean, in water, the amount of water running off to the dams was always reducing, so we were always looking at how we could improve that. We did a lot of work looking at underground water supply and went to the US, to San Diego, to look at their desalination system and their recharging of the aquifers. So, the recharging of the aquifer that they are doing right now, that just got approved, was something that we started when I was the minister. The much better management of underground water supplies was there. The desalination unit I still take credit for, even though Labor built it. Although I’ve agreed to share, just which opposition I share it with is an interesting story.

Ms Jennie Carter: Can you tell me about it?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: What happened was that I was really keen on desalination. People were talking still about pipelines from the Kimberley, but the reality is that bringing water all that distance, in effect through a spaghetti tube, to supply Perth is enormously expensive. People still talk about it now. The cost at the time was about $3.60 per kilolitre of water to bring it down. We were getting it out of our dams at about 30c or 40c a kilolitre, so a huge difference. People kept talking about greening the deserts on the way down, but the reality is that the cost of a banana is, in effect, the cost of the water to grow the banana, so if your water costs $3.60 a kilo, then your bananas are going to be enormously expensive—in fact, unaffordable. You can’t use it for irrigation along the way to grow things because the water is too expensive. The pipeline was possible but difficult. I know Colin was a big fan of it still—or a channel or whatever—but the reality is that all the water of all the oceans of the world run into the sea. Where does the sea go? It’s right at our doorstep. So the water that’s off Perth beaches contains water that comes down that Fitzroy Valley or the Nile or wherever else the river is that runs. It’s beautiful clean water. All you have to do is take the salt out. To take the salt out it cost $1.19 a kilolitre, so a huge difference in cost. The way ahead was to build desalination plants. Jim Gill, was the CEO of Water Corp, who, in fact, is an engineer, and now I am told gets 79 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW credit for the desalination plant, [but] didn’t want a bar of it. He was dragged kicking and screaming. I took him and the head of the Department of Water with me and we went overseas to look at a desalination plant in Eilat, which is in southern Israel, and then we went to San Diego, where they had built a desalination plant.

Ms Jennie Carter: How did you know that these were the places to go and see?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: We didn’t; we just looked around the world at where they had desal plants and went to them to have a look and see how they operated and how successful they were. When we got back, I said to Jim Gill, “That’s what we’re going to do. I want you to go and find an international expert as a consultant and put together a plan for putting a desalination plant probably in Kwinana, which is likely to be the best site.” Jim said—he’d been partially convinced following our trip—”Look, I know someone who’s already in WA who is an expert who can do that work.” I said, “Fine.” I can’t remember his name, but he had a look at it, came up with the plan for the desal unit in Kwinana and worked out that the cost was going to be $1.19, roughly, a kilolitre. So I asked Jim to prepare a cabinet submission to take to cabinet to get the funding to build this desal plant, then we lost government. We lost the election and it went into a drawer in Water Corp.

Ms Jennie Carter: Had you got approval from the government to build a desalination plant or that was still in process?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, it hadn’t got to cabinet when we lost. I am told from different people in the Labor Party different versions.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: We had two or three different versions of what happened. One was that the Minister for Water at the time, which was Griffiths, I think, put it forward and took it to cabinet and got it approved. The second version came from Fran Logan, who was minister for development, or something of that nature at the time, and he told me that he was the one, that Griffiths didn’t want anything to do with it; he was the one that knew about it and as minister for resource development, I think it was or something like that, he was the one that pushed it. The other version was Gallop himself heard about it and told his minister to go and get it out. Whichever way it went, Labor approved it, Labor built it and quite reasonably take credit for it. But what they built was what I had planned and had ready to go. Sadly, didn’t get to be involved in any part of the building of it but it still feels good knowing 80 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW that that’s what happened. Without Labor doing it, I don’t think it ever would’ve happened. So that was an interesting development in water.

Also in water we did a new act of Parliament that was enormously complex and difficult and long called the Rights in Water and Irrigation Act 2000 or something it would’ve been. It’s been amended to some degree since then, but it was a very complex and difficult piece of work. The office of water and rivers put it together.

Ms Jennie Carter: And your involvement was?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I’m the minister, so I have to take it through the Parliament. I didn’t know lots about it to be honest. It was not an area that I was familiar with, and it was all to do with use of irrigation water and rights regarding what water you could use, volumes you could use, the approvals you need, the licensing, the relation of dams and what water you could use, which dams were farm dams that weren’t to be licensed and which were. Of course, the Labor Party scaremongered at the time, saying this was the thin edge of the wedge and all farm dams would then be licensed. So they fired up a fair bit of opposition from farmers, despite the fact that I said no way will I ever let farm dams be licensed as part of that. It depended on where the water flowed and whether it came through their property or off their property or whatever. It was very complex and difficult legislation, but it was needed. I mean, it is still the basis for managing water in this state, and we didn’t have that in place before. It was the department, in effect, that had all the expertise and knowledge of what was in it and they had to tell me lots of stuff on the way through. You have that with bills. Some bills you know inside out because you’re so intimately involved with them, and others you just don’t and you’ve got to rely on all the department heads to guide you through the legislation. It was a big job.

Ms Jennie Carter: And you had confidence in your department heads?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. Roger Payne was the CEO of the Water and Rivers Commission. The first thing Labor did when they won was get rid of Roger. The Labor Party aren’t very tolerant of people who seem to get on well with their ministers and get things done. So lots of heads of department heads rolled after Labor got into government in 2001. The whole of the board of Water Corp were dumped and a full new board were put in.

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Ms Jennie Carter: Yet the policy still went ahead.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. It was all written up, ready to go in a drawer. So they didn’t have to do anything, other than look at it and decide whether they’d do it or not. They didn’t have to develop any plans, other than find the location. I think we actually might’ve even found that. We knew it was going to be Kwinana. So we would’ve done all that work on that site, I would imagine, to get the costings right.

Ms Jennie Carter: Your other portfolio, Aboriginal affairs, what was happening when you were a minister in that period?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: We did a huge amount of stuff just trying to improve the quality of communities. I’d done a report in the first four years when we were in government, when I was a backbencher for Kevin Prince, who’d been made Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. He knew I had a deep interest, and we were friends, so he’d tend to take me to things. I went with him to places like Kalumburu. He put me in charge of a committee to look at management of Aboriginal communities and I chaired a committee just doing a report for him with Ben Wyatt’s dad being the CEO at the time, Cedric Wyatt. Cedric and I did this review that was called provision of essential services in remote Indigenous communities. It was a pretty long title. Anyway, it was all about normalisation of Aboriginal communities. Again, people all talk about that now. It was more Cedric’s idea than mine. I think Cedric had the idea and put it to Kevin and Kevin wanted it done. It was all about how we could turn communities, particularly on the fringe of Aboriginal towns, away from being reserves to normalised communities. It was provision of power to each household, provision of services to each household, where people would pay a fee the same as anyone else getting those services, and how we could do that throughout the state and how we could improve those remote communities. At the time there was a list of Aboriginal communities. I did the report as a backbencher, then got to be the minister, so I got to implement that report as well. For example, I worked with Colin, who was Minister for Energy at the time, to make sure Western Power started a program of getting power into those town houses; otherwise, they’d have generators at the edge and that would look after the community. We got power put through, improved the quality of services. There was a list of 48 communities. There was a federal–state agreement over these 48 named Aboriginal communities for which the state had responsibility. The commonwealth had responsibility for all the other ones, all the little ones, and they would look after them; they’d pay through ATSIC, they’d 82 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW pay contributions to their power and their water, and the state would provide it, but we had to look after the list of 48. I reached agreement with the commonwealth on expanding that list of 48, saying, “We’ll take over those if you improve the infrastructure up to the standard that we need.” We’ve had a growth, and I think that list of communities is a hundred and something now—or early hundreds.

But it’s all become confused and then just recently the federal government, which was our federal government, stopped all the funding for those remote communities, hence the big argument about closing communities down just recently. That was disgraceful in my view, because they were the ones that established—in fact, it was under Bob Hawke that they were established on his homelands policy. The Aboriginals called it the Toyota policy because everyone who might’ve been living in a community somewhere like Beagle Bay, for example, said, “My homeland is out on this strip of land along One Arm Point”, so the Labor government would provide money for them to build a house and a Toyota to get there. Everybody of course immediately had places that they had to go. These very small family-based communities of two or three houses sprung up everywhere. We said as a state, “We’re not going to manage them. You’re spreading everyone out.” It’s fine in some ways; people get out of that humbug that’s in the bigger communities but, otherwise, how do the kids get to the school? How do they get jobs? How do they get anything? They just live a remote nomadic life with their families. Who does the maintenance and who provides the power and who provides the water in these extremely remote places?

So when the federal government just recently said, “We’re not going to fund any more”, we said, “Well, neither are we.” The pressure of course fell straight back on the state and some silly person in the Premier’s office accepted money for the federal government that covered, I think, two years of maintenance; then that was it. And, so, handed it over to us and then suddenly it became our problem because we were shutting them down. We weren’t shutting them down; we were saying to people, “If you want to keep living there, fine, but don’t expect any money from the state government to do it.” People said, “Well, how do we keep the water going? It’s so enormously expensive.” We said, “Well, we don’t know, but they’re not our houses; they’re yours. We weren’t funding you; the federal government was. We’ll provide a house in the town where your kids can go to school and get an education and get a job.” That was the controversy over the last few years, but it all originated

83 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW right back then from this list of 48 we were expanding and developing, but then the Labor Party homeland policy sent people in all directions to build houses.

Ms Jennie Carter: And has the management of Aboriginal affairs since then been sort of centred on these issues of communities?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, it has. We were trying to improve the opportunities for people to do their own stuff. We had a thing called RAESP—remote area essential services program. It still goes on today. We had that program put in place to manage the essential services in each community and funding to do that, but also to try and train Aboriginal people to be able to do it themselves, so to be able to do some plumbing and some carpentry.

Ms Jennie Carter: And that’s prior to 2001 that that was put in or was that afterwards?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No. I did that when I was minister, so between ’97 and 2001, so before I lost. We put all that program in place and it was progressing reasonably well. We also had a big housing program to renew and replace houses. So, yes.

The trouble with Aboriginal affairs—when I got back into government in 2008, as Deputy Premier, I had a choice of portfolios and I chose health and Aboriginal affairs because I wanted to keep doing that work. I loved being involved, working with Aboriginal people and getting to be with them and visit them around the state. But after I’d done that for about another two years, I reached the stage where I looked back and I’d been minister for four years and worked really hard to improve conditions for Aboriginal people. They’d had eight years of Labor and some of those programs continued and some didn’t. One in particular I was really annoyed with Carpenter for stopping. But they had eight years in place and then I’d come back and had another two years, so six years in total. I looked around and thought, “Were Aboriginal people better off now than they were when I started this 14 years previously?” and they weren’t. They weren’t better off. Issues were still the same. Housing quality was just as poor. They were better in some areas where we’d started these programs, but the programs were just going on and on and on—the same programs that I’d started—yet there were no great outcomes there. So I got frustrated at that stage.

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But the one thing that we did start was right towards the end of my tenure, we decided the thing that Aboriginal people needed most was advocacy. This was for the Department of Indigenous Affairs. What was it going to do? Was it going to be shut down, because people were saying it should shut down? In its role, it was spread very thin over the whole state—two or three people covering large areas. We said, “No. What we’re going to do is consolidate those into the major regional towns that’ll work outwards from there and they’re going to be a mentoring agency”—so if someone needs someone with them to go to the bank or to go to the Department of Housing or to deal with the commonwealth. Doing that paperwork and speaking up when you’re not well trained to speak and fight for yourself and argue with the bureaucrats is enormously difficult. I had just started setting these things up to be able to go and talk on behalf of Aboriginal people with Aboriginal people, and Carpenter from opposition said—was it Carpenter or Gallop? Anyway, I think it was Carpenter who said that. As soon as they got into government, they shut them all down, which is an enormous shame. I was just talking this week to someone working with vets’ affairs who’s setting up exactly that model to help look after veterans throughout the state—exactly that model that was shut down within weeks of Labor getting into government.

I do have an interesting story to tell about that time that is sad but fascinating. One of the first of those that we were going to be opening was, I think, in Leonora or Laverton—one of those two. They are right close together. I think it must’ve been Leonora. That’s the bigger town. We were up in Geraldton at the time at a cabinet meeting in Geraldton.

Ms Jennie Carter: What period was this, Kim?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: In that ’97 to 2001. I can’t remember exactly when. Anyway, we were going there to Leonora and the plane that we’d booked had undercarriage trouble and so we got this message while we were up there and my policy officer, Melinda Hayes, was running around trying to find, because we wanted to go and open this new centre. She ended up finding a plane for us to use, which was an awful plane. We whinged about it. It was this long pencil-shaped thing that you could hardly fit into. Anyway, we went and did that trip and came back. The day after we went, this plane had been repaired and was hired by someone to do a trip, the same as us, to Leonora. I don’t know if it was a mining company or something like that. That’s the plane that everybody died in. That’s the plane that took off, heading for 85 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Leonora and then everyone just died in the plane. The oxygen must’ve run out and it kept flying and flying and flying and crashed in Queensland. That was the plane we were going to be on a day or two before. It’s unlucky for them, but lucky for us, because we would’ve all been dead the same. We had about six or seven people in the plane that would’ve died.

Ms Jennie Carter: It’s something to think about, because there’s a lot of travelling as Aboriginal minister to communities around the state.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: That must’ve taken quite a toll as well.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, there was lots of flying, but a lot of it was fun. We went to so many fascinating places. One of the things I got to do was up in the Fitzroy Valley. That’s when they were talking about putting a new dam in Dimond Gorge. The Minister for Water, I think—no, not water; that was me. Anyway, someone was really keen on putting this dam up in the Fitzroy to provide irrigation for that whole area and develop a new industry through the Fitzroy. Richard was a bit concerned about the Aboriginal aspects of it, as he was in so many different things with Aboriginal people, so asked me to go and have a look and see what I thought. I arranged a visit to go there. I think I had about six or seven Aboriginal elders with me from different groups through that whole region. We went up there and camped the night and then went the next day out to look at Dimond Gorge.

There was this Aboriginal man who was a great old fellow called Billy King—a very tall, slim person from Mt Barnett. He was guiding me through this area with the others, but he was very good to talk to. He saw his first white man when he was 14, coming out of that area. You go through this beautiful lush bush and he said there were about 5 000 Aboriginal people living in this whole valley before. It was so lush and so much food, he said, particularly sugar bags. Sugar bags are honey. Those bees didn’t sting, so that was good. He said there was just honey through all of the valleys, and you’d be walking along and every 50 metres or so there’d be a midden heap where they were doing stone implements. You could just bend down and pick them up, and I did, I picked up a little black cutting tool, probably for skinning, and a different chert arrowhead. Billy asked me to take them with us, and I said, “Are you sure, Billy, because you shouldn’t take stuff out of here?”, and he said, “No, no I 86 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW want you to have them to remember this area.” So, I’ve still got those things. I came back from that trip and recommended that Richard didn’t support it because to bury such amazing history and story of Aboriginal people under 100 metres of water— none of the Aboriginals supported, but neither did I, and so Richard didn’t proceed; he took my advice.

The reality is that you don’t need to dam Dimond Gorge. As I found as Minister for Water, which I didn’t know at the time, there’s a huge underground water basin under there called the Canning Basin. It’s got far more water than the underground basin under Perth where we get all our drinking water. I think up to about 60 per cent of our drinking water now comes from the underground sources—massive amount of water. It’s like a huge bath tub that just fills up every year, so you could take as much water as you liked out of that underground source without having to do it above ground in a dam for virtually the same price. Getting underground water out, you’ve got to have power to do it, obviously, but it doesn’t matter; the cost is almost the same. It still hasn’t been tapped that resource, but it should be. There’s a massive opportunity for irrigation in that area. Some of the Aboriginal people are against that, but they’re coming around. You don’t do it in Dimond Gorge; there’s land out from that on the way just east of Bidyadanga that has beautiful soil, a bit like the Ord—massive opportunity for development. There are stations there that have been cleared that have cattle on them that would be perfect for irrigation. I think it will come one day in the future—that will be developed in the same way that the Ord River dam is.

Ms Jennie Carter: I suppose that brings us to places like the Ord River dam project. Were you involved with much of what was happening at the Ord River in that period?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, it was sort of in between things when I was there. My involvement with the Ord is different to that. I’ve got a diary written by my uncle that’s in the Kununurra library—I think I told you about it before—when he was 16 during the Second World War. I think he went up there in 1943 and he was a surveying assistant and they did the surveys for all of that area up there, including for the dam. They knew about the potential for the dam during the Second World War and they did the survey of that whole area. What’s that famous family? The Duracks. There was lots of mention of the Duracks right through his book—of going hunting with them and walking with them and surveying that whole area and what 87 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW happened to them. That’s more of the association with me, although when I was minister I did go out and over and around it quite a bit. But it was just operating. It was struggling a bit, so it was before we got anywhere near the stage 2 development that we did in our second term of government.

Ms Jennie Carter: We might come back to visit that one. The other portfolio you had was housing. Between 1997 and 2001, when you were minister, can you think of any issues about housing?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: We did all that renewal program. It was started, again, by Kevin Prince, who was Minister for Housing as well at the time.

Ms Jennie Carter: Can you explain what that is?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It started in Lockridge. There were a huge number of flats in Lockridge with people in public housing and it had become a ghetto because it was all the people who had very low socioeconomic circumstances crowded in together. A big Aboriginal population as well, but not just them, people from all walks of life. There was a huge incidence of crime and violence within that community. It had a special name, the New Living Program.9 Anyway, Richard started this housing renewal program. When I took over as minister, I took over that program and we decided we would expand that significantly. Our first area was Balga and so we started doing exactly the same thing right through Balga. The plan was to have a policy that spread people who were in public housing out a lot more, so it was a one- in-12 policy. Where Homeswest owned land and did a contract to develop it for general housing—so that’s what happened a lot. Homeswest had to generate its own money, $35 million a year to run all the public housing, but it had enormous land stock, so it would open up a new area of land, go in contracts with a developer who would develop it for them, but part of that deal was that one in 12 blocks had to be available for public housing.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did that continue on, that policy—one in 12?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, it’s still there now. A lot of people who were in Homeswest houses then—you know, they were old, rundown, maintenance had

9 The Lockridge New Living Program began in May 1995. 88 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW been poor—got the opportunity to purchase their unit if they wanted to, or purchase another Homeswest unit, or move into a Homeswest house somewhere else, or purchase another house. We had all these different policies that assisted people, backed by Keystart, to get into their own homes. For Aboriginal people in particular there was a policy that allowed partial purchase, so they could purchase 40 per cent of the house and Homeswest would own the rest. They wouldn’t pay rent to Homeswest for their share, but they would have to do maintenance of the building.

Ms Jennie Carter: So Homeswest would have to do the maintenance?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, the person owning the house would have to do the maintenance. So it meant that Homeswest had then no further charges; they didn’t get rent for their percentage of ownership. Then when the person sold the house, Homeswest would get its money back—whatever percentage they owned. So, if they owned 60 per cent, they get 60 per cent of the sale price after costs of selling the house. That was very popular and we sold lots of houses. People otherwise were moved into new houses. A lot of the old flats, we redeveloped them and they became privately owned complexes, so fenced. One in Balga in particular, as you go on Wanneroo Road, it’s just off to the right after you cross Reid Highway, it became a private complex. We put a swimming pool in there and private security fences and stuff like that, and they were very popular.

Those sorts of changes totally transformed suburbs like that from being very poorly regarded to being ones where lots of people who worked owned houses as well. We need just do them there. I forget the whole list, but there were areas like Queens Park and down near Cockburn. There were six or seven or eight of these suburbs where we did the same and totally transformed them. There were areas near Belmont, or Cloverdale. I think Cloverdale was one. They weren’t flats, but old, daggy houses, so same program there on big blocks. We did subdivisions and allowed people to come in and buy units and build their own houses and buy land and all sorts of things. My son lives in Cloverdale now and I just drove past that area the other day and there are new houses everywhere—double-storey houses—yet that was just an entrenched Homeswest community. Now it’s thriving.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you run up against any opposition to this policy or how it was being carried out?

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Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, everyone was very happy. It was a very popular policy. I got to do great things like being in cranes and start demolitions.

Ms Jennie Carter: Wearing hard hats [chuckles].

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I think I told you that’s where I had that street named after me—Hames Court—that was one of those blocks that we demolished. So, yes, it was a good time to be in Housing. Interestingly enough, when we came back to government in 2008, the waiting list had blown out enormously. We were working and working to get those wait times and waitlists down for public housing. We were building, I think, 1350 new units per year for additional public houses. Now, that wasn’t the total available, because were actually losing some with this redevelopment program, but that’s how many new ones we were buying or developing each year. When we got back into government in 2008, the Labor Party were down to about 700 or 800 per year, so they dropped by over 500 units a year, because they had done that. They just didn’t put enough money into it. It’s during that period of time, that eight years of Labor, that those waiting lists just blew out enormously, because they’d not put the money in that you needed to do that redevelopment.

Ms Jennie Carter: Which brings me, I suppose, in that period 1997 to 2001, why do you think the Liberal government lost favour?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: There were a number of things. Every decision you make upsets some people; it’s inevitable. The longer you’re in government, the more people collectively you upset, and so eventually you reach the stage where you’re starting to looking dodgy. People do get sick of you, get sick of ministers. There’s this “It’s time” factor always when you’ve been eight years in government. In fact, the opposite is after four years. Almost no government gets kicked out after four years for the same reason. There is this fair go mentality, people say you’ve got to give them a reasonable chance to do what they’re doing and four years isn’t very long. But after eight years they get sick of you. Then we had a pile of things that went wrong, and there are three that I think of in particular in increasing order of importance.

One was Bobby Bloffwitch, the member for Geraldton. He got caught having shares in a company called Kingstream that had involvement in the development of the new 90 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW marina that Colin was pushing north of Geraldton, and Bloffwitch had been pushing for that in Parliament, so he had a clear conflict of interest. Sadly, what turned out later is that he probably didn’t even know that he had the shares. He was developing dementia. I’d watched him in Parliament getting tremors and I remember thinking he was getting Parkinson’s disease, because he used to jig his foot all the time, and often people who jig their foot like that are actually hiding a tremor. I watched him very carefully in our party room when were just doing things and I was convinced that he was getting Parkinson’s. Anyway, we lost track of it when we lost the election, but then after the election he totally lost his mental capacity. I remember Norman saying they went to visit him and Bobby didn’t even know who they were. He died not too long afterwards. I am fairly certain he didn’t even know that he owned these shares. It just was so fast, his deterioration.

That was one thing. The second thing was Doug Shave—Doug Shave and the retirement village crisis, I think it was called. A lot of people lost their money in a collapse within the [finance broking] industry—I don’t even remember much about it. I wasn’t involved. Anyway, the general feeling was that Doug Shave should’ve done something about it, that he sat on his hands and did nothing, and should’ve fixed it.

Ms Jennie Carter: What do you think?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I don’t know. As I said, I didn’t know enough about it. He was pretty much on the nose. The general view was that he should be removed from being a minister. What I do know is that Doug wasn’t the hardest working minister in the team, but don’t speak ill of the dead. He has gone now. As you know, he just recently died. The general feeling was that Doug should’ve been removed as minister. Richard was told by his cohorts that because our lot, the non-Crichton- Browne lot, had the numbers in the party room that he’d get dumped as Premier. So he needed to keep Doug on to keep the numbers there, otherwise he’d annoy the rest of his own faction. He needed his faction to be behind him to get through, and it just wasn’t true. We might’ve been a different faction, but we liked Richard and we thought he was doing a great job, and we would’ve all supported him whichever— the faction feeling amongst our group wasn’t that strong. We were a loose alignment of people, not a tight group by any means. We’d vote the way we wanted to vote. No-one caucused votes or sat down before meetings and worked out what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. We just made our own decisions individually in the party room on all issues. This is what I’ve been told; I don’t know if 91 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW this is true or not but I was told that that’s why Richard didn’t sack him and the polls showed fairly certainly that that had an influence on the impression of government.

But the big thing was this save the forests issue. Gallop was very clever in that sense. We’d had a joint policy, Liberal and Labor, of sustainable development of forests. We’d had this policy for years and years and years. I remember when I first started wanting to run for Parliament, we had a meeting up in Liberal Party head office and this thing about save the forests, save the trees was starting then. I said to the room, “I think we should look at doing this”, and the member for the south west—was it Leon something?10—from down south, I think it was around Busselton or somewhere in that south west region, at the time, said “Look, you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you want to make public comments about the forests, go and have a look first. Go down there, drive through and have a look. What you’ll see is the biggest and the best trees are actually from reclaimed forest. Those trees wouldn’t exist if there hadn’t been a forest industry; they would’ve all been knocked over for farmland. They’re there to produce an industry, that’s a valuable industry and provides a huge number of jobs in the south west. Those areas have been carefully managed because we want to keep the industry going forever. So when you do felling, it’s much better actually doing clear-felling because the big karri trees don’t grow back well unless they’ve got clear and open space. What happens with clear-fell is we take everything out, we replant all the native species again and the density is actually much greater because the trees are all growing at the same rate.” He said, “Go to the really old parts of the forest which haven’t been touched and you’ll see all the old beautiful karri trees aren’t so beautiful. No tree lives forever; all the crowns have died out of them, because they’ve got so old, and the density isn’t very great because when they were thriving, the shade stopped any other trees growing up around them. Where they cleared everything, the trees all grow at the same rate and you get a lot more of those big karri trees.” He said, “The areas that we’re starting to clear now are regrowth forests. The ones they’re saying, ‘Save the old-growth trees’ are actually regrowth trees, but they’re 100 years old. But in this block down here they’re 90 years old and this block down here they’re 80 years old. We keep that cycle of trees going.”

But Gallop got the public imagination. All the people going out and hugging trees and saying, “We need to save the forests”—the forests didn’t need saving, but

10 Leon Harold Watt MLA, member for Albany 1974-1993 92 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW everyone was convinced. The unions got onto it and promoted it like anything. At all our booths, for example, all the unions had people wearing “Save the Forest” T- shirts and hanging out of the trees and everywhere. The areas that cost us the most were strong Liberal areas. It was the doctors’ wives who wanted to save the forests. The biggest swing against me was in my safest Liberal area, which was Mt Lawley, when I lost in 2001. That was the amount that put us over, and the One Nation thing. We all decided we would put One Nation last. One Nation decided to punish us by giving their preferences against all sitting members. We had more members, so by giving them against sitting members we were affected much more than Labor was. We still would’ve won that election if it hadn’t been for that last thing. I still probably would’ve lost, but a number of other seats, particularly country seats, where Labor got in it was because of that One Nation vote. The preferences got them over the line.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you expect the One Nation vote to be as significant?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, we didn’t. We thought they were —

Ms Jennie Carter: Was that discussed?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: In retrospect [chuckles] that’s what we should’ve done. I don’t know what we should’ve done. I’m pretty much against One Nation’s views and policies, but interestingly the people who tend to vote for One Nation are the people more to the right of the Liberal Party, what some might call the rednecks. They have very strong views on society and life, and thought that what Pauline Hanson was saying was true. They’re the ones that, particularly tough country people, had that view. So, you know, some votes were 20 per cent, I think, in country areas. People don’t understand how preferences work, so they didn’t realise that voting One Nation would automatically give their preference to the Labor Party. They just followed the how-to-vote card. All those things together and the “It’s time, eight years; give the other mob a go.” And Gallop was a pretty popular figure, well respected.

Ms Jennie Carter: Was Richard Court as popular?

93 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Not as, but he was still reasonably popular. He wasn’t on the nose like poor old Colin was when we got to the recent election. No, Richard was still pretty well regarded by the public.

Ms Jennie Carter: So then, how did you feel on the night of the count?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It’s a devastating experience, one of the worst experiences you’d ever want to have, because it’s not just you that’s elected—your job. I could go back to medicine straightaway. I had a ministerial office with eight or nine staff. What happens with Labor, again, is that most of your staff you know are going to lose their job when they get in. I don’t think they were as bad this time, but previously they’ve just done big clean-outs of staff. My former chief of staff, who was very non-political—in his earlier days, he fairly certainly voted Labor, then he was working for the Electoral Commission, so he had to be absolutely neutral —

Ms Jennie Carter: What was his name?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Ian Wight-Pickin. He had to be neutral, but he’d been my chief of staff, so as soon as Labor got in, he was dumped straight out after all those years of working. That’s just what they did. I had seven or eight staff in my ministerial office. I had my electorate staff as well. Once you lose, of course, your electorate staff will lose their job as well. You have a car that’s provided by the government. You’ve got a phone, you’ve got a computer, you’ve got all those trappings that form part of your normal day-to-day life—in an instant [snaps fingers] they’re gone. By midnight when you’ve lost, everything stops, including your wage, but not the mortgage. The mortgage keeps going inevitably but the income drops to zero. Since then, we’ve put in a change to the legislation that gives people a small payout— $40 000 or $50 000—to see them through to getting their next job, because getting a job as an ex–member of Parliament is actually really difficult.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, yes; I understand that.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: For me, it was easy, when you’ve got a profession like medicine. Teaching is really hard to get back to. If you worked in a government department somewhere, it’s just very, very difficult if you’re not a public servant.

94 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

We didn’t need a big swing to defeat us. As it turned out, I got the smallest swing of any minister in the government, including Richard Court and Colin Barnett. We worked really hard during that election campaign with a really strong team of people. Christian Allier, who’d been my chief of staff along the way, came through all that with me, did an enormous amount of work with me, and my other staff as well. But on that night, it’s all gone. I’m doing a speech and crying and all my staff are holding—I stood up on a box—my legs and my jacket. People are hanging off and everyone is just crying their eyes out. Then the next day you start packing everything up. You’ve got two or three days to hand the keys back and to hand everything back that you’ve had for that eight years, and your staff don’t have jobs anymore. I ended up—instead of going back to medicine, we set up a new company doing Aboriginal heritage work and two of my staff came with me, two policy officers, because they didn’t have anything to go to. We set up a company doing heritage surveys, so we could still be together, but so that they’d have an income.

Ms Jennie Carter: Well, I’d like to get to that in a minute. You were defeated by Bob Kucera. What was your relationship with him?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I get on better now. I still know Bob. He’s commodore, I think, down at the Freshwater Bay Yacht Club. I think it’s that one. But at the time, not too good. During the election campaign we were pretty cranky with him. He’d do things that I didn’t think were that appropriate. For example, when you go to a shopping centre, you get permission from the manager of the shopping centre to go and hand out things in the shopping centre. They didn’t like it too much; they didn’t want their customers to be interfered with. One in particular, the Dog Swamp shopping centre, we heard that Bob was over there handing out how-to-vote cards to everyone, so we called the manager, because we’d talked to him before and he’d said, “No, we’d rather you didn’t”, and he said, “Yeah, the bastard; we couldn’t stop him. He’s allowed to do it; we couldn’t stop him.” He would do things like that that would just bug you.

After the election, when we’d lost—he did a good campaign and he was very popular. He’s a very matey, matey sort of guy, so he did appeal to people like that. As I said, we got the smallest swing, but we didn’t have much, so we were out. I went round his house after, because Keith had come to mine and I was so impressed by that, I decided I would do the same. He actually knew one of my staff, a guy called Neville Collard, an Aboriginal guy who was working with me. I started 95 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW saying, “Look, could you do one thing for me? Look after Neville” because Neville had been a police officer as Bob was and they had known each other well. In fact, Bob came along to Neville’s fiftieth anniversary. I started to say, “Can you look after him?” and that made me cry, of course, which wasn’t easy, so I went off. I have to admit I got some negative feedback that I didn’t appreciate later, saying that Bob had said to people that I came round and cried because I’d lost the election, which wasn’t true. It was hard losing an election but I was crying because one of my staff, an Aboriginal guy, was going to be lost without the job that he had, because I’d taken him out of the police force to give him that job as my policy officer. So, yes, I didn’t appreciate those comments very much, but, anyway, I’ve been with Bob at things since then and I’ve got over it. I don’t know if it’s true that that’s what he said.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did he employ Neville?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No; he didn’t do anything.

Ms Jennie Carter: Kim, what effect did losing the election campaign have on your family?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, hard to know, really. Stephanie, in some ways, became more political than me. She feels the barbs of attacks and Labor policies and the things that they do much stronger than I do. So she was fairly upset, I think, during that time of actually losing the election and was very sad. She was with us, crying, when we’d lost. It did mean that I had more time to spend back at home and spend time with her and the kids because, as I’ve said before, most of the work she was having to do at home. But I don’t remember it greatly, I have to say. That four years is a bit of a blur—we worked hard doing Aboriginal heritage. We set up the company for Aboriginal heritage work and hired a little office in Vincent Street.11

Ms Jennie Carter: What prompted you to take on that particular field?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, I’d been Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, so I had responsibility for assessing all the heritage surveys and giving Aboriginal heritage approvals—what’s called section 18 approvals. I’d been intimately involved with all that during my time as the minister and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. We were

11 Hames Consultancy Group. 96 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW sitting around and I said, “What can we do? Where can we go?” and I saw an opportunity for someone who could coordinate different Aboriginal groups. The trouble was you had different archaeologists and anthropologists doing Aboriginal heritage surveys, but one Aboriginal group had only used this one and a different Aboriginal group had only used that one and trying to get a coordinated large project together was very, very difficult. So I teamed up with a company called AIC12, run by Ron and Sue Parker13 and he was an anthropologist. We sort of partly teamed up with them, but also we would use other people as well for different Aboriginal groups. So we went out looking for opportunities to get contracts to do surveys. Now, they were mostly all going to be government contracts but also mining company contracts as well, and we found some. In particular, we won one with the state government to do an infrastructure corridor from Geraldton to the front door of Murrin Murrin. I remember “Twiggy” Forrest at the time was CEO of Murrin Murrin nickel mine and I don’t know what he did or said, but he needed water and the water was in Geraldton. So, government decided to get the heritage clearance for a whole infrastructure corridor to take water, railway line, power, whatever was required, between Geraldton and that area of Laverton–Leonora, around there where Murrin Murrin was.

So we had to do the surveys. I got different anthropologists and archaeologists doing surveys all along the way and I went out with them quite a few times doing the surveys. We would do all the research for where all the sites were, then we would write up a report that combined the information from all of those different groups along the way and put it together as a single package for government. It ended up being about two inches thick—an enormous amount of work and writing—and not without its controversies. We had trouble with one particular group called Badimia, the Yamatji Land and Sea Council had responsibility for and there was a haunt of Labor Party people in there who were happy to help the Labor Party, but because I was an ex–Liberal minister, weren’t too keen to help us and work with us. A guy called David Ritter, whose dad used to be the Mayor of the City of Perth, was a Labor lawyer—ran for Labor at some stage along the way. He was the CEO there and things were fairly difficult. But anyway, it was a great project. We did that. We did widening of the gas pipeline through the metropolitan area and all the way down to Albany. We widened the infrastructure corridor to allow duplication of the gas pipeline coming from Dampier. I had the Kings Park contract, hence I said before—

12 Australian Interaction Consultants (AIC). 13 Ron Parker – see page 89. 97 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW remember?—I compiled the Aboriginal history of Kings Park. That was one of the things in the contract, but otherwise managing all the surveys. Every time they wanted to do something or build something, they’d call me in as a consultant, I’d get the Aboriginal groups in, we’d consult with them and then get approval for whatever it is they wanted to do.

Ms Jennie Carter: What were some of the challenges in getting different Aboriginal groups together?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Just everyone thought that they were the ones that needed to be doing it. For Perth, for example, there were about eight or 10 different Aboriginal groups that wanted to be surveyed. The tradition at the time, particularly when you’re out in the bush, if you get an Aboriginal group, you get six Aboriginal people doing the survey. You couldn’t do that in the metropolitan area because you had eight or 10 groups and each group was just a little family group, but they all wanted their people to do it to earn the income. So we did a policy that—and the question is: Who’s got the right to be consulted? Who has historical knowledge of that area? We studied all of that group and studied the genealogies of them, which the Department of Aboriginal Affairs actually subsequently purchased off a woman who’d done all this research, based out at Northam. She’d gone through birth and death certificates and marriage certificates.

Ms Jennie Carter: That was Jan Goodacre.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, that was her. So we got all this information and the reality was that none of the Aboriginal people who claimed to have knowledge were from Perth. As we studied the history, almost all of the Aboriginal people who lived in Perth died or moved out somewhere. Yellagonga and all his crew moved out from the metropolitan area up towards Joondalup, but others went back. There were a lot of family connections outside Perth, but a lot of the people like Bropho and Corunna and Wilkes—all those guys—they all came from different parts of the state, not Perth, and they’d end up here. So the only way Bropho had any knowledge is because he’d actually lived as a young man on the Swan River, down towards Midland. He’s not genetically or historically from Perth. None of that group are. The only one was Cedric Jacobs who fairly certainly was connected to someone—a lady who used to be here; her name was Edal—but that’s virtually the only one. But the Aboriginal Heritage Act doesn’t say you have to be from an area. It says you have to 98 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW say that you’ve got knowledge of an area and all of them claimed to have knowledge. How they got that knowledge is not so much questionable but you don’t know how they got that knowledge, unless they got it reading books or if some of their family may have been from the Perth region—like the Maguires, I think, are a good example—people had moved out and now later in adulthood come back, so they’d been told stories by their families or other individuals. So getting that knowledge is not impossible because of the stories and songlines that go throughout the population about different areas. They could have got that knowledge outside. The reality is the Aboriginal affairs act said that they’re entitled to be consulted if that’s the case, so we said, “All of these people who claim to have knowledge, you have to consult, but I suggest you just take two from each group and do them in collections where it’s possible.” So some got on well and some didn’t, but whatever it was was only going to be two people, and that worked much better. I think that’s what they do for a lot of different surveys.

We did that work for four years but what became increasingly obvious over the four years was that government contracts were going down. They were getting to the next election. They weren’t wanting to spend lots of money on doing that sort of work and so their contracts were going down. We were doing some other stuff but there wasn’t enough to employ all three of us, so we ended up starting to do other work. After about two years, I started doing some medicine and then Christian, who was one of the other guys, went off and worked in a federal member’s office. In fact, one of our other ones did the same thing, so we kept the company going for that four years, but towards the end, the income was getting less and less and we were doing more and more work outside. The niche that we thought we had wasn’t as big as we thought it was.

Ms Jennie Carter: When you say you did medicine, did you go back to being a GP or did you go into something else?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. I did mole scans as well. I did both: mole scan stuff and worked in a central city medical centre right near the Perth railway line.

Ms Jennie Carter: In that four years, you must have built up some fairly good relationships both with the mining companies, with state government and with Aboriginal communities. Am I right?

99 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Not really, because with the state government, you’re mostly dealing with people who work within the government. I think we did a pretty good job with our reports. I go back and look at those reports now and there’s about seven or eight of the different big ones that we did. I look at them now and they still look pretty impressive, I have to say. The government departments were happy with them and Kings Park were certainly happy with us—the board—but that’s a fairly limited contact area. The Aboriginal people that we worked with didn’t particularly want—so we used the anthropologists, Ron and Sue Parker. They’d go and do that direct consulting work because they were negative about me because I was Liberal, so guys like Bropho, Wilkes and Corunna were not happy with me when I’d been the minister because it’s all to do with housing and who gets what. There’s a fair bit of demand in there to do stuff.

I did work with Joan Martin, so I had contracts doing work with Joan Martin. You might remember her name. She was the Aboriginal woman on TV who got kicked out of her house in Karrinyup. The kids were terrorising the neighbours and throwing rocks at the TV crews. The guy from Seven News having rocks thrown at him by these youngsters—so her grandkids just went out of control. Her kids were alcoholic and she was looking after her grandkids, but they just were terrorising the neighbourhood. I was the Minister for Housing that had her evicted, so that was on all the TVs and it was a pretty big issue at the time. Anyway, I ended up working for her doing stuff, doing surveys, with her. To start off with, she wouldn’t talk to me at all but gradually, over the years, I won her over. She was a tough old lady—tough as old boots. I have quite a few of her paintings that I bought off her along the way. She was quite a good artist. But, yes, Joan Martin was not well respected amongst the Aboriginal community because she wouldn’t work with them either. If I talk to Aboriginal friends I’ve got there now, they don’t mention Joan Martin with any affection, I can tell you. But, anyway, I did work with her and the different groups along the way, but that doesn’t give you much exposure to other people. That was our trouble I guess; the ability to be able to build networks in areas. I hadn’t been involved, as minister, with lots of those areas and the mining companies certainly didn’t appreciate you much. I did stuff for them, clearances for them—I think it was Mount Gibson or Koolanooka. All up in that area through the midwest, we did heritage surveys, but they’re doing surveys partially because they have to and we made them use Joan Martin when they didn’t necessarily want to and forced them into including her in their surveys. So, yes, we weren’t their best friends either.

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Ms Jennie Carter: Did you enjoy it?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, I did; it was great fun.

Ms Jennie Carter: You liked the research because you said that you one day would like to develop your Aboriginal history of Kings Park.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, it’s all there, ready for publishing. In fact, I started doing it—I got some original photos or direct copies of original photos from the Battye Library to use. All that area around near Swan Brewery used to be a men’s home along there and a home for Aboriginal people for a while. The area along in front where the Mount Hospital is now, that used to be a big vegetable garden. So I’ve got copies of all those old photos and it’s all ready to go, to be printed; I just didn’t get around to it. I started to do it in the last couple of years of being a minister, but got tied up with other things, but it’s all sitting there, ready. Yes, one day I’ll get around to that.

Ms Jennie Carter: Anything else you’d like to discuss about this particular period?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, as I say, I don’t —

Ms Jennie Carter: How did you gear up to run again?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Getting to run again was a bit of an accident. I hadn’t planned it. I had never thought I was going back. I was thinking I’d go back to doing medicine, then I read something in the paper about—I think that Arthur Marshall was going to retire from down at Dawesville and Arthur and I had got on really well. If it had been anywhere else, it wouldn’t have happened, but because I’d had a huge association with Mandurah through my childhood and, in fact, with Stephanie and the kids, we’d go down there for holidays. We’d hire houses. I’d owned a house there for a while. For a brief amount of time, we actually bought a house down there with money that I won. Did I tell you that story?

Ms Jennie Carter: No.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, I had a patient who I’d lent $5 to for a bus fare and I didn’t really expect to get it back but anyway, one day that patient came back with 101 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW the $5. I said, “Oh, thanks” and took my $5 back. The next patient came in and said, “Oh, do you want to buy a Telethon raffle ticket?” I said, “Oh well; easy come, easy go [chuckles].” That was the only money I had on me so I could only buy one ticket. I handed the $5 back over. Anyway, that was the Telethon home. In those days, instead of doing an auction, they did a raffle. The next thing is I get a phone call from Channel Seven saying you’ve won the Telethon house, which was a house in a new development up in Midland. We sold it because I didn’t need a house in Midland and I actually used the money to save a friend of mine who was going broke with his bakery, but it still gave me the borrowing capacity to get a house down in Mandurah that was a holiday house for us. So I had all this association with Mandurah. I said, “Arthur, have you got anyone lined up to run for the seat?” He said, “Funny you should say that. I did have someone lined up but he’s had marital problems and doesn’t want to run anymore. He’s come along with someone else to run in his place and I’m not very keen on him, so if you want to run, that’d be fantastic.” So, that’s what I did.

Ms Jennie Carter: How did preselection for that work out?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Arthur had started off a new branch at Halls Head. There’d only been one branch in the area before. This guy and the guy that Arthur had had lined up totally stacked that branch with people. They got 120 people into that branch, which gave them eight preselection votes. When it came to the preselection, there were 32 people, so you had to get 16 plus one to win. We went through talking to everybody, we interviewed people and we met everyone who was going to be on the preselection committee. What was clear to us was that he had 12 lined up before we even started, so he was going to get 12 votes. Anyway, we went into the preselection and it was 16-all. Interestingly enough, in that same preselection was Dennis Jensen, who after that won the federal seat preselection, but he didn’t get any votes in this one. He might have had some at the start that fed off. Anyway, it was 16-all, so it was the casting vote of the chair. The chair knew me from before as the minister but she’d rung the people who were the referees for each of us. The other guy—Vern Goff—had put someone down and she rang him and he said, “Well, I did agree to go referee. He’s a nice fellow, but I actually think this Kim Hames is better.” She said that was one of the things that convinced her to go with me. Of course, Vern disappeared straight after that. He went to the National Party and ran against me in the [2005] election. He spent a huge amount of money, about 60 grand, and got 600 votes. We were getting 10 000 or 11 000 and he got 600, so 102 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW it shows how popular he was. But, yes, it was lucky I had the casting vote of the chair that won me the preselection. My preselections have always been tight. It’s never easy. I tell people that the hardest thing in the Liberal Party is to win a preselection for a winnable seat, and Arthur’s was a great seat—a fantastic seat.

Ms Jennie Carter: You said that you didn’t think that you would run again, that you were planning another career. What changed your mind?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I’d always wanted to be Minister for Health. In the 2001 election I’d convinced Richard to make me Minister for Health if we won again. He’d been through about five different Ministers for Health. In fact, one of my friends, the one Kevin Prince, who’d supported me, told Richard he shouldn’t make me Minister for Health because people in the same profession being minister wasn’t a good idea. As an example, in fact, they used Norman Moore, who’d been a teacher and then been Minister for Education. The general feeling was that he wasn’t the best ever minister, but that was sort of used as an example. That’s why I never got to be Minister for Health sooner. I think we had five of them during eight years of government—five health ministers including Kevin himself, who didn’t last that long, Peter Foss. Who else was there? Graham Kierath. I can’t remember the others— John Day. At least four.14 Anyway, Richard had said that he would let me be Minister for Health if I won, and then we didn’t win. So I still had this burning ambition to be Minister for Health. If it hadn’t been Arthur resigning, I would never have gone, but I wanted to get back and have another crack and get to be Minister for Health, so that’s what happened.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did that entail you moving to the region at all?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I did, but Stephanie couldn’t. We had, as we’ve said, a child who had health problems. I say that carefully because they might read it one day. He had to still be in Perth, but the other kids still had school up here and moving them out and down there would’ve been very difficult. But I had to be in my electorate, so I virtually bached for the next four years and spent about two to three days a week up in Perth. It was a very tough time for Stephanie, virtually living on her own with six kids all going to school. It was a tough time for her. I learnt to cook

14 Ministers for Health in the Richard Court Government were: Peter Foss (February 1993-February 1995), Graham Kierath (February-December 1995), Kevin Prince (December 1995-July 1998), John Day (July 1998-February 2001). 103 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

[chuckles] during those four years. In fact, I learnt to really enjoy cooking—but mostly living alone. That’s another story.

Ms Jennie Carter: You moved to your electorate, was that before the election or after?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Before the election.

Ms Jennie Carter: To start the campaign?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: When I won the preselection, we bought a house on the canals. I’d always wanted to have a house on the canals in Mandurah. I just love being near the water. I love having a boat at the back door. We’d looked just to buy a unit. We’d worked out we could afford to buy a unit of some sort, we couldn’t afford anything else at the time, but we just couldn’t find one. The prices had leapt up just in the six months before leading up to preselection and we couldn’t afford to buy one. Anyway, we were driving past this house and Stephanie said, “Let’s go and have a look.” I said, “No, no, no. Don’t tease yourself. We can’t afford a house.” Anyway, she went in and came out 10 minutes later and said, “You’ve got to come in and have a look.” It wasn’t that flash a house. I mean it is just a Morley-style four- bedroom, two-bathroom house, but there was just something about it. It had a great atmosphere and a great feel about it and a great connection to the water. The real estate agent selling it said, “Look, the guy who owns it is pretty well-off.” It was a guy called Cam McNab, who used to own the store over at Rottnest Island. He had that house but had other houses besides. As I say, he was pretty well-off. He said, “Look, I’ll do vendor finance for part of it. So whatever you can afford, and I’ll do vendor finance for the rest.” So that is what we did, because he wanted to go out and build a new house of his own. That is what he did.

Ms Jennie Carter: Is that the house you stayed in while Stephanie stayed up in Perth?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. It’s the house we’ve still got. We’re just selling it now. We’ve been in there for 13 years or so.

Ms Jennie Carter: You moved to Mandurah to the Dawesville electorate and started your campaign. Did you bring in your old staff? 104 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, I went back to Christian. One of my other staff, Maryanne, who’d been very close to us through all that time—she’d been a former patient as well. In fact, her mother was managing my surgery, so I got to know her and her family during that time. I think she had two other sisters and a brother. I think somewhere along the way all of them worked in that surgery in one fashion or another. When we won Dianella, we moved and Maryanne came with us and Christian. They were my two electorate staff. Her mum was still managing my surgery.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you keep your practice going at this time?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, I’m talking about the first time round. The second time round, Maryanne and Christian had worked with us doing the Aboriginal heritage, but then she moved on to other things, to her older jobs. But Christian came and started helping me campaign and, eventually, when I got back in,15 he came in as well as my electorate officer again down there.

Ms Jennie Carter: You won but you were still in opposition?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. We had four years in opposition.

Ms Jennie Carter: Who was the Leader of the Opposition at that time?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, we had a stack of them, didn’t we?

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes. It started out with Matt Birney, Paul Omodei, Troy Buswell and —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I got to be deputy along the way. What had happened was I think Matt Birney was there at the start when I got in. I got on well with Matt. I was a bit worried that they felt a bit funny, particularly the people who’d only just got in and here I was coming back again. They’d done four years of hard work in opposition and moved up in the social scale, and I had to be sort of slotted in in the middle. I was put on the frontbench, but in that little circular bit, so I was next to John Day and

15 Elected on 26 February 2005 as the member for Dawesville. 105 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Sue Walker, a lawyer—Member for Nedlands who took over from—she ended up going Independent. I remember she was a bit controversial.

So I moved back into that middle echelon thing. We supported Matt Birney, but along the way some of the things he did were just disappointing, really. There were a few controversial issues that he got involved with—changing records of things. I think Matt would’ve made a great minister if he’d stayed, but he decided not to stay after he lost the leadership.16 I was one of those influential in him going, to be honest. He rang me and said, “Look, the numbers are even”, when there was a challenge against him. He said, “It’s up to you. You vote for me, I’m in. If you don’t, I’m out.” I said, “I’m sorry, Matt, but I’m not going to. I’m not convinced that you’re the person that we need to lead us to win the next election.” I was instrumental in him going, but I was still not in any position of authority. I never even thought of becoming deputy; it didn’t even cross my mind at that stage. Then, as we moved forward, he got challenged by Paul Omodei.17

Then Paul had to step away because of that thing where he accidentally shot his son’s thumb, and then Troy moved in. I need to think about that a bit, because I’m a bit confused. Some of that was for the deputy leader’s position. I remember I wanted to run for the deputy leader’s position when Troy got it. I was really mad at Paul Omodei, because Paul had been one of my best friends in Parliament and next thing I heard him on the radio, when he knew that I was running for the deputy position, backing Troy Buswell. He backed Troy Buswell. Troy took over and then when Paul was cleared, he asked Troy if he would step down again and let him go back and Troy said no.18 I said to him, “It serves you bloody right, because I would’ve stepped down and let you back in.” Anyway, I need to think about those and remember what happened.

16 Matthew John Birney (b.1969) was a Liberal member for Kalgoorlie from 2001 to 2008, serving as Leader of the Opposition from March 2005 to March 2006. After the Liberal Party under Colin Barnett was defeated at the February 2005 elections, Birney was elected unopposed as party leader. 17 Paul Domenic Omodei (b.1950), member for Manjimup, defeated Birney in a ballot for the leadership on 24 March 2006. Birney refused a ministry and and retired from the Parliament at the 2008 election. Omodei remained as leader of the Liberal Party and Leader of the Opposition in Western Australia until 17 January 2008. 18 Troy Raymond Buswell (b.1966), member for Vasse, became leader of the Liberal opposition on 17 January 2008, defeating Paul Omodei for the position. Kim Hames was elected deputy leader. [On 4 August 2008, Troy Buswell resigned as opposition leader and two days later Barnett was re-elected unopposed to the Liberal leadership despite the fact that he had previously announced his retirement. Premier called an early election for 6 September 2008. Barnett led the Liberal Party to the election, which saw a significant swing away from the incumbent Labor Party, leading to a hung parliament. The Liberal Party was successful when the Nationals decided to support it.] 106 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: We might stop it there. Thank you for that.

End of Interview 4

107 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Interview 5

Ms Jennie Carter: This is recording 5 of an interview with Dr Kim Hames. The interviewer is Jennie Carter and the interview is being conducted on Wednesday, 4 October 2017.

Kim, we were talking about, in our last interview, the time you were out of Parliament and doing other things. Can you tell me, did you always intend to run again and saw that as a hiatus? How did that all come about?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, I had no intention of running again, although I had this unfinished business—I think I said before—that I always wanted to be Minister for Health, and Richard had promised that if we won, he would make me minister, and then we lost. So, I had unfinished business, but I hadn’t planned to get back in. I thought that time was it and now time to make a new career, and so I did the work doing Aboriginal heritage surveys and medicine while I was out. Then Arthur Marshall was a good friend of mine; we’d shared a room when we were in Parliament together, when we first got elected. His electorate was Dawesville, which is just south of Mandurah, and I’d had a strong association with Mandurah since I was little. My grandparents moved there when I was 10 or 11, something like that— no, it must have been earlier—eight or nine. They retired from Derby, from the butcher shop, and moved down to live in Avalon. So we’d been going there to visit when I was a child, and in fact I went to primary school there just for three months during the change—again, I think I’ve said that before. We’d gone there; we bought a house down there. I think I told you I won a house in a raffle, didn’t I?

Ms Jennie Carter: You did, yes.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: The money we used supporting a friend, but it gave me the capacity also to get a loan to buy a house that was a holiday house down in Creon Way in Mandurah in Silver Sands. So, we had a long association with Mandurah. I’d heard something about Arthur running—certainly that he was retiring. So I rang Arthur and said, “Look, Arthur, have you got someone to replace you?” He said, “Well, look, I did, I had a guy here who was a local councillor who was going to run, but he’s had marital problems and he’s not running anymore, and he’s picked a

108 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW colleague of his in council called Vern Goff to run, but I’m not so keen”—are you sure we didn’t do this last time?

Ms Jennie Carter: We did a little bit of it, yes.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, I thought we did. So anyway, Vern Goff was chosen. I ran against Vern and he had branches already stacked with people, and the vote was 16–all in the preselection, and the chair gave me the casting vote. Yes, again I think I covered that last time.

Ms Jennie Carter: We did, and then —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So where were we up to?

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes. So we’re really probably starting when you won the election, because you were doing your —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So, yes. We worked really hard on the campaign. Christian Allier, who was my former policy officer, came and worked for me in the electorate office; and Gary Gregan, who’d been there for a time before, came and worked with me also; and some staff who used to work with Arthur Marshall stayed with me as well. So, we got in with four years to go in opposition. Of course, coming back into Parliament was a little difficult for those who were already there because, you know, pecking orders had been established and a hierarchy had been established, and here I was, someone who’d been a minister, coming back in, and where was I to fit in all of that? Matt Birney was the Leader of the Opposition at that time. They slotted me in the middle hierarchy. So, he had his close team of people as leader. As always, he would sit opposite the Premier at the time, who was Geoff Gallop, and his deputy—I can’t even remember who his deputy was at the time—and the rest of the frontbench. On my side—so we were sitting in the other three seats that were frontbench seats but not the main front bench seats, so where the National Party sat when we were in government, opposite them. So there was Sue Walker and myself and John Day sitting there, and I have to say I wasn’t a big fan of Sue Walker. She had pretty strong views on lots of things. Nice enough lady, but I didn’t always agree with her point of view. I was going to be sitting next to her, so I arranged to have a little change of seats so that —

109 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: [chuckles] How did you do that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: — John Day sat next to me, because I’d known John for a long time—we always got along well; we went to the same school together, to Guildford—and then Sue Walker sat at the end. I’m glad I did, because she would get up and argue about things all the time and, as I said, I didn’t always agree with her point of view, so I was glad he was between us.

But anyway, I was shadow Minister for Health to Jim McGinty, and we had a great battle over the years. I mean, he scored a few points against me and I’m pretty sure we scored a few points against him. In the lead-up to the 2008, election the papers were just filled with stories of the failed health system. Remember, Gallop had promised that he would come in to fix the health system. That was one of the big cries that they had, because we’d had four or five health ministers in a row when we’d had our eight years in government, and he was going to fix the health system. Well, then he had a few ministers of his own. He had Bob Kucera to start off with, who was the one who beat me in my seat, and I think someone else next, and then Jim McGinty got the job. Well, Jim McGinty was Attorney General as well, so we used to get stuck into him for having two major portfolios. That’s something Labor did to me later, exactly the same.

But the health system was in trouble, as it continues to be, because the demand was so great—never ending increase in demand. So the media took up this catchcry of, “Health system in crisis”, and if you look back at the newspapers of the day across that four years, especially as we led up to the next election, it was almost inevitable, and it got to the stage where I didn’t have to do anything much. The media would say to me, “Is this another example of the health system in crisis?” and I would say, “Of course; of course it is” and just lead into whatever it was we were talking about. I think I did a reasonable job in exposing the flaws in the health system, so Jim was under a fair bit of pressure, but he got me back a couple of times, particularly over a leaked conversation between myself and Jon Fogarty, who was the owner of the Peel Health Campus.

Ms Jennie Carter: When was this?

110 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: In the middle there somewhere, about two-thirds of the way through, I had a conversation with Fogarty that he totally misrepresented to Jim McGinty.

Ms Jennie Carter: What was the conversation?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I can’t remember. It was about something that was happening at Peel, and I said to Jon, you know, “There’s not much point making a fuss about that”, because he was actually a fairly strong Liberal. He came out with a serious attack on David Templeman during this time leading up to the election that we lost. So it came back to bite him after that and the Labor Party were pretty focused on giving him a hard time. Anyway, he was clearly worried that Labor were going to disrupt his business, because we had a conversation in which I said, “There’s not much point in racing off with that to the media”, and Fogarty and McGinty together twisted that around to look as though I was trying to hide problems that were there within the health system. That wasn’t the case at all, but that’s how McGinty presented it in Parliament with this conversation that he got directly from Jon Fogarty. I have to say, next time I saw Fogarty I abused him, and then I don’t think I talked to him ever again, for a long period of time, because it was a pretty low thing to do, what Jon Fogarty did.

Ms Jennie Carter: So he went to —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I was an admirer of him. He was a Swan Districts footy player and I was a supporter of Swan Districts, but after he did that I didn’t have much enthusiasm for him anymore. Anyway, that was just one incident. The whole thing went well, and, frankly, I think Jim McGinty was a good health minister, given the circumstance at the time. He had strengths and weaknesses, and his strength was an absolute focus on trying to get numbers down on waiting lists, which he did, but he didn’t understand some other issues within the system that were just causing huge problems. The main one of those was the queuing of people to get into the health system—”bed blockage” it was called. You know, you could walk into a hospital—they were feeding people through their emergency departments all right because again Jim had a big focus on ambulance ramping and getting that down, and he was successful in doing that, but what’d happen is the patients would get seen, there was no beds in the hospital, there just wasn’t enough beds in the system, and so those patients would lie on a bed cluttering the emergency 111 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW department corridors. You could walk into an area in the emergency department and see patients on beds everywhere, and they’d hear someone coming and lift their heads thinking, “Oh, finally it’s my turn to get a bed”, and then sink back down in disappointment when it was just somebody passing through. So, bed blockage was a major failure for Jim; his major success was reducing ambulance ramping and reducing waiting times for surgery.

Ms Jennie Carter: Can you explain what that is, ambulance ramping, in that context?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, what happens is ambulances come to the hospital and there’s a period of time which they’ve got to hand over that patient to the hospital staff, which is normally accepted as being about 20 minutes. So when you have ramping, it’s taking longer than 20 minutes—sometimes up to an hour or even two hours—sitting with the ambulances not able to go anywhere, because they’ve still got to look after the patient, waiting for them to get taken into the hospital. You know, urgent cases would go through urgently, so it wasn’t a problem there, but you want your ambulances out picking up patients, not standing there looking after patients in the corridor. It was a major problem. When we came into government, we sorted out the bed blockage issue by bringing in a thing called the four-hour rule, but ambulance ramping, which was good at the start, steadily got worse. We tried everything to get it better and it was a system failure of the hospital of trying to make that work and get it better—of all the hospitals. The privately run hospitals, in fact they were probably the worst at having patients wait outside, and we tried so many different things to stop that.

Anyway, during Jim’s time, it was the bed blockage that was the issue, because there was just not a good enough system of working those patients through from being seen to getting them admitted to getting them discharged, because to get an empty bed you’ve got to have a patient discharged; and to discharge them, they’ve got to be safely discharged. It’s no good having a patient ready to go in the morning and the doctor goes and has something else to do, or, especially on weekends, if the doctor doesn’t come into the hospital, then the patient can sit there all weekend when they’re ready to go home, and then there’s no beds for patients coming in. So, you’ve got to have an efficient system of discharge to be able to create the beds for the patients to come in. That was a major problem that had to be solved.

112 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

But overall, as I’ve said a number of times—in fact Labor used to give me a hard time when I was a minister because I was forever saying Jim McGinty did a good job, and they didn’t like it very much [chuckles], because, as you know, in Labor the factions are pretty fierce and so quite a lot of the Labor people hated Jim McGinty. In fact, I used to get leaks from opposition, from Labor Party members who were from other factions, who didn’t like Jim—in fact, hated him. They hated him more than we did in opposition, really, and it’s largely because Jim was of a faction that wasn’t theirs. He was pretty tough. You know, you didn’t mess with Jim. He was a tough operator. Yet, under it all, and I’ve had a few dealings with him since, he’s a very nice guy, but in that he could be ruthless. As long as you understand that he’s ruthless, you know that if you stick your neck out he’s going to chop it off, as he did with Fogarty. He was ruthless in going at me over that. So, Jim was factions first, Labor Party second, but both of those way ahead of anything else. That’s how he was.

Ms Jennie Carter: Right. Then the Fogarty issue, what was the gist of all of that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: As I said before, I can’t exactly remember.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, right.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was just this conversation. It was a short conversation over something happening in the hospital, and Fogarty misrepresented what I said to Jim, and so Jim, with great glee, got up and said in Parliament what Fogarty had said I’d said, even though it wasn’t actually true.

Ms Jennie Carter: Right, and you couldn’t —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: And you can’t do much. You in fact get angry and shout back, and it makes no difference—he scored the points. It’s part of the battle, you know. I often would say to Roger Cook when we were going home, “Goodnight, Ralph”, and he’d say, “Goodnight, Fred.” You know the context of that—the cartoon about the sheepdog and the wolf. So, the two sheepdogs would guard the sheep all day, and Ralph the Wolf would come and try and attack them to eat them all the time and they’d be thwarted by the sheepdogs. Part of the comedy of it was at the end of the day, one sheepdog would go with his little ticket and clock off, and the other sheepdog would clock on, and then the wolf would do the same, and they’d say, 113 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

“Goodnight, Ralph”, “Goodnight, Fred”, to each other as they left in great friendship, whereas they’d been attacking each other all day. It’s a bit like that in Parliament— you’re fierce competitors when you’re in the Parliament, but outside you can actually be friends.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you have Labor Party friends?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. I regard Roger Cook as a friend. I think he was very honourable in his time in opposition. Again, he could be ruthless at times in attacking me. That’s his job; his job is to make me look like an idiot. So we would fight back just as hard, the same as I did with Jim McGinty. It’s no difference. What goes around comes around. Things can get nasty at times with some people, and you know there’s some that can be nasty, but others that are never nasty. Ian Taylor was a great example when he was in opposition. I’ve said that to you before. Fantastic guy, tried to be ruthless in Parliament, as you need to be, and we just smiled to ourselves because we knew that’s not him. Others can pull it off better than others. I have to say, McGowan certainly has the capacity to get nasty, but there’s those on our side that are the same. I don’t think I’ll go into any of those names.

Ms Jennie Carter: That’s a shame.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, I don’t think I will. But there were certainly the ones on our side who could be just as ruthless. In fact, when we were in opposition during that four years, we had various leaders of the opposition, Troy Buswell and Paul Omodei and Matt Birney —

Ms Jennie Carter: It was a fairly volatile time.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was a tumultuous time, it was, because it’s very, very hard in opposition. People who run it don’t generally do well, and it takes a very strong person to succeed in opposition and take all your people with you. That’s always the key, because, you know, factions aren’t such an issue now but they were much stronger in those days. You’d have a whole pile of people who weren’t factional at all, and I was sort of like that; I was in-between. But when people go, it’s just very frequent when you’re in opposition. You saw the Labor Party—before they got to Gallop, I think they went through three or four, and we did the same. 114 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, because when you came in, it was Matt Birney, but then it changed fairly quickly to —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. Well, Matt left. I have to say I played a small part in that and it’s not something I’m proud of, because I think Matt was very good. Matt would have made, in my view, an excellent minister. As Leader of the Opposition, he performed fairly well, but I couldn’t see him as a good Premier. Even though he’s got good personality and good looks and lots of things going, he just did a few things. I remember he went and changed some reports on things—you know, you have to put in a report on financial dealings—little things like that. But the key for me is that I brought someone in to talk to him about a health issue, and he was up listening and taking notes, and at the end he asked a question which was what the guy had been talking about for 15 minutes, and the guy just looked at him like, “Where have you been?” [chuckles] and I was a bit embarrassed. If you’re someone who’s going to be Premier, you want someone who is better than that. It was such little things. So when the time came and he was challenged for the leadership, I decided I wasn’t going to support him; I was going to support Paul, partly because, you know, in opposition the polls nearly always look terrible no matter what happens, and Birney’s were bad. So there was a challenge. It wasn’t that I thought Paul was so great. Matt rang me and said, “I need you to vote for me because it’s neck and neck, and I think I’m going to win or lose by a vote”, and I said, “Well, I’m sorry, Matt, it’s not going to be mine.” He took it pretty well, but he did lose. I didn’t ever see the numbers but I gather it was very narrow, so it could’ve been my vote that cost him the position.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did that affect your relationship with people that supported him?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Matt? No, he took it pretty well. No-one knows how you vote; only Matt knew. In fact, they don’t know how I vote; they just know what I said. I was good friends with Paul Omodei. I mean, I was just talking about him yesterday because I had a falling out with him later. He’d been deputy, I think, and challenged Matt, and just won. So, as I said, I’d sat next to Paul when we were ministers and I got on with him very well, and so everything was going fine until the issue came with his—I think it must’ve been before. I have to say, I get this time a bit confused as to what happened when and I can’t exactly remember as to who was in power and who wasn’t and when things happened. But when—I think it was running for the deputy, 115 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW when Paul was deputy leader, I think that’s when he had the issue where his son was shot in the hand by accident and Paul was charged, so he had to step down.

In my mind, there was no-one else to run for deputy. John Day had talked about it but I saw myself as doing a better job than John Day as deputy. Then there was Troy Buswell, but Troy had only been there for a very short period of time. Troy was a great performer, great orator, but he was very new. So I put up my hand to run for deputy, thinking Paul, amongst others, would support me in doing that, because, as I said, we were good friends and I’d supported him getting in—not that he necessarily knew that—and next thing, I heard him on the radio promoting Troy Buswell for the deputy’s position. I was furious, because the least he could have done is rung me and let me know what he was doing and why. I shouldn’t have had to hear it on the radio that one of my good mates was supporting another person for a job I was going for. So anyway, that’s what happened, and Troy won. To be fair, Troy did a good job when he was in.

Ms Jennie Carter: Okay.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: But anyway, we went through that thing, and then Troy was the leader as we were coming up towards the next election. I was then elected his deputy when he got to be leader. So, I was deputy to Troy, and during that time the conversation started about this unfortunate nickname some of his staff gave me, which I can’t repeat because it’s not polite. Some of his media team were as tough as—well, I guess as tough as you need to be. So they got information and they wanted to go for the throat of whoever it was, and they got cross with me because I wouldn’t do it. There was one in particular where they had some very sensitive information about someone, but it was personal information and there was no way I was going to use that personal information to attack anybody, and so they started calling me this rude nickname for not doing stuff like that. Even when poor old—I’ve got a mental block—Neale Fong, he was health director general at the time. I’ve appointed him to plenty of things.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So, we were leaked some sensitive information about Neale Fong, who was the director general of Health at the time—a sensitive email. They wanted me to really attack him, but I liked Neale Fong and I didn’t want to be too aggressive about it. I wanted to give him an escape route, to be able to get through all that without being sacked, because it was quite a serious email. It was a letter 116 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW from Brian Burke to Neale asking for him to consider a particular IT company working directly with stuff with health. Now, I only read the letter once and I don’t remember all the details, but in effect it was promoting this IT company to Neale Fong to get them into the health department. I don’t even know which IT company it was, but, anyway, very sensitive for Brian Burke to be asking to do that, because in a sense—I mean, that’s not how things should work. There should be an open tender process, there should be competition. If something happened as a result of that, that was very serious for Neale Fong, and we had a copy of this email. So, during estimates, I asked Jim McGinty if there had been any email communication between Neale Fong and Brian Burke. He turned and talked to Neale and Neale said, “No” and the answer came back, “No.” Well, in the next week Jim McGinty jumped up and announced that they had found three emails from Brian Burke to Neale Fong, and they were Brian Burke inviting Neale to dinners, which were—Brian Burke used to have these big dinners, I think at Perugino’s, where he would have some serious heavies there, and often they were fundraising events. Neale had been invited to those.

Now, there was no response going back from Neale to those—just the emails of invitation—but of course they weren’t the emails that we had. So we said again, “Are there any other emails?” and the answer came back, “No.” In the meantime, when these emails were found with Neale having said, “No”, Jim sacked him, as director general of health, because he’d given information that there were no emails from Brian Burke, and there were, and so he got dumped. So the email that we actually had a copy of never came out. Nobody, except us, were ever aware of this email that was in existence. I don’t think Neale even knows now what it was. But, you know, all we wanted—I mean, all I wanted was for Neale to be able to come back with an email response to Brian Burke saying, “Thanks, Brian, but that’s not how things work; we’ve got a system in place.” When he came back with no answers, and not even answers to the other invites, you know, he just left the whole issue hanging in the air of what happened with that and what the outcome was. We still don’t know to this day what he did. So in effect I got a scalp, but not a scalp I wanted. I liked Neale, yes, but I don’t feel ashamed of what we did, because we gave every opportunity for them to be able to produce evidence. I mean, we had a leaked very sensitive document and gave every opportunity for that. To be honest, I think sacking him over the emails that they did find was extreme. Whether there was some hidden agenda there of wanting Neale to go in the first place, I don’t know.

117 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: It’s interesting you were talking about Brian Burke’s influence. Was that still happening during that period, 2005 to 2008?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Brian Burke was a dirty word for anything. So whenever we said Brian Burke was involved, it was very serious.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, yes.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So the Labor Party were trying absolutely to keep him away from things. Now, it’s a bit like Crichton-Browne for us. They probably have people who wouldn’t have talked to Brian Burke at the time, and yet others who were still friends who would take the phone call and have discussions with him. But I’ve got no idea to what extent that happened any more than I do over how often Crichton- Browne talked to people on our side. But he was certainly a sore point. I mean, it was a point that we could attack on and Labor were very sensitive about. So, as soon as something came up about Brian Burke talking directly to a CEO then that was a serious issue for them. Even so, just emails that invited him to lunch and him not knowing about it—I mean, we get thousands of emails and you don’t get to read them all. I thought Jim sacking him was pretty extreme, and so that’s why I wonder if that was the true extent of the reason for him going, if there was some other agenda at play.

Ms Jennie Carter: During this time of course Geoff Gallop resigned and Alan Carpenter took over. What was your relationship, well, both with Geoff Gallop and eventually with Alan Carpenter?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I’d been at university with Geoff. He was older than me, but we were at the same college—at Kingswood College, at university. He was just a very intellectual, quiet sort of fellow. I thought he did a very good job as Premier— very stable and steady and managed the state well, particularly after what had gone before. I was surprised about the depression side of it. Not that there’s any question that people do get depression, but he just didn’t behave like someone who had depression, right up to the time he retired. As a GP, you see people who get depression and how they behave and what they do and what they don’t, and I just couldn’t see it. Again, I wonder if it wasn’t Labor Party people deciding it was his time to go and that was the reason he went. But, you know, if he really did have serious depression, he managed it very well. He certainly didn’t give that 118 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW appearance when he was in Parliament and he did it with great dignity, I thought, his departure and his subsequent management and his subsequent life, in fact. I think Geoff Gallop is a very honourable person. He was good.

Carpenter I used to get on with very well when he was in opposition and we were in government. In fact, he and McGowan both, would sit near each other and I had the same sort of relationship with the two of them. They would have a go at me and I would defend myself, but it was almost in a humorous sort of way where no-one was that serious because they weren’t contenders, either of them, at the time. They were happy sitting up there in the backbench. When Carpenter became leader, he changed enormously in my view. It’s like he didn’t like being there; he didn’t like what you had to do to be Premier. When people started doing things wrong when he was the leader, I think he was enormously offended by that and would lash out at his own people. I am bit of a student of body language and particularly as we got towards the end, when he lost, he would slump lower and lower in his chair, sitting in the middle, so Eric Ripper, who is about the same height as him, would be sitting six inches higher than him. Until one of his own people did something wrong and he’d sack them. He sacked and Kucera. I think there were about five or six ministers along the way that he sacked. When he’d sacked someone, he’d be sitting right up tall again. It was like that gave him the strength to be able to go out there and say to the public, “I’ve sacked someone because they’ve done something wrong.” It’s what gave him a personal boost.

Two things he did that bothered me: one was sacking of John D’Orazio. John was Minister for Police at the time and a very good friend of mine. We’d been on Bayswater council together. A series of things happened that John was in trouble for. One of them was that there was a fellow called Minniti, whose children went to the same school as mine; in fact, at the father and son camp I was treating callouses on his feet with a scalpel. This Minniti was the one who ended up going to jail for falsifying police records with a cohort in the police force. People who had a speeding ticket, they’d go and fiddle with them and fix them up. Minniti ended up going to jail for that, but he was part of the Italian support group that helped get us on council. When you have that when you’re Italian—I was part of that group even though wasn’t Italian; I was the token skip—when you’re part of all that, you go out of your way to support the people who are your supporters. If they have difficulty, whether it was financial difficulty or personal difficulty or whatever, everyone gets together and goes to help that particular person. Anyway, John got into strife with 119 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW the police, even though he was Minister for Police, for not changing his residential address when he split with his wife and went to another house and allegedly hadn’t changed the address. He was being prosecuted for not changing the address and responding to police issues. What John was able to do later is prove that the police had made a mistake. He had evidence of the letters that he’d written and the notifications and all of those things. He had written evidence. He ended up going to court and proved that he was not guilty and the police were found to be in error.

That was one of the things where he was in strife. The next was paying superannuation to his staff, because he still owned the pharmacy at the Galleria shopping centre even though he was paying someone else to run it. But that was the point: he was paying someone else to run it. He had staff whose job it was to manage the superannuation. I was talking to him at about the time when the unions went public, because John was right wing and non-factional, I think, or he was the right faction; whatever, he wasn’t part of all the left. The unions went public having a go at him, because one of his staff went public saying, “I haven’t been paid my superannuation.” He said to me, “As soon as I heard, I called in my staff involved and my accountant, and got them to go through the records for all my staff to see what had happened. What we found was that some had been paid too much and some hadn’t been paid enough and some hadn’t been paid. So I wanted them to pay it all, but the tax office wouldn’t let me. The tax office said, ‘You’ve got to do it as a bulk, as a whole, let’s work out what the total is.’” Because of those two issues, both that were false, Carpenter sacked him as minister, which was a pretty ruthless thing to do. But you remember McGowan’s comments at the time—McGowan actually still feels sensitive about this—he went public and called John an ethnic branch stacker. “The biggest ethnic branch stacker in the state”, he called him, or words to that effect. What he said later was that he meant that he was biggest branch stacker who happens to be ethnic. The way it was taken was that he was having a go at ethnic people for stacking branches. John was a great branch stacker; you’ve never seen anyone stack branches like John. So it was true, but it was very politically insensitive and McGowan was taken from pillar to post over that comment. I know that in subsequent dealings with McGowan, when he’s done something that I’ve thought nasty, having a go at Colin, and I’ve chatted to him about it, he’s said, “Look what you guys did to me over the ethnic branch stacking thing.” He obviously still feels very sensitive about that and he uses that attack to justify him making attacks on others.

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Anyway, Carpenter sacked John, which I thought was terrible. That was the first thing Carpenter did that really upset me. The second thing was to do with Aboriginal health. I’d been the Aboriginal health minister and circumstances in Aboriginal communities were still pretty tough. When I’d been the minister, there was a big issue—a big not so much a rumour, stronger than a rumour—of sexual molestation of young Aboriginal girls. Girls of 13, 14 and 15 were being molested, often by other people in the family. We were talking about what we could do. My Aboriginal policy officer and myself talking to Aboriginal people about what we should do. The girls who were involved—it was often uncles. It’s not just in Aboriginal society; in white society, it’s the same. Often it’s the uncles that are involved in sexual molestation of children—they didn’t want the uncles to go to jail; they just wanted them to stop. They weren’t getting the support from the parents, because sometimes the parents were saying, “You wear that short skirt, you put on lipstick; you deserve that, girl.” We wanted to make it stronger, so we had a video produced by Aboriginal people for Aboriginal people to teach them to say it’s okay to say no and that families should support girls who said no and didn’t want to be involved. That video, the year after I left—of course, my policy officer and I got no credit because we were gone, but the Aboriginal affairs department that we got to make it got credit for it—won the Premier’s award of the year, the making of that video. Something came up about what had happened and Carpenter shouted out at me, “All you could do was make a video. You sat around and watched while Aboriginal children were raped.” It’s the angriest I’ve ever been in my life. I wanted him to come outside and discuss it further.

Ms Jennie Carter: What did you do?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I couldn’t do anything; we were in opposition. Fred Riebeling was a pretty tough Speaker. If you’re called three times, you get kicked out. I got called twice and then I left. I didn’t want to be kicked out, so I just walked out. But before that I was shouting a fair bit, I have to say, because I was really angry. I’ve been angry with him about that ever since, because that’s a dreadful thing to say. Anyway, that’s why I don’t like Carpenter.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: During that time, from 2005 to 2008, as I’ve said earlier, I got elected as deputy leader to Troy, and we were leading up to run for the election. The polls weren’t looking that flash. Troy had had a few incidents at the time and, rightly or wrongly, various sections of the public loved him. And they did love him. Troy was 121 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW a very popular figure when you went out. I remember going to Telethon, and we were being shown around what happened with Telethon, just a small group of half a dozen of us, walking around. You have an audience at Telethon sitting there watching whatever happens on the stage, and we were sort of walking along the corridor, and these people kept jumping up, mostly women I might add, wanting to get photos with him, and other people realised he was there, and it was almost like a hero’s welcome as we walked through this area. So people did get to love Troy, but on the other side, there were some that strongly disagreed with him.

So the polls were not looking that flash. Then I had people in my electorate saying, “Look, we’d like to vote for you”—mostly religious people—”but as long as Troy’s your leader, we can’t vote Liberal.” So I had a conversation with Ben Morton, who was the director of the Liberal Party at the time, and said, “Ben, what are you doing with your polling? Are you just polling for Troy or are you polling for alternatives?”, and he said, “We’re just polling for Troy.” I said, “Just to be sure, you should do a contrast with Troy and Colin”, even though Colin at that stage had announced his retirement, and Deidre Willmott had been preselected to replace him already. So anyway, Ben went out and did this extra polling. Interestingly enough, he included me as an alternative as well, which isn’t something that I’d asked him to do and, even more interesting, while the other two were top with most of them, I was the top in Kalamunda. I don’t know why [chuckles], but that’s what it showed.

What was really clear in the polling is that Colin was going to get a much better vote than Troy if Colin was the leader. And particularly Kingsley was the critical one. It had been a Liberal seat for a long time under Cheryl Edwardes was the member, and then we lost that seat and Labor had it. But it was neck and neck.

Ms Jennie Carter: Judy Hughes took that one, didn’t she?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I can’t remember.

So what the polls showed is that with Troy the leader, it was still a 50–50 seat; with Colin the leader, it was 57–43 for the same seat. So to Troy’s great credit, Ben went to him and showed Troy the results. I didn’t know what the results showed until much later. Troy rang Colin and told Colin the result and offered to step down and let Colin take over as leader, because he could win the election. Colin was already planning his retirement at the time, and Deidre Willmott had been preselected. So 122 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW when that happened, it was very, very difficult. Deidre had a really tough choice to make, as she could have said, “No; I’m not going. I’ve been preselected.” But again, to her great credit, she agreed to step down and let Colin back into his seat so he could lead the party. Then we were trying to find an alternative place for Deidre to go, and, interestingly enough, we had a meeting with Bill Marmion, to talk to Bill and see if he was prepared to step aside and let Deidre in, and he took it very well and gave it serious thought but decided no, that’s what he wanted to do. In fact, he went on to be a minister, so I’m sure he made the right choice. Tony Krsticevic was another one mentioned, but his response was, “No way”, because he had strong support in his preselection. So Deidre was left without a seat and ended up working for Colin for a while and then becoming head of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

But, yes, it was a tough time trying to find an alternative. But from almost as soon as Colin was announced as Leader of the Liberal Party, Carpenter started making serious mistakes that cost him the election. He did so many of them it’s hard to put them all down. The first thing is unilaterally, without even talking to the head of the Labor Party hierarchy about it, he immediately announced there was going to be an election four weeks later. He’d got a lot of credibility by sacking all the ministers. People would say, “Oh, he’s not a normal politician. He’s an ex–ABC reporter. He’s not “Mr Normal Politician”; he’ll sack his own people if they’ve done something wrong.” As soon as he did that, the response was, and we got it when we were out doorknocking, “Oh, he’s just another bloody politician; that’s all he is.” So he lost a huge amount of credibility over that. He thought Colin wasn’t really that well known. But as it turned out, he was. So he was hoping by getting in quick it didn’t give Colin time to build it up. But Colin came straight in to having like a honeymoon period— you know, he’s gone but now he’s back. Because when he was Leader of the Opposition and had lost the last election—the previous election—he wasn’t doing all that well in the polls. So he had a great resurgence after all that, and particularly people were angry that Carpenter didn’t give him a chance to get back in. Then Carpenter parachuted his people into seats that he wanted. He’d sacked John D’Orazio as minister, then wasn’t supporting him for running for Ballajura—because John went Independent, remember?

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes.

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Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So he had the Channel Seven reporter who he parachuted into that seat. I can’t remember all the names so you’d have to check. But the young lady that was up in Swan Hills who sadly died later of kidney cancer, I think it was —

Ms Jennie Carter: That’s Jaye Radisich.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Radisich, yes—Jaye Radisich. So he supported a replacement for her, and everyone was really upset by that. He didn’t support Bob Kucera running again, said Bob was too old, so he moved Bob out and put another of his favoured people into that seat. Every one of those seats, the candidates lost. If the other candidates had been there—if Jaye had still been there, if John had still been there or if Kucera had still been there; any ONE of those—he would have won the election, because we only won by one seat, so he would have held onto those individual seats. I think about four came in altogether; there was another one somewhere else. So he really shot himself in the foot. In fact, I have to say I know Labor Party people are very bitter about what he did and how he managed it. The comments have been that he had a very tight inner circle and told nobody and just ran it all himself. In my view, that is what cost the election, because we only just won and in fact weren’t even expecting to do that.

Ms Jennie Carter: So you didn’t expect to win that election?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No. We knew we’d go close. We knew it was neck and neck. But we had a lot of seats to win back, and I think if Carpenter hadn’t made every mistake in the book, that they would have still won, because we only did it by the skin of our teeth. That’s the view of Labor Party people I have to say. You talk to them now about what happened in that time and they’re very bitter about it.

Ms Jennie Carter: Were you still deputy opposition leader at that time under —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, I was deputy opposition leader leading up to the election. So I was deputy to Troy, but when Troy swapped, I became deputy to Colin, and then we won the election.

What would normally happen is that the National Party would be the deputy Premier. But that’s another story in itself, the whole issue of the National Party, because under Brendon Grylls they announced that they were independent of us, that they 124 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW would announce after the election which side they were going to support. There was a strong feeling amongst them that they wanted to go and join with Labor to form government. So what had happened is they’d had all their group get together and had a vote, and it was 8–4 to go to the Labor Party. This was in 2008. I’m not sure if certain people would appreciate me talking about what happened with that, but, anyway, I had discussions with certain people. It’s well known who they were—the four. I had discussions with people as part of that group, because they came to me, because Colin was a bit aloof from all that and certainly didn’t want to talk to National Party people that he thought were going to be traitors and go to the Labor Party. So he was very angry with them, and when he heard about the vote, he was even angrier.

When I had to talk to people as part of that group of four, Labor was offering huge incentives for the Nats to join with them. In fact, the rumour has it—I don’t know if this is actually true—that Carpenter was going to offer the National Party a minister for EVERY portfolio that was out in the bush. So you’d have a police minister for the metropolitan area, but a National minister would cover police and health and whatever. So they would be country ministers and cover every portfolio in the area, and give them a huge amount of money as part of that to manage all that stuff in the bush. Colin’s response was, “We’re not going to do all that”, because it was the royalties for regions issue as well that they ran on. So the first thing was you had to support the royalties for regions concept, and Colin wasn’t. He said, “We do spend lots of money in the bush and we don’t need to be doing this thing. If they vote for Labor, the country people will kill them at the next election.” Because most country people don’t like Labor. They’re pro the conservative side, so they split their conservative vote between the Nationals and the Liberals. They hate Labor. They’re the enemy. As I said, they’d get voted out next time if they go with Labor. I said to Colin, “Look, Colin, it’s fine if they’d be voted out, but that doesn’t do anything for us. We’ll be in opposition another four years, and you’ll never get to be Premier because you were going to retire last time and you’ll retire this time, and we should be together as a team, so at least sit down with the National Party members and talk about it and put up a proposal as to what you would do and how it would operate. So that’s what happened. I went out with some of the National Party members to Colin’s office out on Stirling Highway and we sat in the office and we put together a plan as to what we would do if we were to join with the National Party and how royalties for regions would work and what the number of ministers would be and so on, so, you know, sensible. 125 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: That was with Brendon Grylls and —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, it wasn’t with Brendon. Brendon wanted to go to the Labor Party, and Mia.

Ms Jennie Carter: So who did you talk to?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Some of the four who voted against [laughter]. The four who voted against were “Tuck” Waldron, , and—I can never remember his name but he became Speaker. He was the member for Greenough, south of Geraldton.19 They were the four who voted against, largely because they had exactly the same view—that their members were conservative voters, that they would be extremely unhappy if the Nats were to go to the Labor Party. They would be devastated in their electorates, and they didn’t want to go. That’s why they voted against it. Brendon and his team, I mean, they could have just split. They could have had the four go off and join us and the rest join Labor, and Labor would have still had the numbers to win the election. They could have done that, but Brendon said, “No. We’re a team. We’ve got to make a decision to do it together.” So what happened is the four went back and discussed it.

We were waiting to see what happened. My wife and I were sitting at home watching TV and I was slumped down in the chair like that, and Brendon came on. We thought he was still going to go to Labor. We didn’t think we’d won that argument. And so Brendon said, “We’ve made the decision and we’re going to go with”, and he paused, the bastard [chuckles], and he said, “Liberals”. We were so excited. My wife and I were jumping around. Because for us it meant we’d won the election, which was a hard-fought election. It’s like winning a grand final—well, I don’t know about winning the grand final of footy, because I’ve never done it, but it is seriously exciting to win an election.

I was going to be Minister for Health, which is what I’d wanted, otherwise all those dreams of doing stuff in health would be gone; I’d be in opposition another four years. It’s just chalk and cheese, the difference between winning and losing—it’s all or nothing. So when Brendon announced he was coming with us, it was absolutely

19 Grant Woodhams (b.1952), member for Greenough (2005-2008), then member for Moore (2008- 20014) became speaker on 6 November 2008. 126 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW fantastic. But because they only had an alliance, not a , that meant that he couldn’t accept being Deputy Premier—I mean, he could have, but that was his decision, that in his view, because it was only an alliance, they wanted the capacity to vote. Part of the agreement was that if we had areas of policy difference, even if they were in cabinet, that cabinet solidarity didn’t apply; that provided they announced it and told us, and as it turned out would mostly leave cabinet when decisions were made that we didn’t agree on, then they would come out saying, “We don’t agree with that decision.” That’s the deal we struck, to do that and that we would support royalties for regions, obviously, which turned out to be an absolutely fantastic program. I loved royalties for regions.

Ms Jennie Carter: So you were in favour of what was eventually happening with royalties for regions?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Absolutely, yes. No doubt we can talk about that later, probably, but I love royalties for regions. Anyway, that was the deal. Because he wasn’t going to be deputy leader, just a minister, then I got to still be Deputy Premier, because I was the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party. The great thing about being Deputy Premier is it’s tradition that the Deputy Premier picks his own portfolios, so I picked health. I’d been shadow minister for four years, so it’s not like Colin was going to say no, but I picked that, and Aboriginal Affairs, to have that again.

Ms Jennie Carter: Why did you want Aboriginal Affairs again?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, because I’d enjoyed it when I was —

Ms Jennie Carter: It’s a difficult portfolio.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. I’ve got a strong affiliation with Aboriginal people across the state and really enjoyed my involvement with them, so I wanted to do it again. So, they were the two that I picked and, yes, I got to do all those.

As Deputy Premier—I mean, Colin had pretty strong views on who he wanted to do things, and mostly we agreed on things, not always, so he would seek my advice on who I thought should do different roles, who I thought should be ministers. That happened throughout the seven years we were working together, and sometimes he 127 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW would follow my advice and sometimes not. I have to say that the times he didn’t, didn’t turn out so well, so it serves him right [laughter]. But everyone that we agreed on that should be a minister did a good job. We were in agreement, but the people really picked themselves from their performances during the year.

Ms Jennie Carter: So this was in 2008 in your euphoric moment [chuckles]?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: Going up to them, because you were in this new seat of Dawesville, so it was getting really to know your seat or electorate —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was a tough time for Stephanie and myself because I had to live down there. We’d bought a house on the canals in Mandurah, because we’d always wanted to live on the canals. Financially, it was difficult because we still had six kids, although some were growing up and going off. I think we still had three at home at that stage. We had one child who had some difficulties. He still had to be in Perth. He had a job in Perth, and even though it was only a part-time job, he had to keep working but had lots of issues. So Stephanie had to be up in Perth still. So I virtually bached for four years. I would be down there because we were in opposition. You’re not in Parliament. So when Parliament sat, I was in Perth, but for the rest of the time I had to be in my electorate because we had to win the next time round and had to be involved in the electorate. During that four years, I was about 60 or 70 per cent of the time on my own. That’s when I learnt to cook, I have to say.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes [chuckles].

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I love cooking, and it was during that time—I couldn’t get by with just having steak and chips or packaged food, so I started cooking for myself. So I would get a duck from the farm and do duck a l’orange.

Ms Jennie Carter: Just for you.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Just for one, yes. All sorts of different dishes I learnt to cook.

Ms Jennie Carter: So how did you find —

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Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was tough on Stephanie, because she was on her own up in Perth, with a child who was a significant problem, and other issues around the house and family and kids, and mostly on her own. I have to say the children, or child—it’s difficult, because if this person reads this down the track, I don’t want them to see. I’ll tell you what it was but —

Ms Jennie Carter: Now, you’ve won the election and you’ve got your two ministries that you wished —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: New Minister for Health, yes. So, we put our old team back together, because when I’d been minister we’d had a couple of—Christian Allier, who’d been my policy officer. There was a lady called Melinda Hayes, who’d come to us as a policy officer from Planning, I think, when I was first a minister, and was a really strong part of our team. She’d been working with ministers when we lost. She’s got good friends in the Labor Party and she wasn’t regarded as being political—and she wasn’t political. So she got to be a policy officer, I think for David Templeman for a while, and other ministers. She still had that experience, so she’s a public servant, and came to join our senior team. A guy called Ian Wight-Pickin, who had been my former chief of staff, had retired—had been told he had to retire—he came back as well. So, we put our core team together. There was another one, Maryanne France, who had been part of our team but had moved on and wanted to do other things. So we got three of our core people back again.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you persuade them or were they sort of, you know —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I didn’t have to do much persuasion. They were pretty keen to come back—and Neville Collard was an Aboriginal guy who’d been our policy officer; he came back as well. We had the little core team back again, and off we went. Yes, I have to say they were very enjoyable years trying to improve the health system. Although, I did read an article once that was I think written by someone in America. I gave a copy of it to Roger Cook as well later, when he was in opposition, that says, “If you’re”—I forget the exact words but, “Don’t ever think that when you’re in opposition and you find all the faults with the health system that you know how to fix it and that you’re actually going to get in and be able to fix it; it isn’t possible.” So, you do the best you can but it is not possible to fix the health system anywhere ever. This was written in America, not in Australia, but turned out to be fairly prophetic.

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You could do lots of things, and one of the first things we did is there was a team already going off to look at a thing called the four-hour rule in the UK. So I attached myself to that team and took the head of the AMA with me, Gary Geelhoed, who was also a paediatric specialist at Princess Margaret hospital. We went over there and had a look at how the four-hour rule system worked, and we were very impressed with it. While it had things over there that were a lot different to what was over here —

Ms Jennie Carter: What is the four-hour rule?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Four-hour rule means that a patient coming in to the emergency department, the staff have got four hours in which to assess them, manage them, and either admit them to the hospital or discharge them from the hospital. There was a percentage. You couldn’t do it to everyone, particularly in some places you’re better off having people in emergency departments, or diagnosis takes longer or tests take longer. There’s all sorts of reasons why you can’t, but we had a percentage. Now, in the UK it had been 98 per cent and they’d let it lapse to I think 95 per cent. So 95 per cent, we set that as an eventual target but our earlier targets were less; I think 85 per cent was our first target. At the time the hospitals were operating at about 50 to 60 per cent. That was all. It was terrible. So, we had all these plans around how we were going to do it and how to increase it, but it was tough going and it was slow going, and they’re still not at the targets now. What it did do, it just transformed the way the hospitals operated. Since then, when we brought it in, South Australia were next, they followed the lead, and then the Labor Party nationally made it a requirement for all hospitals through Australia. So what we introduced here is now the rule for the whole of Australia.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you come up against any opposition to that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Very strong opposition in circles. In fact, there were doctors here who’d left the UK to get away from that system. People within the AMA were strongly opposed—a guy called David Mountain probably the worst of them, he works in the emergency department at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital—implacably opposed. But we were very strong about doing it because there’d been a survey done by Dr Spiridulis, who was a physician I think at Fremantle Hospital. He’d done a study on morbidity and mortality rates associated with access block. What he found is there was the big increase in mortality and morbidity for people who have 130 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW delayed access to hospital. I forget what the figures are now—I used to know them all off by heart—but there was a certain number of people, and it was probably 120 or 130 people, who would probably die as a result of that delay. So it means someone who had a severe medical problem, even though they were being cared for in the emergency department and may be waiting for a bed, more of those people would die than would have otherwise been the case. Behind that there was something like a thousand people with increased morbidity. It means someone who had an issue with their finger, instead of having the finger saved, would lose that finger—or lose the leg or have other complications. So, it was very strong evidence to show that it was absolutely critical that that access block be fixed.

When we did fix it—and even though the worst figures were up around 65 per cent, we had some hospitals like PMH were up around 90-odd per cent. A lot of the hospitals got up to the 80s, but access block stopped. We just didn’t have it anymore. So, all those corridors that used to be filled with people didn’t have them anymore. Now, later we got more ambulance ramping as they delayed, because the hospitals were being a bit clever and just not seeing those patients fast enough so that they couldn’t get access block. That was creating a problem on its own that we really fought hard to fix, and didn’t succeed very well. Anyway, we solved the—and whole hospitals would just operate better and people were happier. So you talk to any one of those people who opposed it before, they’d never go back. David Mountain has admitted no, he would not. He’s always complaining about the lack of resources and lack of beds and lack of this and lack of that. I said, “Would you go back to the old system?” “No.” He wouldn’t. Everyone says the same. So, it turned out to be a very successful program.

Ms Jennie Carter: And what else was happening in Health? What did you feel you needed to do?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, waiting lists. Waiting lists were critical. Hospitals by their nature are very inefficient. If you go to a private hospital to have an operation, you’ll get five or six operations happen in an afternoon. If you go to a public hospital, you might only get three or four. It’s all to do with the way they operate, the traditions of how they operate. It’s not anyone who wants to see those delays, but it’s just ingrained hospital bureaucracy that is something that people fight against all the time without a great deal of success. It’s all through the system, from doctors to the opposite end of the scale, of just the way things operate. People in there work very 131 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW hard, and the staff in the public service are extremely hardworking and under all sorts of pressure. There’s just things that could be done differently but it’s like turning the Titanic. It’s just very difficult to get people’s attitudes and systems to change. You know, we brought out people from the UK after we started to go through and do an evaluation of all the hospitals, found all these things that they need to do, particularly in getting specialists to see patients and discharge them— that’s one of the critical issues—nurse-led discharges, and all sorts of other things. It’s hard to get people to change. So, that’s why we could never get to the 90s for the hospitals. In the country we did and in the kids’ hospital we did and King Edward I think as well, they were in the high 80s, but the key tertiary hospitals were tough going—and still are.

Our waiting lists were getting higher and higher, but that didn’t matter because what happens with a waiting list—so this is the waiting list for people to have surgery. What happens is you get on the waiting list, and if you’re treated quickly and efficiently, then word gets out, and so more people with the procedures come along. So our numbers were getting higher and higher and higher, and yet we were still marginally the second-best state in Australia for the time to get that surgery done. Queensland used to just pip us all the time, but we were second. So, it doesn’t matter that there were 16 000 on the list. If all of them had their surgery, the second- quickest time in Australia, then we were doing well—and we were doing well. That’s what was happening. But the numbers were steadily growing because we just couldn’t do enough surgery to keep the numbers down, and eventually it was going to hit the stage where the waiting times would start to blow out and they would start getting worse. I think it’s reached that stage in the last year or so.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Since I’ve been gone, I might add.

Ms Jennie Carter: [chuckles] Well, we’ll certainly come to that.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: But the numbers did keep getting bigger.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes. In Aboriginal Affairs, your other portfolio, what were the main things facing you?

132 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, I did that for two or three years. Just standards of living of Aboriginal people, and still issues like alcohol and physical abuse, sexual abuse. All those things that are rife within a lot of those remote communities, where they’re very isolated and lots of issues still with alcohol. They’re no different to the issues that you’d find in a dysfunctional non-Aboriginal family if you went anywhere in the metropolitan area and found a family that were dysfunctional through alcohol or drugs or whatever. Their issues are the same, and to some extent those issues are reflected in our own family, yet with so many in such a small place, no opportunities for work, alcohol having more of an effect on Aboriginal people than non-Aboriginal people because they’re not used to tolerating alcohol—they’re not used to tolerating Western diets. Their bodies, with thousands and thousands of years in isolation, don’t have the capacity to adapt as well to Western diets, so a much higher incidence of diabetes, of heart disease, of hypertension—all those medical conditions—so there’s a huge gap in life expectancy as a result of that.

I eventually became disillusioned because we’d spent four years in the previous government when I was the minister, I had eight years away from government, and then another two years as Minister. Had to say to myself, were Aboriginal people better off as a result of me being there, or were their conditions just as bad? In fact, I think their conditions were worse. Even though I’d been Minister for Water and we did a lot of work improving water supplies. I’d been Minister for Housing, we did a lot to improve housing. Put swimming pools in remote communities that I’m a bit famous for, because we were the first to do that, and we did before-and-after health studies that show what a huge improvement there were in the health of Aboriginal kids where we put swimming pools in. But still, were Aboriginal people better off? I thought not. It was so frustrating because (a) not being able to get success, but (b) still being blamed by Aboriginal people for not doing enough when the reality is that there’s Aboriginal people out there that need to do a lot more for themselves and take responsibility for themselves. There’s certainly Aboriginal people out there that do that, lots of them, lots of them that don’t have those issues, lots that live good lifestyles. You know, now I chair an organisation raising money for Aboriginal students to go to high schools, and you see the wealth of talent that’s out there amongst Aboriginal kids to do really well in their lives. But by and large, overall there’s no closing of the health gap. In fact, in some areas the health gap’s getting wider.

Ms Jennie Carter: I thought there was an improvement in infant health? 133 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: A little bit, but overall gap—I think women have got a little bit better in Western Australia. We’ve done a bit better than other states and our gap in quite a few areas has narrowed, but overall Australia-wide Turnbull just announced last year that the gap’s—and the critical thing was, though, that where Aboriginal kids are educated, well educated, there is no health gap. Aboriginal people live as long as non-Aboriginal people if they’re properly educated. So that’s an argument we used trying to get more money for Aboriginal scholarships all the time.

Ms Jennie Carter: Right.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: But yes, eventually I became frustrated so I asked to step aside and was made Minister for Tourism in December 2010.

Ms Jennie Carter: And you were Deputy Premier?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: So, yes, you were Deputy Premier to Colin Barnett. Did you have a good working relationship? Did it continue?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, I did, particularly those first four years. You know, Colin can be grumpy and—he won’t enjoy reading this—he can be petulant as well, and gets upset with people easily. That’s what he’d been like when he was in opposition. You know, the people he could talk to most were the females in the group. He wasn’t the sort to sit down with the guys and have a beer and be relaxed and comfortable. You could see that. But he just changed in that first four years; he was like a totally different person. He didn’t used to get angry, didn’t get grumpy, he was relaxed, he was friendly. You could sit down and have a chat with him. I think that’s why he was so popular and I think that’s why we did so well after four years of government. He had a huge focus on people who were disadvantaged so we, more than any previous government, improved funding to the not-for-profit groups; increased their payments by 25 per cent.

All of that—and he was always very strong about doing the right thing. You know, “Don’t follow Labor’s example where all the ministers get stacked, look at your accommodation allowance, look at your travelling things, look at this, look at your 134 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW declarations.” He was fanatical about people doing the right thing all the time. Which was a great credit to him, that he was like that, and he was like that the whole time. So he sort of changed in the second term of government, but that never changed, and particularly his focus on people with disabilities. In the terms of spectrum of people being right and left, Richard Court—well, certainly Crichton-Brown—was to the right of Parliament. The Labor Party have those that are way over to the left. The right factions of the Labor Party are probably more to the right than Colin and I would be. So, we would overlap Labor and some would call us socialists, but we’re not unhappy with that. A lot of the focus for Colin and myself was about helping people who needed help, who were disadvantaged. That’s sort of the traditional area of the Labor Party to do that, but it isn’t, and it’s always been an area where we’ve overlapped. I think Colin’s done more, under his leadership and his direction, than any previous government has ever done for people with disabilities and low socioeconomic groups.

Ms Jennie Carter: So, you’re gearing up for the 2008 election and there’s a renewed confidence. You felt much better about the results?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, we got in. We didn’t have a big margin but we had enough. Yes, everything was going well. Even Rob Johnson was enjoying himself as Minister for Police. I thought our ministers were doing a good job and we were getting on with the business of governing. So it was a good four years, that four years, and it was reflected in our popularity going up at the next election. I mean, it was partly our popularity and partly federal Labor’s unpopularity. Gillard and Rudd became extremely unpopular, so that’s one of the reasons we had a record win. We had a record loss this time around, but we had a record win in 2012. Yes, it was a very enjoyable four years.

Ms Jennie Carter: Right.

End of interview 5

135 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Interview 6

Ms Jennie Carter: This is recording 6 of an interview with Dr Kim Hames. The interviewer is Jennie Carter and the interview is being conducted on Wednesday, 18 October 2017.

Kim, in our last interview you were talking about the lead-up up to the 2008 election. I’d like to take you back to that—the issue with Paul Omodei, who then quit the party because he said it was an unwinnable position, and the leadership taken over then by Troy Buswell in January 2008.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, as you said, Troy won the leadership battle—not that there was any battle really. He was the only logical choice of the people that were there, and he’d been a very strong performer in the chamber. He was almost unequal amongst all of our team in his ability to take the fight up to the Labor Party and give them a hard time. Some of his debates were fairly robust at times and fairly scathing, but he certainly was very strong in the Parliament, and he was popular. He was a boisterous, friendly, easy-to-get-along-with guy, and so he was popular amongst the members. The choice of him as leader—I don’t even know who ran against him, if anyone, actually. So there was pretty widespread satisfaction. I think the only one who might not have been happy was Rob Johnson at the time, who didn’t have much time for Troy, but everyone else was happy. I thought we were a good team, when I was elected as deputy, and we had a good relationship.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes. I was interested in his decision, while leader, not to remove John McGrath after the Corruption and Crime Commission—that he had a question written for him by Brian Burke. Do you know anything about that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, not really. I remember the incident, but it was nothing with which I was involved. John McGrath was a great guy. All of us loved John. We would have been pretty solid behind him at the time. I vaguely recall the incident and I don’t remember the explanation, to be honest. I thought John might have been a bit silly at the time to take advice, but I think the question was a good one, so I think John would have been well supported regardless, even though I can’t remember the exact details—and I think that’s probably why, because it wasn’t such a big deal to me.

136 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: Right. So the question was okay even if it came from a disgraced former Premier?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, yes, if you get stuff from the other side it’s almost something to boast about, that you got information from the former Leader of the Labor Party. It would’ve put Labor in a pretty awful position, getting a question prepared for one of our members by their former leader. I think we would’ve probably enjoyed it.

Ms Jennie Carter: I see. So your working relationship with Troy was good, you’re saying.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was.

Ms Jennie Carter: Because you defended him on the so-called chair incident and you called him “a rough diamond with a robust sense of humour”?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, he was. He was very much a Benny Hill sort of character. You need to do Troy’s background a bit. I mean, the information I had that his father was similar, but that his father had committed suicide. So he was that sort of person who needed to be out there and needed to be friendly and needed to have people around supporting him—and he did. The worry for everyone was that he was a very similar person. Even the way Troy laughed, it was like Benny Hill. His whole life was sort of a re-enactment of Benny Hill. His humour was fairly ribald at times. I’ll tell you one that might embarrass you a little, but it’s just a good picture into Troy. When I was deputy, we would be in the office—I think this might have been after he lost the leadership; this might have been years later. He would come and bang on the door, and you’d open the door to let him in and he’d say, “I heard you liked big knockers [chuckles].” That was Troy. I mean, that would have been Benny Hill—just the same. As I say, even when he laughed, his body language was just the same. So we all knew Troy was a little bit of a risk because of that, and he had strong advice for him to control his sense of humour, but then he had some incidents, as you know. One was unclipping the bra strap of one of the staff. It was not in a private situation—it was a group of them—and he did it for fun and probably because he could, but totally inappropriate. Then the issue with the chair, and again even more inappropriate. So, those things damaged him severely, and hence my 137 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW conversation previously in the lead-up to changing back to Colin Barnett is that all of us had had people, particularly those of strong religious views, saying, “We can’t support you while you’ve got a leader who behaves like that.”

Ms Jennie Carter: Right.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So, yes, it was definitely very damaging for Troy.

Ms Jennie Carter: When you say you had people with strong religious views, was that within the party or without?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, this is within my electorate.

Ms Jennie Carter: So this is your —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So, people I knew well who were strongly religious, who’d forgiven me for something before—something I’d failed to mentioned earlier, but in the first four years of my time in Parliament, when we were first in opposition, I talked about the big fight I had in workers’ comp, but there was a huge issue for debate, which was on abortion. There were lots of members of Parliament on both sides of the house who were strongly opposed to abortion under any circumstances, and then there were some like me, who are against abortion but pro the right of women to make that choice. I think it started in the upper house, but it was Diana Warnock in our house who brought the legislation to Parliament. We all had a free vote. I in fact led the debate for our side, probably because of my medical background and my knowledge of the circumstances under which women may come and ask for an abortion, and their management and how we looked after them and what we did. So I was leading the debate for our side. In the end, we won that debate, but not without a huge amount of acrimony on both sides. So you had people like Paul Omodei who was very strongly against the legislation, and Michelle Roberts the same, joining together to fight the rest of us who had a different point of view. Now, we moulded that legislation. The numbers were tight, but we made sure we got things in there that satisfied those who were sort of in-between, particularly around counselling for women, making it compulsory that before someone be referred for a termination that they be provided with the opportunity for counselling, if they wanted, and given good advice about where they could get it. You know, the key thing about that is making sure it wasn’t just the anti-abortion group doing the 138 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW counselling—that people had counselling from whatever source they wanted. So that legislation got through because of myself with our numbers and Diana Warnock with the Labor Party members, and that’s the legislation as it stands today. That was a very difficult time.

In my electorate there were lots of people who had strong religious views who didn’t like my stance. The right-to-life group were fairly vicious in all that debate. In fact, in my electorate they put round pamphlets to areas—particularly where my kids went to school, a Catholic school—saying, “Kim Hames kills babies” and putting pictures of foetuses in the pamphlets. So they were very, very nasty. But the religious group down my way got to know me and got to understand me better, and they said, “Look, we don’t agree with what you’ve done but we forgive you because we see all the other things you’ve been involved in”—again, things I haven’t talked about I don’t think, things with Father Brian Morrison where we took medical supplies to Bangladesh and Chernobyl, and doing the Christmas appeal and things like that. So they’d forgiven me, but they said they couldn’t vote for me, even though they’d like to, with Troy Buswell as our leader.

Ms Jennie Carter: I see. So when Troy—did Troy resign? How did that happen?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, we talked about that last time, remember?

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, that’s right.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: The polling was done that showed that Colin Barnett had a much better chance of winning than Troy, and so Troy called Colin and asked him to come back. He’d already been through preselection and been replaced, and then came back to lead the party.

I have to admit, I still feel perhaps a little guilt over all that, even though it was the right thing to do, but it was me that initiated the poll through the Liberal Party—it was me who requested the poll—that eventually came back showing Troy couldn’t win. So, ever if he reads this, I apologise to Troy for doing that, even though I think we could not have won with Troy there, and all what we did was expose the fact that what people were saying in my electorate was obviously true in lots of other electorates as well. That there were enough people out there who didn’t want to vote for Troy, and it’s such a shame because I think if those areas had been controlled 139 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW he would have been a very good leader. Mind you, he was a tough flaming Treasurer—I’ll talk about that later [chuckles]. We didn’t always see eye to eye when he was Treasurer, mainly because I was spending all the money [chuckles].

Ms Jennie Carter: Because your particular portfolios were Health. When Colin Barnett took over, the day after he was elected as Leader of the Liberal Party and the opposition leader, Alan Carpenter called an election, very quickly, quite out of the blue. Now, this should have been, I suppose, a quick decisive move with catching everyone offhand. What went wrong, do you think—or what went right for your party [chuckles]?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, it was a silly move. Again, I think I said last time, he just made so many mistakes. The Labor Party, even today, are very bitter about what he did and how he did it. He did it without consulting anyone. So, even the Labor Party, the head of the party—I forget what they’re called. But the Ben Morton equivalent, who was Rob—he’s a minister now—Bill. Goodness, how quickly we forget. Anyway, Bill was the head of the lay party and [Alan Carpenter] didn’t even tell him that he was going to call the election, just announced it, thinking he’d catch Colin off guard, so obviously he was getting advice from somewhere else as well. But what people did is, their view was, “He’s just another politician.” They thought he’d be better than that because he’d sacked so many of their ministers, five or six of them or something, and as soon as he did that, they said, “He’s just another politician.” So he lost a lot of credibility over that move, because it was clearly designed to try and catch Colin out. But they underestimated how much people knew Colin already and in fact admired him. So that was a big mistake, along with his other mistakes that we’ve discussed before, including the people that he didn’t support in running for their seats, like Bob Kucera. We went through those names last time.

Ms Jennie Carter: Now, Colin Barnett was quite an experienced politician.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Very much so.

Ms Jennie Carter: And you were his deputy. What was your working relationship like?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was very good. Colin had always been—when he was Leader of the Opposition previously, and even when we were in government before 140 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW and he was Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party at the time, and Hendy Cowan was Deputy Premier, because the Nationals and the Liberals were in alliance at that stage—very well respected. He was sort of the factional head, even though we didn’t have a faction, of the anti–Crichton-Brown group. He was very well regarded by all of us, but he was fairly aloof, and he could be very cranky. When he was Leader of the House, it was terrible. He and John Kobelke just fought and fought and fought. You know, Colin would much rather sit down and talk with the female members of Parliament than sit down and have a beer with the male members of Parliament, so he was always seen as distant and aloof. He could be petulant at times—I hope he doesn’t read that, but I think I’ve said that to him—and cranky.

But he just changed; he just totally changed. I think it was getting what he’d always wanted, winning the election and becoming Premier. It had obviously been a burning ambition for a long period of time. He was just different. He was so easy to get on with and friendly and would sit down with the guys and have a drink. When you watched him on TV, he was relaxed and confident and came across very well, made good, strong sensible decisions all the time. We were really proud of him in those four years. You just couldn’t fault his behaviour or his attitude or his manners. Very strict on making sure we did the right thing, emphasising that to us in cabinet all the time, “Don’t spend taxpayers’ money unreasonably; don’t take too many trips; don’t have too many holidays; do the right thing all the time.” He was always saying that to us. He didn’t want to see what had happened to the Labor Party with the difficulties that they’d had. So he was great to work with. We would, together mostly, choose the ministry at the start, and then make changes as we went along. Although what tended to happen—not so much chose them together, but he would get my advice on who I thought should do what and I would tell him. Often we agreed on those things; occasionally he didn’t and he would choose his own people for different roles. I have to say, that didn’t always go well. Anyway, at the end of the day, Colin made the decisions on who got what, except I got to make my own decisions for what I wanted to do, but I would give advice.

Ms Jennie Carter: So he gave you space to do that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. He said it right at the very start, “As Deputy Premier, you choose what you want, so tell me what you want.” So, I did. I told him Health and Aboriginal Affairs—Indigenous Affairs, whatever it’s called. So that’s what I did to start off with, when we won. 141 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: Well, you started then in the new government as Deputy Premier, Minister for Health and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. When did you become interested in the portfolio for Tourism?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I just got frustrated that it was so difficult to achieve anything [in Aboriginal affairs] and in the end I just wanted someone else to have a go, see if someone else could do better than I’d been able to do, because I wasn’t satisfied that I was achieving as much as I wanted. Tourism wasn’t something that I went to look for; it’s just that I loved being outdoors, loved visiting places, loved camping, loved fishing, loved doing all those things. In looking for a replacement for Aboriginal Affairs, because I needed to take on another portfolio, that seemed to be the one that would suit me the most. So that’s why I asked to switch over, and I think there was an opportunity—I forget who had Tourism before me—that’s right; Elizabeth Constable did. I didn’t get Tourism until towards the end, I think, of the first term of government, is that right? Have you got that there?

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, in December 2010, so it was quite some time afterwards.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: 2010, yes. Liz Constable had had it, and she had a very heavy workload doing Education and she was under a lot of pressure in Parliament. The Labor Party—when you’re in Parliament, I don’t know what it is, but the women hate the women. The females in the Labor Party just hated the women in the Liberal Party and they would focus their attention on—by way of interjection, for most of the eight years I was there I’d be yelling out at the opposition, “Stop targeting our women” all the time, because that’s what they were doing, Liz Constable first and then . They were ruthless in attacking them, all the time. I think Liz was under a lot of pressure. She loved Tourism, really enjoyed it, but agreed that I could take that over. So that’s what I did, and have to say I loved Tourism. It was a great portfolio and it balanced really well with Health. Health was hard work and a lot of hours, a lot of time, but not so much time on weekends and at nights. There weren’t lots of events to do in Health; it was just managing the health system. Whereas Tourism was exactly the opposite—not a great deal to do in the day; lots to do in the evenings and weekends. So it was a really good mix and it let me relax a bit from the pressures of Health and have a portfolio that I really enjoyed, and it was good fun. The people in it are great people. They put their money on the line. They’re the people that go and put every dollar they’ve had into tourism ventures. Tourism can 142 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW be tough. You live and die on the numbers of people who walk through your door to buy your coffee or take your holidays or stay at your resorts or hotels or whatever. It’s a tough business. So people who do it tend to be a bit flamboyant and outgoing and fun loving. They were just great to be around and so I really enjoyed that time and that portfolio.

Ms Jennie Carter: So before that, you were becoming disillusioned, you indicated, by Aboriginal Affairs, or the lack of things happening?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: If I looked back and said, “Were Aboriginal people better off now than they were when I started 10, 14, 16 years before?”, they weren’t. In some areas they were, and some of the things we put in place to help and change things and make things better were still there and were working and were still around—and are still going now, some of them—but people still weren’t better off than they’d been before, and they still aren’t now. I like to be able to get in and grab things and make them better. In Health, I could do that, I could turn it around and I could get big improvements, but in Aboriginal Affairs I just seemed to be getting nowhere. So in the end I decided to let someone else have a try.

Ms Jennie Carter: With Health, though, you did do some shaking up. Can you tell me about your time as health minister?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, it was a very challenging time because I came in and there’s huge amounts of pressure, and particularly financial pressure. At the time, we were chewing up 26 per cent of the budget; by the time I left, we had 30 per cent, 29 per cent of the budget. The amount of money we were spending went from, I can’t remember the exact figures, but around three and a half billion dollars or $4 billion a year up to $8 billion when I left. So, nearly doubled the spend in Health over that seven years, and made huge changes to the way the system operated both in board structures, in the four-hour rule and the way the hospitals were run. Because of my background in health, I could relate to it very well and relate to the people in it. Some things were great and you felt a great sense of achievement; other things were just tough as nails.

I can very well remember a meeting we had when we were planning where all the specialists would go and where the cardiothoracic surgeons would operate from and where the major trauma unit would be, and we had some serious fights with the 143 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW specialists involved in that. So I got these cardiothoracic surgeons up to my office one day—they were from the three different hospitals, Fremantle and Sir Charles and Royal Perth—and we had to narrow it down to two cardiothoracic centres to get proper balance within the system and to get the proper balance between what was going to stay. Remember, we’d saved Royal Perth. That’s something I haven’t talked about—that was a massive campaign to save Royal Perth. Anyway, we had the three hospitals and we had to balance, get the balance right. Each of the cardiothoracic specialists thought it should be their hospital and one other, and nobody could reach agreement on which two hospitals it should be. I had a meeting that was supposed to go for an hour and then I had to be up in Parliament, and after an hour and a half of them just arguing and arguing and abusing each other—it was slanderous, the things they were saying to each other.

Ms Jennie Carter: So these are individual specialists?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, individual specialists. I said, “Listen, you guys, I’m a GP. I’m not a specialist. I’m not an expert to be saying where it should be. I need you to come to an agreement.” After an hour and a half they were just still arguing, so I said, “All right. Sorry, guys, but I’ve got to go to Parliament. I’ve got to make a decision so I’ll try and make the best decision I can based on the information that you’ve done.” So I did that; I made a decision. I forget which two hospitals I picked. Fiona Stanley was certainly going to be one of them, but which combination was just so difficult. So I made a decision. The next week in the paper a letter appeared absolutely abusing me and saying I knew nothing and I was the worst minister we’d ever had, and it was the first time these specialists had ever agreed with each other, so at least I achieved something! In fact, the decision wasn’t the right one, as it turned out, and I changed it later, but you had to have a decision. To be able to change it later, I had to have a position upfront, and once I did that, we got some progress. Yes, the first time they’ve ever agreed with each other.

The major trauma centre at Royal Perth stayed. All the people were saying that should move and be exclusively at Fiona Stanley Hospital, but I had received advice that said by 2018 we’ll need two major trauma centres. The one at Royal Perth was the sort of reason for living for Royal Perth, it was the pride of Royal Perth, had one of the best records for major trauma centres in the world, and the person who was head of it wanted to keep it at Royal Perth. So I agreed with him and kept it at Royal Perth, and you think that didn’t cause trouble as well? Because it’s no good shutting 144 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW it down and in 2018 you need a second one, you’ve got to open it back up again. That’s just crazy. As it turned out, we got to 2018—well, we’re not there yet, but nearly—and we probably don’t need a second one yet, but that was just bad advice that I was given on the growth and demand we were going to see. But there will eventually need to be a second one, and Royal Perth has been fantastic for managing that major trauma centre. That sort of helped coordinate where the cardiothoracic surgery went and how that linked in, but yes, it’s difficult decisions to make along the way about how those things go. Of course, we got to do in those seven years amazing things. I think I built nine or 10 new hospitals. Not built in that time, but committed the funds to building or built, one or the other. I don’t count Port Hedland or Rockingham, because while Rockingham certainly was opened by me, it was built by Labor. The other hospitals we opened were nine or 10 new hospitals plus major redevelopments in just about every other hospital across the state, particularly with our country health package that was extremely popular and very successful.

Ms Jennie Carter: I’d like to talk about that, but can we first go back to Royal Perth?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: You talked about—now, I remember that controversy about Royal Perth. Tell me about your involvement in that.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, the Labor Party had instigated a report called the Reid report, which was done by a Dr Reid, who was a senior bureaucrat in Australia, who came across and sat down with a team of people, including John Langoulant. Rita Saffioti was on it and the chief of staff of Jim McGinty whose name I just can’t remember.20 They formed this committee, the Reid review, and the Reid review recommended a total change in the way the health system ran, saying we needed to develop a peripheral circle of hospitals, move them away from the two major tertiary hospitals right next door to each other—Charlies and Royal Perth Hospital are just down the road from each other. Recommended developing the Fiona Stanley Hospital—we didn’t name that; that was done by Jim McGinty—and expand the ring

20 The Health Reform Committee, chaired by, was appointed in March 2003 and its report on the public health system was published in March 2004. Committee members were Professor Mick Reid (Chairman and former Director of NSW Health), Mike Daube (Director General Department of Health WA), John Langoulant (Under Treasurer), Rita Saffioti (Department of Premier and Cabinet), and Danny Cloghan (Chief of Staff, Minister for Health). 145 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW of hospitals around and get more work done out in the rim. In doing that, he said that either Charles Gairdner should stay, or Royal Perth should stay, or both of them stay, but under one management. The Labor Party made the decision that it would be Sir Charles Gairdner that would stay and Royal Perth would close down. To me, that was just totally wrong. All the other recommendations of the Reid review we agreed with, just not that recommendation. Even to have them under one management—we would have agreed with that recommendation but chosen a third way of doing it, which was to put them under joint management if we’d supported that recommendation. It became very political because they were going to shut Royal Perth down.

Ms Jennie Carter: Why did you disagree with the Reid report’s recommendation?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Because everywhere you look in the world, having a major hospital within the CBD is critically important, particularly with things like terrorism. If you have a terrorist attack or gridlock for whatever reason where people can’t get around by vehicle, where people need to walk, where you might have casualties that need to be stretchered into the hospital, you need a major hospital. All of the eastern corridor, the people from there tend to go to Royal Perth for their tertiary hospital. While you might say Sir Charles Gairdner is not that far away, it’s still much tougher to get to, particularly if you’re coming from somewhere like Armadale. A lot of people come on the train. Royal Perth is a great centre for Aboriginal people in particular, but eastern corridor people as well. It was a very popular hospital amongst all of those, and had been there for a long, long, long time. In fact, my dad had worked there as a doctor and I was there as a doctor so, you know, there was a personal attachment as well.

Under the plan that Labor had, they were going to change Sir Charles Gairdner into a 1 000-bed hospital, and it was 550 beds at the time. There’s just no room, absolutely no room, because the recommendations also had King Edward and PMH going to that site as well. It would have been a massive site. There’s just not enough land, there’s not enough beds. Already the ED was packed out, and still is, at Sir Charles, so where would all those other patients have gone? Royal Perth was seeing the most patients in its ED—60 000 patients a year. Where would that 60 000 go? They weren’t all going to suddenly go out to Fiona Stanley. It just was never going to happen, it’s too many patients, because you’re already—Fremantle

146 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW was being closed, remember. That had 35 000, 40 000. So suddenly you would’ve had 100 000 patients with nowhere to go. So it just wasn’t logical thinking.

Now, Jim McGinty changed his mind about three times. First, he was going to do that. Then he was going to move PMH to the Royal Perth site, which got dropped fairly quickly. Then, instead of having 1 000 beds at Charlies, he was going to keep Fremantle open, which was a very old and rundown hospital, but it happened to be in his electorate, so popular for him. But that wasn’t logical either because you still had all those patients out from Midland area that were just going to have nowhere to go. So, yes, we started the campaign opposing it with a particular nurse, and I’ve been trying to think of her name and can’t. She led the campaign from the nurses’ point, getting petitions. She collected 40 000 signatures that I presented to Parliament, her and her team at the hospital. They were absolutely fantastic, and she just fought tooth and nail to save her hospital. Of course, a lot of the specialists agreed—some didn’t. Some specialists at Royal Perth were strongly of the view that it should be shut down, and I think there still are people of that view. The Labor Party of course fought it tooth and nail, and it probably went a long way to cost them the election. You know, I’ve talked about the other things that Carpenter did, but Royal Perth was a very strong component, particularly for seats like Mount Lawley and Morley that we won off Labor.

So, politically it was a very good move, but retrospectively it was a very good move as well. There are just nowhere near enough beds in the system, and if we’d taken out all of the beds that are at Royal Perth Hospital it would’ve devastated the system. In fact, I foresee a time when, even though we’ve significantly reduced the number of beds—it went from 660 or so down to, what are we now, 350 or 400, something in that range—they’ll upgrade the building, which we tried to do and failed because I couldn’t get the money out of Treasury, but a major redevelopment and they’ll start increasing numbers at the hospital. The structure is sound. The location is very good, particularly with the build-up of numbers of people living in the inner city.

Even though new hospitals like Midland are very successful, they’re packed to the eyeballs as well. Patients are just coming out of the woodwork. During that time, of course, our population increased by the size of Tasmania, during our time in government, which put huge pressure on all of the system, and particularly our roads, but on our hospitals as well. We were forever short of bed space enough to 147 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW look after the patients, and you can’t have a patient come through the door and say, “No, sorry, go away.” You have to treat everyone who walks through that front door; you’re required by law to do it. So, you have to have places for people to go, otherwise you just get chock-a-block. In fact, that’s what happened to some degree during our second term of government. Despite all the hospitals we built, with the growth in population and growth in demand, we still couldn’t keep up. That’s why now wait times are higher than ever.

Ms Jennie Carter: You also said that you were involved with reorganising the hospital boards, which had been —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, that was more in the second term of government.

Ms Jennie Carter: That was in the second. So we’ll cover that a bit later. But you had started along that —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Remember, Jim McGinty had sacked all the boards.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: The first thing they did when they came to government—and I don’t think it was Jim actually; I think it was Bob Kucera—was sack all of the boards of all the hospitals, and the minister in fact became the board. So, as minister, I was also the board of all of the hospitals, which actually turned out to be very helpful at times, because my first DG could sometimes be of the view that I’m the minister, not the DG; the running of the day to day of the hospital was a matter for the DG and not for me, and that I shouldn’t be interfering. My response to that of course was, “Well, yes, you are right, so I won’t ask you as the minister. I’ll ask you as the head of the board, in which case you’re obliged to provide me all that information and of course I’m obliged to be involved.” So I have to say I had a very hands-on approach to how the health system was operating that didn’t always go down well with senior bureaucrats.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, I can imagine. So, you said that the Health budget sort of went up under your term. Was that a deliberate strategy to push the —

148 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Not specifically for it to go up, but we wanted to get the best health service we could. You know, in health you have all the time growth in demand that grows by about two, three per cent a year. Then you have an ageing population, which grows by about another two per cent. Then the CPI for the costs of the existing health service doesn’t just go up by the CPI that exists for everything else across the system; it’s a higher CPI. Medical equipment in particular costs more. We were competing with the mining sector to keep staff, you know. Getting senior nurses to keep working for us on $60 000 a year when they could go and drive a Haulpak on $100 000 a year wasn’t easy, so we kept our wages at the top in Australia for doctors and nurses. We were a bit locked in. The Labor Party had done a deal with the AMA just before we came that locked in increases through our time. They were quite significant increases for doctors. The AMA certainly had a big win with McGinty just before the election. The nurses had a big win with us just before the 2012 election—not with my approval, I might add.

Ms Jennie Carter: That was with the wage and conditions?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So this is jumping forward a bit, but leading up to the 2012 election, the agreement wasn’t even due until June the next year, after the election, and the election was in March. The nurses’ union under Mark Olson campaigned very heavily and staff were going on strike leading up to the election. Obviously, that tends to be the way with unions leading up to elections when Liberals are in government, but Colin unilaterally made a decision to agree to their demands, which were massive increases, seven or eight per cent.

Ms Jennie Carter: Was that to clear the air, or —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, he said that. He was concerned that people’s lives would be put at risk in our hospitals by the action of the unions, and he wanted to stop that from happening and so the decision was made in his office to agree to that increase. Now, over the next four years that cost us enormously in increased expenditure on wages, yet I was still the one that had to carry the criticism of Treasury saying how much I was spending. But 70 per cent of our costs in health are wages. They were going up by decisions made either by the Labor Party or by Colin Barnett, so not things that were our responsibility. If you’ve got certain numbers of patients, you need certain numbers of staff to manage them properly, so we had no choice with those increases in costs. But we wanted to increase services 149 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW as well, so we had a commitment to country health services. We had a commitment to children’s health services in particular. I significantly increased funding going to child and adolescent health. In fact, a doctor who worked in there told me towards the end of my career that the decisions we made and the big increase in child health support that we gave was one of his best moments as a doctor working in the health system in his life, because they were so significant and made such a big difference. So we were pretty proud of doing that.

Ms Jennie Carter: What was your relationship with the AMA like?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Difficult. I was a member of the AMA. The chief executive was a friend of mine; we played hockey together, yet the AMA are all about the AMA. I mean, they’re a doctors union and they can be pretty tough. So, I met with them every month and we had a lot of—you know, it wasn’t antagonism. I think we were still friendly and got on well, but I have expressed to them the view on many occasions that they’re—I forget the exact words—tougher than the opposition, harder to deal with than the opposition, cause us more problems than the opposition. Any one of those things would be true. Particularly in the second term—I won’t talk about that now, but in the second term of government the relationship soured and so that became much more difficult.

Ms Jennie Carter: While you were health minister also, and I’m not sure which particular government, whether it was the first one, there was a decision to part- privatise hospitals or bring the private sector into —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: That was Fiona Stanley, yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I know [it was] strongly fought by Labor, even though I had great fun often in Parliament reading out stuff from Eric Ripper when he was the Treasurer strongly supporting using the private sector, particularly in hospitals and particularly in Fiona Stanley. It had become a political thing for Labor and, with their strong union membership, something that was easy for them to oppose and easy to get members’ support for. So they were fanatically opposed to privatisation. We got Serco, and they attacked Serco endlessly, even though Serco were first appointed by John D’Orazio when he was Minister for Police when the Labor Party were in 150 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW government. So provision of services to manage inmates was contracted out to Serco by the Labor Party—just want to make sure that’s there on the record—and yet they had the gall to jump up and criticise it because it was politically expedient when they were in opposition.

The provision of services by public servants isn’t always efficient. Having worked in public and private systems, all doctors know that. For example, when I was a GP and working, I would go and assist a doctor working in a public hospital, Midland in this case—Swan Districts, it was—a vascular surgeon. We would walk in there and get changed and then we’d go and have a cup of tea, because once we arrived and they saw us, they would send for the patient. Then we would come out and do the operation 20 minutes later and when we had finished that, they would send for the next patient, and we would go and have another cup of tea or a coffee, waiting. The time it would take to go through the number of patients was just so slow. Then you’d find, because there was risk of the last operation going after five o’clock, the staff in the hospital had cancelled the operation, so the poor person was sent home. Whereas, when I would go to a hospital like St John of God’s in Subiaco assisting, we’d come out dressed and the patient would be asleep on the bed. We’d go scrub up, walk in there and do the procedure, go back, and the next patient would be waiting. We’d have a quick cup of tea and 10 minutes later we’d be back in there doing the next operation. That’s absolutely typical of the contrast between them. It’s not the staff not working as hard, because they do, it’s just the bureaucratic system that’s in government hospitals. I tried for seven years to change that, and we made some progress, but still it’s chalk and cheese. Specialists would tell me that they would go in their private clinics, in an eye clinic, and see 20 people in an afternoon, and they would see half that number in the government clinic. It’s just a cumbersome procedure. So, to get the private sector to manage things was very successful.

Before my time, Kevin Prince had gone to the private sector to manage Peel Health Campus. That had indifferent results. They had also done the same with Joondalup hospital, which was working fantastically well. When the Labor Party came to office, they could’ve cancelled contracts, but didn’t because they could see it would cost them a lot more. The contract for the hospitals, they provide the same service at a 15 per cent discount, so you’re 15 per cent in front right from the start, and they would see more patients and do more operations and do everything more efficiently, because the private sector has incentives to make the system work more efficiently. 151 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

So, we’re supporting the private sector. In fact, at that time, every other state that was Labor managed in Australia—when I became minister, I was the only Liberal health minister; everyone else was Labor—were all privatising all over the place, getting the private sector in to take over different roles, including Jim McGinty, with things like radiology privatised. Those things worked well, but they are not always more efficient.

The Labor Party used a thing that Graham Kierath did in Royal Perth, where he contracted out all the cleaning services at Royal Perth, and it was an absolute disaster. They had an outbreak of a serious infection within the hospital because the people that were doing the work just weren’t doing it properly. So privatisation is not always the best system, but a combination of public and private works very well. That is what we have done at Fiona Stanley, where all the non-patient services are contracted out and all the patient-management services are still managed by state government. That system worked, and is still working very well.

But hospitals like Joondalup hospital that are totally contracted out, again, are extremely efficient. Mind you, their four-hour rule times have never been fantastic, but they had the highest number of patients at any hospital until Fiona Stanley came along and just pipped them at the post. But the new hospital in Midland that we’ve contracted to St John of God is going exceptionally well also. So, there’s nothing wrong with the system, and you’ll find Labor won’t get rid of it, although I’ve been waiting for them to get rid of Serco at Royal Perth. I am surprised that we’re a year down the track and we haven’t seen it yet. That was going to be one of the first things they did in government. I’m interested to see what happens then, because their contract period was coming to an end.

Ms Jennie Carter: While you were involved in this, was there much pushback that you had to fight against?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Only the Treasury. No offence to the people who read it, because some them I get on well with, but they were my number one enemy. They were the ones we fought against all the time to get the money we wanted to do the things we needed, but within reason. There was a negative comment written about me in the paper the other day, I think it was by Paul Murray, who seems to have a bee in his bonnet about me. Christian Porter once said when he was Treasurer, in a joking fashion that was meant to be something supportive of me, but in the paper 152 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW they used it in a negative fashion saying that if a dollar wasn’t nailed down, then Kim Hames would get it.

Ms Jennie Carter: I would’ve thought that was quite a skill.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, you know, Treasury was tough to deal with. They had to be, particularly in the last four years, when there was not enough money to go around and we were demanding more and more.

Ms Jennie Carter: But the first period of government —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was still the same. They had to keep control of the finances. To be fair, we had a lot of costs in health that were more accounting costs. As we built more hospitals there was a big increase in the depreciation costs. When you’ve got more value, you’ve got more depreciation, but it’s still an item on your budget and it’s an increased cost on your budget. We had changes in commonwealth funding, we had all sorts of different things, so my actual cost in providing the health service went up five or six per cent, but our total costs went up about 11 or 12 per cent. That’s unaffordable, so they had to find a way to make changes, they had to put on pressure and because it’s a huge organisation there’re lots of inbuilt inefficiencies. They were trying to force us to be efficient, which was fine, except that you still had to provide the service. Some of the years when we had to find ways to cut down were particularly tough, because I didn’t want to cut any of the health services we were providing; in fact, I wanted to grow them.

The lucky thing—it wasn’t so much luck. When we were in opposition, I was one of the first to develop a complete package of things to go to an election, of election commitments, and because people didn’t think we were going to win, they agreed to all of them. I remember Norman Moore being really upset the first few years in government because I was getting all this extra money for health because we’d made election commitments to do it. I’d thought of all these great things to do. We increased PATS, which is patient assisted transport funding, enormously. We nearly doubled it, I think. There’d been a federal government review of PAT services throughout Australia and they made a whole pile of recommendations as to what should be done, so I just adopted them all. A big increase in cancer funding. I can’t remember them all; there were so many. And, of course, the commitment to retain Royal Perth. All those election commitments were adopted, so I got about 70 per 153 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW cent of the extra funding available in those first few years to health because we’d made election promises to do it and they’d all been agreed to and supported by Troy and then by Colin. So, it was good, we got a big boost in funding, but that is why Treasury always fought me tooth and nail.

Ms Jennie Carter: You talked earlier about the advances in child health, is that a particular interest of yours? Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, but when we were in opposition we were aware of big deficiencies, particularly at Princess Margaret hospital, but also out in the community for speech pathologists, for child health nurses, for child physiotherapists—there was a huge deficiency—and child psychologists. We worked out how much that was going to cost and we made a commitment to fix it. I think it was $20 million a year, or something, in extra funding to boost child health services. We did that. It took us four years to get all the money together—fighting with Treasury, as you do—because you can’t do it all at once anyway; you’ve got to build the numbers. But we did that. There are lots of child physios and speech pathologists and OTs out there that wouldn’t be there if we hadn’t won that election. We just spent so much on doing that. Cancer services—the same. Plus support for particular organisations. When I was in opposition, I went, a lot, to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and motor neurone disease and muscular dystrophy, and I made commitments to them to increase their funding. And we did; they got a huge boost in funding. I think their funding went up over three years, partly because of mine and then partly because of Colin’s commitment to give all not-for-profit organisations a 25 per cent increase in funding. On top of the 30-odd per cent that I’d already given them, they ended up with more than 50 per cent more funding than they had before.

Ms Jennie Carter: At the same time you are having all this, and they seem quite impressive —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I missed one before and I wouldn’t mind getting them down. There is cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, motor neurone disease and there’s one—never mind, I will remember that later. Don’t stop; I’ll remember, as we’re going along, the other disease.

Ms Jennie Carter: I’ll stop for a moment.

154 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: To recap on the period 2008 to 2012—what did you think your greatest achievements were, both as health minister and as aboriginal affairs minister?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I’ve said in Parliament that there’s one particular thing I did that I regard as being the best thing I did. That had nothing to do with any of those. It was the girl who was having the liver transplant. What happened is that she’d had a liver transplant that had failed because of her drug addiction. I think she had two small children. She then used drugs again and her liver failed again. Under the policy of transplants that excluded her from having a second chance—having a second liver transplant. Her parents came to me. Her Irish dad came to me and begged me to help them do something. I went back through the department and I couldn’t overturn the decision because there were lots of other people on the waiting list who deserved equal opportunity to have their chance at getting a liver transplant, so it wasn’t fair to do that. But what I found out also is two things. One is that she’d been sexually molested as a child, which is now public knowledge because there was a series on TV about it since then. That is why she became a drug addict. Her brothers and sisters were very strong motivated individuals, like the family were. But also that her grandmother, who was very close to her, had died. The combination of all those things led to her using drugs again.

They had found that they could get a liver transplant in Singapore but needed the money to do it. It was $100 000 or something of that order. I agreed that the state would lend them $100 000 to allow them to get the operation because they couldn’t otherwise get that money together. They’d raised a fair bit themselves. I think they needed $150 000 or $160 000. This is quite a few years ago so that money had a lot more relevance than it does in today’s dollars. They worked really hard to get that money put together. I was roundly criticised for that decision. Remember that people didn’t know those extra special circumstances about her grandmother dying or the sexual molestation. The sad news was she went to Singapore and had the operation, but it went wrong. She got multiple blood clots and died from the operation. It was the worst possible outcome. As it turned out, she had a minor clotting disorder that they discovered while she was in Singapore, which was probably more the cause of her having the first liver transplant fail than the drugs she used. It probably wasn’t actually her fault that it had failed, but nevertheless. Then the family had that burden. It had actually cost them a lot more because of the complications and their having to be there. They’d had to raise a lot more money to 155 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW pay and they still had the $100 000 debt. They were trying over years to repay it but what I did was absolve them of the debt. I think it was about $60 000 or $70 000 that they still had left to pay. I wrote it off and, again, Treasury weren’t too happy. I think they changed the rules after that, but up to $100 000 a minister could make decisions like that of absolving debt.

I did it lots of times, I have to say, for various very good reasons. For example, someone who’d come from New Zealand, I think, who’s had a partner, had children, got pregnant, went to hospital and had the baby. But he left her so she was left as a New Zealand citizen without health insurance having a baby in our hospital, so she had a $20 000 or $30 000 bill that she couldn’t afford to pay because she had four or five children. I was able to absolve debts like that. There was a lady from Georgia. The Georgian consul came to see me because someone had come across—I forget what the circumstances were now, but she was left with a big health debt that I wrote off. Things like that, while it’s a reasonable amount of money, in the total scheme it is like everybody in Western Australia making a one cent donation for the family with the liver transplant. But for that individual it’s an enormous difference. Anyway, I absolved that debt. That’s probably the thing I felt best about of all the things that I did.

But we did a lot of other stuff. As I said, we built all of those hospitals, we re-funded the health system, and we got rid of those huge queues in the emergency departments. We kept waitlists down; we were the second best. When we were opposition there was a report put out that compared all the states and Western Australia was performing as one of the worst of any state or territory in just about every area. We were the highest number when you wanted to be the lowest and the lowest number when you wanted to be the highest. As I said, the media ran this “health system in crisis” all the time. You never saw that when we were in government. You never saw any headlines saying, “Health system in crisis” when I was the minister. We went from being the worst to either best or second best in just about every category—surgery wait times and all those different areas of comparison. Even though towards the end—this is a later thing—the numbers started to grow and grow of people on the waitlist, we still had the second best time for getting surgery done. But it was starting to reach crisis point by the time I left and it was just because the demand is too great. It’s insatiable. During the first four years it was great because everything was improving. Everything was getting better; all the numbers were improving. We were getting on top of waitlists and people having 156 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW surgery. We were getting a lot more surgery done. I was very happy with the way the system was going in those first four years. Of course, amongst other health ministers I’d started out being the only Liberal minister. By the time a few others had joined the system we had, even as health ministers, made changes that I was involved with to a degree, particularly in registration of different professions and the like.

End of interview 6

157 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Interview 7

Ms Jennie Carter: This is recording 7 of an interview with Dr Kim Hames. The interviewer is Jennie Carter and the interview is being conducted on Thursday, 16 November 2017.

Kim, I’d like to recap on a couple of things that we didn’t follow up on. One was your interest and support for the royalties for regions program. Would you like to go into a bit more on that and your relationship with the Nationals?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Sure. As we discussed last time, I was one of the ones that got the Nats together with Colin and we agreed to how royalties for regions would work and the amount of money that would be committed prior to the National Party agreeing to coming and forming a government with us. Clearly, I had an interest in royalties for regions. It was a great tactical ploy by the National Party to do that, which was Brendon Grylls’ initiative. It was really political genius to come up with the concept because everybody in the country always felt that they weren’t getting enough, particularly since all the royalty money came from the country but tended to be spent on big projects in the city, I guess, because that’s where the population was. Because that’s where it was, people in the country did tend to miss out on getting services that were taken for granted in the city. That was their political ploy and it worked exceptionally well. They got very strong votes in the election—a resounding win for them—and to be seen to be a bit separate from the Liberal Party.

In the country the fight isn’t between Liberal and National on one side and Labor on the other, because Labor only get a very low vote in most of the country areas. It’s normally between Liberals and Nationals, so out in the bush they’re sort of the enemy and they fight each other. There’s people on the National Party side and on our side who are very negative about people on the other side in the Liberals or Nationals. There’s a fair bit of ill feeling in those lower levels but at senior level we got on very well. I particularly got on well with “Tuck” Waldron and Terry Redman, and Brendon Grylls while he was the leader. We agreed that we would support royalties for regions, which had a fixed percentage and then we agreed it would be a cap of a billion dollars a year of funds to go into royalties for regions projects.21 It

21 Royalties for Regions, formulated in 2008, was funded by setting aside 25% of the state's mining and petroleum royalty revenue to be held in a special investment fund for regional spending. 158 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW would be managed by the Minister for Regional Development, who was Brendon Grylls at the time. We had the legislation come through and it was very complex legislation. It was done with a view that the Labor Party and the media would be severely critical of any suggestion of corruption within the system. There were so many checks and balances put in place. In fact, it made it very difficult to work. You had so many levels of approval to get funding in to a different area.

The great thing for me, both as Minister for Health and as a country member— Mandurah is country, whatever anyone else might think; it’s outside the metropolitan area, so we were entitled to get those funds as well. It means that there was another pool of funds—a whole second budget that was available just for projects in country areas, which had never ever been available before. Before, if you wanted to get an upgrade to anything out in the country, it had to come from the pool that that minister had and most of the demand for him was in the city, not in the country. It improved the social fabric of communities. There were just no funds available in a normal budget for that. The further we went on with it, the more we got to see that that was the case. As budgets got tighter and more difficult and things were being cut everywhere, there was still money available for projects in country areas.

As Minister for Health, it was a great opportunity for me to improve services in country areas. Even when we had money in the normal budget, often it was insufficient. Albany Hospital was a great example. We went to the election committing to the amount of funds the Labor Party had put on the budget. Carpenter committed to fully replacing that hospital in response to my commitment to fully replace the hospital when they had only previously committed to an upgrade of the existing hospital. But the total amount of money wasn’t enough to do it so we added in royalties for regions funds to top that up—to do it the way it needed to be done and end up with a fantastic hospital. Albany Hospital and Busselton Hospital—so many country hospitals we were able to upgrade with those funds. On top of that, the National Party came to us and said, “Health services throughout the wheatbelt area in particular are very poor. How about you come up with a plan on how we can improve it?” Our country health people went away and had a look at how they might do it and formed a plan and the funding required. They then came back to Brendon Grylls, as Minister for Regional Development to start off with, to go through the plan. I forget how many millions we put up—it was too far back—but it was a big chunk of money. I should know, because I said it in Parliament often enough, but it was a big

159 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW amount of money. We expected that through the process that would be whittled down to a level and we would have to cut things out.

As it turned out, it was a great plan and it was fully supported and so we got all the funding we’d asked for. We set about a program of totally revitalising country health services, particularly supporting practices in the country—the GP practice—and helping them to employ people; setting up a model that allowed much better provision of services throughout the whole wheatbelt; and upgrading or replacing just about every hospital in country WA. A massive amount of work was done to improve the standards of the hospitals or replace them and build new ones. The total amount of money that we spent doing that—not so much the amount of money, but the total number of hospitals that we renewed or replaced. I know, counting the ones in the metropolitan area, and remember that was Fiona Stanley Hospital and the children’s hospital and midland health campus, so outside that there were seven other hospitals that we totally rebuilt—brand new hospitals—including hospitals in the northern parts. We had the wheatbelt area that we did first that included all the way down to Esperance and out to Kalgoorlie, and then we did another northern package later on. Onslow, Newman, and Karatha, hospitals were new hospitals that were in the pipeline for building.

Ms Jennie Carter: Was that mostly your involvement with the royalties for regions?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: That was in health. That’s where we got most of that money. But also for tourism. We got a big chunk of money to upgrade tourism. A big caravan and camping package that I put together where funds went to Tourism WA but also to Main Roads and DEC to upgrade all the camping facilities in our reserves.

Ms Jennie Carter: What’s DEC?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: The Department of Environment and Conservation. They were in charge of all the national parks and they had camping facilities in them. Albert Jacob got all the credit for that but I have to say that I got the money for him. He always laughs when I say that in private. He says, “Yes, well, bad luck [chuckles].” They were great opportunities to take funds and spend them in massive upgrades. You can’t go to a country town anywhere in WA without seeing the benefits of those royalties for regions funds. Some of them have been a little 160 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW controversial in that you build a brand new facility and then you have to run it. Some of those councils have had trouble with funding for the maintenance and running of those facilities. I saw a great letter to the editor just last week from someone in the country where I think McGowan had been critical of providing these buildings—Taj Mahals, he called them—that then the council couldn’t fund. The person responding said, “Great for you living in the city where you’ve got access to all those things as a matter of course. The particular service in our community has totally changed the way that community operates and the services being provided.” Sure, the funding of it is difficult; that’s what it’s like in country towns. State government should be helping to do that but you’ve now provided a level of service so that people can live in the country, confident that they can get the quality of services that they need, particularly for people who are disadvantaged and need a lot of support.

Ms Jennie Carter: But it was a controversial program and even within your own party as well, wasn’t it?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: The reason it was controversial in our party was just the politics of who claimed credit. As I said, out in the country there was huge controversy, almost enmity between some of our country members and the National Party country members. National Party country members would run around with everything that opened and had funding from royalties for regions and say, “Look, that’s provided by the National Party. How good are we? If we weren’t here, it wouldn’t exist, and if you don’t re-elect us, it’s likely to go.” But, of course, the funding is approved by cabinet, which is largely Liberal Party members and so we’ve supported all of those things that get funded. Nothing got funded in royalties for regions without coming to cabinet first. We approved all those things. Our country members wanted to claim some credit because it was government funding, not National Party funding, which is fair enough. That’s the politics in the bush.

The other difficulty I guess was always the Treasurer. When funds got tighter and tighter, and this commitment was made of a billion dollars and the percentage of royalties going to the country. But when we wanted to claw back money, that was one source of clawing it back. Obviously, there was going to be resistance to that from National Party members, but to their credit, Brendon Grylls and Terry Redman were actually very strong in supporting reducing their own fund where was better for the state to do. I used to have arguments with both of them where I wanted to still spend money on things and they were cutting back because both of them were on 161 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

EERC—the economic advisory committee, I forgot what its actual title is but that’s the one that John Langoulant is investigating at the moment.22 They were both on that and saw the bigger picture from being on that of how the state was getting into financial difficulty and how everyone had to do their part to fix it. They were deliberately agreeing to cut back on the funds for royalties for regions, supporting the Treasurer and supporting the EERC, and not necessarily supported by all the rest of us, who were out there busily doing things.

Ms Jennie Carter: The royalties for regions program is still in existence but you say it’s been under attack.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: When I talk to people who are on the board, they’ve been told there’s no more money available and so my understanding is that there’s been a big reduction. But I don’t know that for sure because that’s current issues. But I do know they’re spending it on some areas that we were committed to already and there’s a big project outside Mandurah—the Nambeelup development—that we committed to the funding. I saw Alannah out there with some other ministers happily announcing this big program that they were doing. It was clearly one that we started and funded. In fact, it look a long, long time with the planning and to go through the process to get the funding for it, but it’s going to be a fantastic program, which will have huge implications for Mandurah and employment around Mandurah.

But, yes, I think it was a great program and it achieved a lot. It had reached the stage where it needed some modification because a lot of the things the country had missed out on—community halls and sporting facilities and simple such things that people in the metropolitan area take for granted. My electorate, for example, had three clubs in it because there’s a bigger population, but they got funds for upgrading and the replacement of greens and so on. When trying to get support for those things, which generally comes out of sport and rec funds, there’s just never enough money in it to cover the whole state. Royalties for regions would be the backup funder for so many programs and often done in conjunction with other money to really make sure things were done.

A great example were a few things in my electorate where I was, again, deeply involved in getting the funds—the Peel Thunder footy club, the Bendigo Bank

22 John Langoulant was appointed as Special Inquirer in May 2017. His report into 31 government programs and projects was published in February 2018. 162 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Stadium. I put together the funding groups that funded the whole of that project. Money came from local government, state government, federal government, sport and recreation, and royalties for regions for that and the huge swimming pool– basketball complex that was developed. Because we got the royalties for regions money committed first, that was the anchor that allowed all those other things to come in on top of it and around it and federal members were great in supporting those—Liberal and Labor. Don Randall helped get money for the swimming pool project. Gary Gray, a Labor member, helped get funding for the football complex— all those. The money for the replacement of the Mandurah bridge, I got the Minister for Transport, who was Troy Buswell at the time, to put the bulk of the money there. But it wasn’t enough to finish the project when the quotes came in, so we topped that up with, I think, something like $10 million worth of royalties for regions money to have enough money to do the whole new bridge in Mandurah. It just gave us the opportunity to tie a whole pile of things together that otherwise wouldn’t be done.

The Onslow Hospital had a commitment from Chevron of funds to build a new hospital, and that was topped up with royalties for regions money. The Newman Hospital had BHP committing funds—$5 million, I think—and the rest funded out of royalties for regions. It allowed so many different programs like that and service provision as well with things like renal dialysis services in the Kimberley region and an upgrade to flying doctor services all funded through royalties for regions—yes, can’t speak highly enough of it.

Ms Jennie Carter: That’s interesting. So you’re a fan [chuckles].

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes.

Ms Jennie Carter: How did you feel then when Brendon Grylls lost his seat in the last election?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was a courageous move in the full Yes Minister sense of the word for him to go and run for the Pilbara in the first place. People thought he wouldn’t win the first time he ran against Tom Stephens, I think it was. But he did that and he got a lot of support and, again, trumpeting the royalties for regions program. A huge amount of money was invested in that area through royalties for regions, again, because that’s where all the money came from. It was quite

163 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW reasonable that people from there could expect a better return on their hard work than they were getting, and an upgrade in services.

When he came up with the new concept of increasing the royalties for Rio and BHP, it was fairly controversial and wasn’t supported by our side of government. The main reason being that you need to have a reduction in sovereign risk for any project. If you get international investors investing in your state, they’ve got to have certainty that changes in government aren’t going to change taxation or the way they operate or procedures or whatever. We have state agreement acts that lock in place the agreements of what people have to pay so they know what their return is going to be when they first make that investment. We’d already had BHP agree with us to provide funding as a compensation for lower royalty rates that they got on a certain type of ore that had been in existence that no longer needed those low royalty rates because the iron ore industry had moved on enormously since then. So they made a contribution to government of $350 million that mostly went to the children’s hospital. Even though we kept that at arm’s length, that’s how that funding was designated. To then come in when you’ve got all these agreements in place, you’ve got all this mining occurring, and hold out your hand and say, “Okay, guys, now we want some more”, we in fact didn’t think that was reasonable. Those companies already put in a lot of money into funding Aboriginal communities, extra services and Rio funds the Royal Flying Doctor Service. All those extra things that they put their money in, we thought if they were paying extra royalties, they’d just pull all that money back again, so we didn’t support that.

For Brendon, it was a political tactic to get further support because support for the Nats—despite all the royalties for regions work that had been done, they hadn’t got the amount of personal credit that they thought they would for that and that would keep them strong into the future, and we saw that at the last election. But in attacking the mining companies, Brendon attacked a bottomless pit of funds and they just spent an enormous amount of money. I remember seeing the ads on two or three times a night, coming from the Chamber of Minerals and Energy, obviously funded by the big mining companies to fight against Brendon in particular. It obviously told in the end and he lost his seat, but I think it was a shame, myself. He was a great politician and very astute. I said to him when he came up with this concept, “You’re either brilliant or you’re mad; we’ll find out afterwards.” Sadly, the results suggest that he was mad but I actually think he was brilliant; he just miscalculated what the mining company would throw at him. He should have known 164 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW because we saw what the mining companies threw against the federal Labor Party when they were proposing the new tax on the mining industry. They just spent millions and millions on that. They were ruthless in attacking him and it bore fruit in the end, but he is a very astute man. I have to say that we counted on him very strongly as one of the leaders in cabinet. He and Terry Redman were amongst the top echelon of people with ability in cabinet for all the time that they were there.

Ms Jennie Carter: Kim, also during the time in 2010, you were responsible for an apology to mothers who had to adopt out their children I think from the early days right up until the 1970s. Now, can you tell me a bit about that, because it was quite an interesting time?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, we were approached by a family—I forget whether it was a group or just an individual, but people who have been affected that way— asking if the state government would do that, if we would do an apology to those mothers whose children were taken away. In the early days in hospitals, the practices were quite harsh, so the view was that if someone was going to have a baby adopted out that it should be taken away from them without them even seeing the baby. That’s what used to happen. Often families weren’t allowed in, parents weren’t allowed in. So the mother, sometimes only 15 or 16 years of age, would be in a room with group of nurses and doctors, have the baby, the baby would be whisked away and they would never, ever see it again. It would be adopted out and there was no communication about where the child went because it was thought best that was a clean separation. That was extraordinarily traumatic for those mothers who were affected in that way and some carried those scars to the grave.

Queensland, earlier in the year, had done an apology on behalf of government, on behalf of those hospitals that were involved, to those mothers who were affected and they asked if I would do the same. I took it to Colin and to cabinet and got very strong approval for us to do that. I talked to Roger Cook who talked to Labor Party members and it was unanimous the support across Parliament to do that apology. So we arranged a special day and did the apology in the Parliament. I have to say it was a very emotional day for some of the women sitting in the gallery because it brought back all those memories of what had happened to them. You know, some of them were getting quite elderly and so many people came out of the woodwork that you never knew. If you’d listened to the transcripts of women in Parliament talking about things like that, that either they’d had personal experience or someone that 165 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW they knew, and the same came later when we discussed in Parliament the issue of stillborn children, people who had been personally affected in some way. So it was a very moving time.

I was very proud that we had initiated it, but I don’t take personal credit because we were just asked by parents to do it and it was the right thing to do. I was very pleased that it got support across all sides of Parliament to do that apology. I think the mothers who were involved were extremely grateful but it gave them some degree of closure as well. Since those times, everything’s changed a lot; it doesn’t happen like that anymore. There’s opportunity for mothers to bond with the children. I have to say that we had some personal experience of that in our families, one of my cousins was pregnant at a very young age. She got pregnant to an Afro- American sailor at the age of 16 so the plan was that she would adopt that child out, but her mother—my aunty—went with her to the hospital when she had the baby. They were given time to see the baby—an absolutely beautiful baby, and they decided to keep the child. That was a great outcome. In fact, I was just talking this morning to her mum. The way things are done now is enormously changed and enormously better but that doesn’t take away the harshness. Now to be fair to those who did it at the time, it was government policy. It was widespread policy and the policy in private hospitals as well because that’s what everyone thought was the best thing for the mother and the child. In retrospect, I don’t think that was the case and so that’s why an apology was appropriate.

Ms Jennie Carter: And it was a change in time. Were there any ramifications of this in government policy, what you were putting forward?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No. It was much more a symbolic gesture because policy had already changed and operations were different. This was to recognise those people and particularly that group that I spoke of—the ones where they didn’t have a lot of choice being underage, under 18, and if it was decided by family that was happening, the baby was just taken and that was it. They would never see the child again.

Ms Jennie Carter: There was the other issue too you were involved in, which was the garden of remembrance for the stillborn children. What was your involvement in that?

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Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I had been at the hospital and there was a small area there already at King Edward hospital that was for children who had either been miscarriages mostly, so foetuses that were still very small. Parents could opt to have their child buried in that area and there was a garden of remembrance. Again, a very emotional event and I think perhaps more in that one than the first where we had members of Parliament that we didn’t know had ever had miscarriages who told the story of their miscarriage and how recognising those children and supporting having the garden of remembrance. We did that in conjunction with the Rotary who’d originated the concept in the first place. So, some emotional issues during the time in Parliament. You can’t be in Parliament for 20 years without having things like that to remember.

Ms Jennie Carter: By the way, you were talking, too, about the fight to save Royal Perth Hospital and you mentioned the person who was behind that. Would that be Bev McGrath? You couldn’t remember her name at the time.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, no it wasn’t. I can’t remember; she was a nurse working at the hospital. It is a shame I can’t remember her name because she should be mentioned. She just worked so hard and she was the one behind getting those 40 000 signatures we presented to Parliament. I think Jim McGinty got absolutely sick of me stacking piles of paper in Parliament. They’d man the corridors of Parliament just about every weekend getting people to sign to oppose the closure. I’ll see if I can find it; my former chief of staff might remember her name.

Ms Jennie Carter: That would be good, thank you. We get back to the election in 2012. Now, in the lead-up to that election, what were the issues that were driving you then?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, we were starting to get into financial difficulties at that time because funding was getting more difficult and we were spending a lot of money without doubt. Our view at the time was we’d come off the peak of the boom and we believed that we needed to continue to stimulate the economy by funding government programs to upgrade the quality of the state. But you have to say, we ended up that election, I think, with a record margin. Everyone talks about our record loss just recently and in our record loss, we ended up with us and the Nationals having 18 members. The Labor Party, for the last four years of government, only had 18 members so they had a record loss to us in the previous 167 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW election. But I have to say that was on the back of the federal Labor Party. Gillard in particular and Rudd were very much on the nose in this state, strongly disliked by just about the whole community and, in a lot of ways, our record vote wasn’t so much of an endorsement of us but a negative against federal Labor. We saw that with our record loss coming through because all those votes that we got because of Rudd and Gillard were lost to us because a lot of them were traditional Labor voters who voted for us, often for the first time.

Ms Jennie Carter: Do you often find that, that the federal politics drives state politics?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Not a lot in the past, to a degree. It’s always been the case that while federal Labor is in government, states tend to go Liberal. When federal Liberal is in government, states tend to go Labor, so Australians seem to like a bit of opposite in their votings. But when you see a flood against a state, that’s when you see finally that flood carries through and the federal Labor government is elected, so I think there’s a strong chance that Malcolm Turnbull and his team are at the wrong part of the curve on that. Seeing the strong reaction in the states that that will tend to feed into the federal results—when people vote for a certain way, they’ll often vote federally the same way and vice versa. So we see that coming in the election for us, but time will tell.

Ms Jennie Carter: In 2012, you are firmly now member for Dawesville, you’ve had a long stint in the ministry, you come into 2012 and you take on health again and also tourism.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well I’d been Minister for Aboriginal Affairs for four years in the previous government and then that period of time in this government so I was frustrated and a bit disillusioned about the ability to have successes as Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. While I really enjoyed it and I loved being out in the community with Aboriginal people and going and visiting Aboriginal communities, I thought it was time to give someone else a go to have a fresh perspective on the portfolio and see if somebody could manage it better. So because as deputy I get the choice of what portfolios I wanted, I looked around at other portfolios and sort of what was available and who was doing what. Liz Constable had education and tourism at the time and education was a big job. I wouldn’t say she was struggling because I thought she did a good job as minister but she was under constant attack by the 168 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Labor Party. As I have said before, Labor Party women love to attack Liberal Party women in senior positions and so the women in particular on the Labor benches were ruthless in their attacks on Liz Constable and I think she was suffering the strains. So I said, “I would like to do tourism; how did she feel?” Colin had a talk to her and she agreed that she would let tourism go to concentrate on education and so I picked it up. As I said before, I loved being Minister for Tourism. It was a great balance with health. Tourism was a lot more relaxing and enjoyable. You got to go to see things and be part of things with a great bunch of people that are all entrepreneurs that put their heart and soul and money into the industry and sometimes for great rewards, but great risks as well. You’re just as likely to become a multimillionaire in tourism as you are to go broke. People would gain everything and lose anything and do it or three times during their life in tourism, but they’re so passionate about their industry. They are just a great bunch of people to be around. I still hang around them now even though I am out of politics. I just got an invite to the Christmas drinks for the hotel association and the Tourism Council coming up.

Ms Jennie Carter: These functions you used to go to, you could take Stephanie to those as well?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, and she loved tourism.

Ms Jennie Carter: That was a different —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: She loved tourism too; it was a great portfolio to have. But, of course, I had difficulties along the way. I got dumped as Minister for Tourism. I say “dumped”; I have to say I wasn’t very happy and perhaps now’s a good time to talk about it. What happened is I happened to be over at Rottnest at the time and, as a country member, we have claims for accommodation allowance. It’s designed for the fact that you’ve got to have two properties, not one. You can get away with having one in the country area and mine’s closer than most, so that’s where the criticism came from. I was just an hour outside Perth but I had to have a house in my electorate and when you’re a minister in particular. But when you’ve got Parliament sitting sometimes till 11, 12 at night and then you’ve got to be back as a minister at eight the next morning, it’s just impossible getting up and down. So I had to have the two properties and we had to keep a place in Perth because my wife

169 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW had to be up here because of issues with our children and so I was able to make those claims legitimately.

What happened, though, was that my appointment secretary would put everything in her diary and that would come across onto my iPad. I would do the claims every four or six weeks or so, and I’d go back in the diary and find where I was in the nights when I was entitled to make a claim. I was only entitled to make a claim on nights where I had to be in Perth either for Parliament or a function. If I had an event that finished at 4.30, even if I stayed in Perth, I could legitimately have driven back Mandurah because it’s not that far, so I wouldn’t claim on those nights. But nights when the event finished at 10 or 11 o’clock, then it wasn’t reasonable, so I’d make a claim on those nights. We had a number of claims that you could make a year and I was always within that range.

What had happened, though, is sometimes—I didn’t find this out until after I got into trouble—things would change, and I’d either fly out earlier or I’d come back sooner or suddenly I’d have a meeting or an event was cancelled. When that went into my day sheet, what went onto my iPad wasn’t necessarily changed.

In one instance, for example, I claimed two nights being away somewhere. As it turned out, something had changed in Parliament and I had to stay here for those two nights. But it was a month ago and I’m just going through the diary. I didn’t remember. Labor found about six nights where I’d claimed the accommodation allowance when I shouldn’t have. I think because I claimed accommodation here and I was overseas. I think that is what the key one was. I’d flown out two days earlier and claimed accommodation for those nights when I was already over in Japan or somewhere—wherever it was. I had to jump on the ferry and come back for Parliament. I think this was on a Sunday because the Labor Party knew I was over on Rottnest for an event, so they timed it right to give me as much grief as they could. They announced it on a Sunday that they’d found these errors in my claims. So we came back and all my staff were called in and we started going through the diary. We went through comparing the two diaries and doing a day-by-day assessment of it. I think in the end we found about 12 nights. They’d come up with, I think, six. I’m pretty sure we found 12 nights where I’d claimed, over about four years, were I shouldn’t have claimed. Obviously, I then immediately paid that money back that I’d claimed.

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Colin called me in and said, “Look, it’s public perception that you’re rorting the system even if you’re not.” I said, “They’re genuine mistakes. They’re not something deliberate. I just made an error and I paid the money back.” He said, “Nevertheless, there needs to be seen to be a price paid, so I want you to step down from tourism.” I didn’t agree, I have to say, that that was the course. I don’t think I even said so. I think I just accepted it. In fact, I remember asking, “Do you want me to resign altogether as a minister?” He said, “No. Resigning as Minister for Tourism will be enough.” It was so hard to do because, as I said, I loved to do tourism more than anything. Since that day I hardly ever go near the Japanese garden which is near Dumas House because that’s where I had to go and stand and tell them I was stepping down as Minister for Tourism. I have to admit, I cried doing it. What made it worse was that one of the reporters—the ABC reporter—was crying as well. That made it even harder because I got on really well with the media—mostly. You always know that the media’s job is to try and get you. Some of them are more ruthless than others. But by and large, they’re a good bunch of people. You form friendships with some more than others. For one of them that I particularly respected to be crying as well made it much harder.

Anyway, I did that. As a result, we wanted to get everything. We didn’t want to miss anything. I went through and my staff—we spent hours and hours going through every day, every document, every leave claim and put it all together in a package. Then I went to the Public Sector Commissioner and said, “Can you do an independent assessment of my claims and make sure that we’ve not made any more mistakes? I’ve paid back all the money that I think is correct.”

Ms Jennie Carter: Can I ask why you did that? Was it required?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, it wasn’t required. I just wanted to do it to have it all above board so nobody could claim again that I’d left one out or fiddled the books in some way.

They went through that and they came back and told me, “No, those are the only ones—the ones you’ve found, but we’ve, in fact, found another 20 that you haven’t claimed and could have. So if you want to put in a claim now, you’re actually owed money. You’d get back all the money that you paid back and probably the same amount again in extra money that you could’ve claimed but didn’t.” I said, “No; we’re just going to let it go and put it behind us.” I have to say I feel vindicated by that. 171 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Every claim that I’d got wrong was one where the diary had changed. It wasn’t even a mistake on my part. It was what was in my iPad where things had changed at the last minute.

Ms Jennie Carter: It seems to be that that would be a very easy mistake for anybody to make. You have to match all these different documents.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It was. We were very critical of the system. In fact, the system was changed after that because it was so difficult for people to have to come back and do claims.

The Labor Party kept having a go at me. David Templeman, in particular, kept jumping up and down saying he doesn’t claim and he lives in Mandurah so I shouldn’t be claiming either. I have to say I found later that in his first four years in Parliament, when you got an automatic allowance for, I think it was 100 nights of accommodation, that he received that amount of money. At the end of that four years they brought in a new rule saying you had to justify getting that money and prove the 100 nights, which is what I was doing. He immediately stopped making the claim because he couldn’t justify it because he wasn’t staying in Perth. It was very hypocritical of him attacking me like that, but he was clearly asked to do that by Mark McGowan, the leader at the time, so he was the attack dog on that issue. We looked through some of the other members of Parliament on the Labor side, at their claims, and I have to say I used to keep in my drawer a list of their claims—two in particular—and said, “You attack me one more time on this and I’m going to table those documents.”

Ms Jennie Carter: This clearly had an effect on you—the loss of tourism, obviously.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It did and I was pretty angry at what happened. I have to say I was not happy that Colin had asked me to do that, particularly when it came back that I was vindicated later, but to his credit he gave it back to me after about a year of penance. I had taken on workforce development, which I have to admit I struggled with. It was not an area with which I was familiar.

Ms Jennie Carter: Just before you start that, because we will get onto that one, did it change your relationship with Colin Barnett at all? Did you feel that he should have supported you more? 172 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I would’ve preferred if he had supported me more. I think his advisers were saying that that’s what he needed to do and he took their advice to limit the harm to government. He was such a stickler for doing the right thing that even though I hadn’t deliberately done the wrong thing it was a matter of public perception for him. I understand his reasons for doing that, but I have to admit that I would’ve preferred that he had continued to support me, particularly after it came out that I’d not done anything deliberately wrong and, in fact, could’ve claimed more.

Ms Jennie Carter: After you resigned as tourism minister you then replaced Terry Redman, who had been the Minister for Training and Workforce Development. You didn’t ask for that portfolio. How did that come about?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Colin asked me to do it. There was a reshuffle happening and things were moving in different directions. I forget what happened, but the National Party wanted to switch to have something else so part of the deal done was that we got back—it was a Liberal–National thing—that we got back workforce development. Peter Collier had had it previously and he loved that portfolio. He would’ve gladly had it back but he had the big task of education and other things as well. Colin asked me if I would do it and I said yes but, as I say, I struggled in it. I had a great CEO in Ruth Shean and a good team of people, but I didn’t ever feel that I knew enough to be comfortable in the role and trying to learn all the different jargon they use in training and workforce development. They have an acronym for everything that moves. It was so hard to remember them all and to be across it. It was actually a lot more work than tourism had been because you had had to have a lot more information at your fingertips, so I struggled.

A year later, when we were looking at some other changes again I said to Colin, “Look, I’d really like to stop doing this.” Liza Harvey had taken on tourism and she was asked if she would agree to let it go and go for training and workforce development, which I gather she had a passion for. So she agreed to do the swap. She took on training and workforce development and I got tourism back, which was, I have to say, a great day for me. I think people in the industry—I got on very well also, to the extent that after I lost my portfolio I was made a life member by the Tourism Council, so I’m now a life member. I’m the first politician ever to be a life member of the Tourism Council. They did that in support of me, despite my departure. That’s why I was just recently invited to the Tourism Council ball. 173 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Unfortunately, I couldn’t go, but it was as a life member. I was pretty happy, particularly when the CEO is a staunch Labor supporter, Evan Hall. Despite that, most of the people who run are probably more Liberal than Labor, but people in the tourism industry have to be supportive of both sides. But a lot of their personal views are probably more Liberal, because they’re all entrepreneurs—but they employed a CEO who was publicly a Labor supporter. I get on with him very well and I think he’s doing a great job for the industry. I was asked if I was happy with him getting the position in the first place. I said, “Yes, I’ve got no trouble at all”, because he was very good. He still is.

Ms Jennie Carter: So your brief stint in training and workforce—were you involved in changes to TAFE at that stage?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, I inherited those—the big reductions in funding for TAFE. That was something Terry Redman did. I have to say that even though I’m good friends with Terry, I didn’t like what he did. I didn’t like the changes. I was having to defend these changes that I didn’t agree with.

Ms Jennie Carter: Why didn’t you agree with them?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: They were such big increases in cost for people having to undergo training. You can see why to a degree. Government was already funding something like 90 per cent of their training and we were reducing that to 80 or 60 or 70, but there were huge increases for people who could least afford it, who wanted to get additional training. But it was done in the light of our budget difficulties. Terry was on the EERC and, as a senior member in that, he had to make tough decisions on behalf of the whole of government and the whole of the state, so he took the sacrifice on personally as a minister in his portfolio. You would have to say other ministers in other portfolios weren’t as good at doing reductions, but he did them, and I didn’t agree with them. So having to defend something I didn’t agree with was tough.

Ms Jennie Carter: I can imagine.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: We fought against some of those in Treasury but, once they’re agreed to—the sequence of them was already agreed to—trying to blunt that progression was tough. I managed to ease it off and smooth it out. I know Liza 174 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Harvey worked really hard when she became minister to do the same and try and blunt the effects of those increases, but they were tough.

In the end, of course, everyone says we should’ve done more to improve the budget, not just in training and workforce, but across the whole of government because we ended up with such huge debts and growing debts and huge expenses. We had to make big cuts in all sorts of areas. The criticism from Labor was that we should have done more, even at the same time they were criticising what we did, but that’s politics and that’s what you do in opposition. But they didn’t miss us.

Ms Jennie Carter: Would you say that the period from 2012 to 2017 was marked by these problems with the budget as well?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Absolutely. The budget just got more and more difficult because, remember, we had the huge collapse in the price of iron ore, so we lost a big percentage of our growth in income because that’s what we’d counted on— growth in income—and then with the GST percentage falling, then it was a massive amount, so we were starting to get into deficit by hundreds of millions a year but we’d lost three and a half BILLION dollars a year just in those areas. It was a massive hit. That’s what’s so unfair about the GST. It’s retrospective, so it comes two or three years after a boom period. Suddenly things change and you get a collapse in the mining industry, it takes years to catch up. So we’re still looking at only 40 cents in the dollar for GST, which is crazy.

Remember, the GST was brought in at the start to replace a whole pile of state government taxes that we would otherwise have still been receiving. They were silly taxes on a whole pile of things. You’d pay a wholesale tax that’s different for a can of peas than it was for a can of corn, so across the whole system there were these myriad taxes. But that’s what state governments live off, yet all you’ve got to pay for everything is payroll tax, which is an obnoxious tax, but it is one of the major sources of income, land taxes and the like. Those are the income of government to pay for all the services we have to provide. All the income tax goes to the federal government, so it doesn’t matter how prosperous you become as a state, every scrap of that goes to the commonwealth. Most of the money for offshore oil and gas, except for what Sir Charles Court set up, went to the federal government and then you’d get some back as though they were doing you a favour when they return

175 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW money to your state that had come out of the state. But, you know, in tough financial times got more and more difficult.

Of course, I was under huge pressure because the health budget when we came to government, was 25, 26 per cent of the total state government spend. By the time I left, it was up to about 29 per cent. Costs in health don’t slow down; they just keep going up and up and the income was going not down but it had just about levelled. The reason that my percentage went up and up wasn’t so much that I was spending huge amounts more, but that the income of state hadn’t increased. Mine progressively went up, the state’s stayed the same, so quite naturally my percentage went up. The risk was that at that rate, eventually, the health budget would take over everything. Money that has to be spent on schools and police would be shrinking to pay for health. That’s why we had to try and rein in the spend in health. But the problem with that is that there were things that were locked in that were beyond my control.

There were two things. Remember 70 per cent of the expenditure in health goes on wages. The wages weren’t determined by me. To be fair, we had to pay high wages, so we were constantly at the upper level of wages Australia-wide with nurses and doctors, because a nurse on 70 grand a year could go and drive a Haulpak during the boom time for 100 grand a year. We had to have wages at the top level to help retain people. But there was an agreement before we came, by Jim McGinty through the AMA, of certain rises in pay to doctors that chewed up increasing amounts of the health budget.

Then during the 2011–12 election campaign, the nurses went out on strike for an increased wage. It wasn’t even due until three months after the election—the decision. But, as unions do love campaigning against Liberal governments before an election, they had a massive industrial action. Colin formed the view that there was a risk to patients because of that industrial action, so he agreed to their pay deal, which was a massive increase. That caused us huge financial trouble over the next four years, paying that massive increase in wages to nurses. I’m not saying individual nurses don’t deserve it. You know, they work exceptionally hard and under trying circumstances but as a state government, you just can’t afford it, with 70 per cent of your expense going on wages and 30 per cent of the total income in state in that one area in health, and a seven per cent increase—you’ve got a massive problem. 176 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you think that that was right to give into the demands?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No; I didn’t. We didn’t have a say. The decision was made within Colin’s office during the election campaign. He knows I don’t agree with it— didn’t agree with it. Although I don’t know that he knew I didn’t agree with it at the time because we weren’t asked. But he certainly knew afterwards that I didn’t agree with it. But it was his view that there was risk to patients so that’s why he made the decision.

Ms Jennie Carter: You didn’t agree there was a risk to patients?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, I didn’t agree, I don’t believe there was. He had people telling him there was, but it wasn’t me. The reason is while lots of nurses go on strike and there’s a potential risk to patients because of that, in my view, nurses would not put patients at risk. Nurses have got much more pride in their work than to risk the lives of patients, so it was a bluffing game and we blinked first.

Ms Jennie Carter: There was also the issue, too, of the building of the hospitals— Fiona Stanley, the children’s hospital—which were running into difficulties.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I can’t get into details of that because that’s not something I want public, [but I’m happy to tell you that it was an issue to do with the chief executive of the AMA, Paul Boyatzis, with strong rumours that he was attacking us in revenge for issues relating to his wife Dr Rosanna Capolingua.]

Ms Jennie Carter: Switch it off.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. The hospital and those things have been proven.

Ms Jennie Carter: There were issues with Fiona Stanley that caused some tensions too?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: There were. It was mainly around the appointment of Serco to get the contract to manage all the non-patient services. I have to say I didn’t draw

177 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW that line. I don’t think it was drawn in exactly the right place because orderlies were placed under the Serco contract and nurses and above were part of the public component of the management of the hospital. I think it should have been one level down, so the orderlies should have stayed within ours, but I have to admit that I didn’t notice that was it when the whole contract went through, and by then it was difficult to change.

Anyway, Serco were appointed, and Labor had their anti-privatisation hat on because they think that was worth lots of votes in the community, to attack privatisation. Even though Labor were the first ones to give Serco a contract in this state. John D’Orazio, when he was Minister for Police, gave them a contract to manage prison systems and they were doing a very good job. Eric Ripper, as I loved to quote to Labor over and over again, had written a long section on contracting out of services saying how good it was. Every other Labor state in Australia was doing it, particularly in the health industry. Jim McGinty himself had done it, particularly with radiological services in hospitals. But it was just the Labor mantra at the time because of the union dominance of people in the Labor Party. It was an area for them to attack, so that was very controversial.

It was made worse by the committee of the Parliament that investigated, that had Graham Jacobs as chair and Rita Saffioti who was looking for opportunities to attack government. They were fairly ruthless in their delving into every aspect of Fiona Stanley, tried to show that it was a bad decision and that the hospital was not functioning well. The reality is that while it had teething problems at the start, and every hospital had that; you only have to look back at—people forget but Royal Perth Hospital had significant problems when it first opened. There was no funding for any of the services it had to provide and Sir Charles Gairdner as well had major problems when it started. It’s a tough job building a hospital, a $2 billion hospital, and putting everything in place to manage it. There were issues with the sterilisation service that, again, we put to Serco. I think they did a poor job in managing that, we had to take over in the end. There was confusion in supply about whether the state was buying things or Serco was buying things, so there were problems with that. But all those things were ironed out with time and now it’s a great functioning hospital and it’s doing everything we wished it could do. The service is excellent and people get a great service. The building was fantastic. You have to give credit to Multiplex who built it on time, on budget—unlike the company that managed the building of the children’s hospital—they did a great job and subsequently did a great job on the 178 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Midland hospital complex as well. So you have to give credit to Multiplex for their organisation.

Ms Jennie Carter: That’s interesting because while all this was going on, the Midland one just sailed through virtually.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes. Midland was great again. We had a bit of controversy about some of the services that were being provided, and picking St John of God’s, so they wouldn’t do some services, but I haven’t heard—we made arrangements to get them done elsewhere locally and I haven’t heard a peep about it ever since. Again, I think they’re doing a great job out there.

As you know, huge problems with Perth Children’s Hospital at the moment. I think I have to be careful what I say because the company, John Holland, will probably be discussing those things with the courts with government over time, so I think that would be incorrect of me to make comments about their operation.

Ms Jennie Carter: But Fiona Stanley now is functioning well, you believe?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: As far as I know, because I’m not involved any more. They’re struggling with the weight of demand. When we shut the emergency department of Fremantle Hospital, they were seeing about 45 000 to 50 000 patients a year. Fiona Stanley, from the day it opened, went to 100 000 a year. I thought they must’ve come from the other hospitals, but they hadn’t. Royal Perth had some reduction and Charlie’s had a bit of reduction but nowhere near 50 000 people a year. That tends to be the way of hospitals. When you build services, people will come, particularly when we brought in the four-hour rule. People would tend to go there more for GP services. But even so, you look at the total spectrum of what sort of patients are coming there, they’re not GP patients. There are more serious conditions going there requiring lots of admissions. Suddenly the demand grew. When we had the huge expansion that we did at Joondalup hospital, their ED demand grew by 18 per cent overnight as we opened the new service.

Ms Jennie Carter: I know the Midland one is very busy too.

179 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Very busy, so you would look at the number that used to be seen at Swan Districts Hospital, far more are being seen at the new Midland hospital—just people come out of the woodwork.

Ms Jennie Carter: Also during this time, I know there were issues with Healthway because that’s on the record. You were involved in that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, that was internal problems. Rosanna Capolingua, as chair of Healthway, had come to me to discuss concerns that she had about the operations. There was a very toxic environment within the board because you had people from the sporting industry that were getting funding, so there were lots of people who had a stake in there separate from the needs of Healthway. The people who were getting funding from the sporting industries were on the board and people from the health industry who were wanting to see funds spent on preventative health, research and the like. They were very much against each other to the effect of shouting and yelling at each other during meetings. Rosanna was concerned about the operations and then concerned about one particular staff member and issues with attending functions, because part of the contracts signed when grants were made, was in return getting lots of tickets and boxes to go. That tends to be the standard way if you are a sponsor. If you’re a car company, for example, and you sponsor the Dockers, in return, you get a box and services and tickets and all those things. Healthway were negotiating in providing funding along those same lines, so they were getting all those things. There were issues about who was attending, family members and the like. I won’t go into that because it was all investigated and reported on by the Public Sector Commission.

But Colin insisted that the board all be removed. We couldn’t remove them, but they were asked to resign and they did that, including Rosanna as chair, even though she was the one who had come to me with the problem in the first place. That’s what happened. The board changed. We had to have new legislation, that I took through, about a different way of the board operating and appointing a new team of people. Because there was already legislation [governing] the establishment of Healthway and the board, and the way the money was spent and so on. Even though it was opposed by Labor at the time, I don’t think they’ll be changing it because it was actually good legislation and a good new construction. I don’t think we’ve heard any whispers of problems ever since. My suspicion is that it’s operating very well with the new system that we put in place. 180 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

I have to say here, I don’t think it was Rosanna’s fault at all; I think she was a good chair, and was struggling with the management of the different personalities on the board. But at the end it was how the money was spent that was her best interest. They were fairly ruthless with some of the sporting clubs in forcing them to reduce their reliance on beer, alcohol, in particular as sponsors. That’s what the sporting clubs were objecting to because they were used to that. But Healthway was established in the first place to get cigarette advertising out of sport and that was very successful. The next stage was to try and reduce the dependence of the clubs on alcohol sponsors and fast food sponsors. Who can forget every five minutes at the cricket, you’d see Kentucky Fried Chicken advertising. It’s, in my view, not in the best interests of the health of the nation to have fast food outlets promoting their wares all the time, or alcohol outlets. Nothing wrong with drinking at an event; I like to do it as well. There’s no reason we shouldn’t promote moderation and mid- strength alcohol and make sure there’s lots of water available and so on. I think they were taking the right direction, but it did become controversial.

Ms Jennie Carter: It also brought up the issue of the funding for the opera Carmen and the withdrawal of that because of the smoking.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Sure, and that was wrong, in my view, because the opera was related to past history when smoking was common and was—you still look at American movies and you see people sticking fags in their mouth every five minutes, but it’s not what it seems and not what the public thought. The board of the opera company had put forward to Healthway the proposal that they not do that because the opera itself wasn’t all that successful. They were looking at changing to something else and they said, “Look, we’ll stop that because it does do a lot on smoking, if we still get funding from Healthway”, and Healthway said, “Well, fine.” It was all painted as a decision by the board when it wasn’t really their fault. But there were members of the board who had much stronger views, who were saying that we should stop their funding if they keep doing stuff like that. Again, in Rosanna’s defence, she wasn’t at the board meeting where those discussions were held and comments like that were made. She found out about it when she came back at the next meeting. But it was a done deal by then and, as she said, the board hadn’t objected to doing this. I wasn’t there to see whether the board of Healthway initiated it or the board of the opera had initiated it or whether it was mutual agreement as part of discussion or whatever. That’s an internal thing that I don’t think I need to 181 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW know. Needless to say, it wasn’t a one-way thing or a unanimous agreement of the Healthway board. Anyway, they changed it after some strong objection.

Ms Jennie Carter: That brings us to when you were Minister for Tourism as well. What was your involvement in the building of the sporting arenas?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Not a lot. No; we were involved, particularly Tourism WA, the tourism board, was involved in dealing with the management of what was going to go in there and how we contracted out and so on, but, no, that wasn’t anything that I had a lot to do with. I have to say that I was in private discussions with Colin. When we first got into government I said, “What Labor wants to do in putting [the stadium] on Kitchener Park, I totally disagree with; Burswood’s the place it should go. It’s the perfect spot and I think we should change”, and Colin agreed. Remember, Labor was going to fund that up-front and not fund the replacement of the children’s hospital. The first thing Colin did and said to me was, “We’re not doing it that way; we’re going to put the sports stadium back and bring the children’s hospital forward.” Partly because we got that money from BHP, remember, which was to help the funding, but we wanted the kids to be put first so the Princess Margaret Hospital replacement was put higher on the tier before the stadium. But of course we got to do both. Even though we don’t get to open it; we got to make the decision, opposed by Labor, I might add, both of those things.

The main things we got to do in Tourism WA that I’m proud of is one that is on this weekend, Gourmet Escape. The concept of Gourmet Escape came from myself and one of my staff who became my CEO. We were strongly determined that there be a food and wine event in WA to promote it. We said to Tourism WA, “That’s what we want; go and find something like that.” I have to say that it wasn’t that strongly supported initially by senior people in Tourism WA. I’m not referring to the board but senior staff. Anyway, the people who provide the event now came forward with this proposal. We had a choice between that and another which was Taste WA, based on the guy who was running Taste SA in South Australia but we’d had some negative feedback about that, so we chose this new event that has now become Margaret River Gourmet Escape, which is a fantastic event. We like to claim credit, my chief of staff and I, for that particular event. The caravan and camping development was again our initiative. The big swimming event but that has now fizzled out because BHP withdrew its funding—the sporting thing. We brought the golfing event back in. Remember the Johnnie Walker Classic we used to have that 182 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW stopped. Now we’ve brought back a big international golf tournament. There’s a story about the Premier now talking to China Eastern about new flights from Shanghai to Perth. He had tried when he was tourism minister before to get flights with China Southern from Guangzhou to Perth and hadn’t been successful and we put together the whole package of Tourism WA and ourselves. I went to China and had discussions with them. It just all fell into place beautifully so we got agreement for those first flights from China Southern to Perth, which was fantastic.

Ms Jennie Carter: What was it like going over to China to negotiate these deals?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It’s interesting with the Chinese; you never know exactly what they’re going to get and what they’re going to say and how agreements go but they were very good in the end. There were times when it struggled, when they weren’t getting the numbers and they were thinking of canning it, and we’d go back again and I’d meet with senior people. I played golf with the chairman of China Southern; that’s how you negotiate in China.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you win?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, we definitely didn’t. There are two reasons we didn’t win. One is because it wasn’t a good idea to win, so we had no intentions of winning, but secondly, we couldn’t have won anyway because the chair of China Southern was a shark. He didn’t look that athletic and had an official handicap of somewhere in the 20s, but he played to a standard of someone who had a handicap like a five. He had another guy with him who was sort of semi-professional, with a relatively low handicap. He killed his partner. He played much better golf than his partner. Obviously, his handicap wasn’t a true handicap for his abilities. He was a very good golfer, so he would have killed us anyway. But we had great fun and it helps strengthen the bond. That’s what doing things like that does. They continued to support it and in recent times the trade has improved significantly, so they’ve brought in the new Dreamliner and they’ve increased to five days a week. There was a great build-up and we were helping them to promote it, because the importance of China as a tourism source was critically important and will be even more important in years to come. I have to say that McGowan always bristled when I talked about getting the flights from China and he tried to claim credit on a few occasions after his visits, but I loved to point out to him that his visits eventuated in nothing. I think now instead of the Minister for Tourism doing it, he’s doing it himself, 183 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW because he clearly has a strong interest in that and he’s been successful now in getting China Eastern to do those flights, so I’ll never be able to tease him again.

Ms Jennie Carter: And there’s also, recently, the long haul flights to London. Were you involved in any of that at the same time?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: We didn’t have a lot of involvement in that I have to say. They were decisions made by Qantas and we were the beneficiaries of some credit, but the reality is that that was their doing, whereas China was different. China was hard work and we had to do all the running. We had to do the research, put together how it would all work and what happened is that I was going to be going to China to talk to China Southern to try to talk them into it. As it happened, our CEO met the CEO from China Southern when they were at the tourism event in Sydney and they were already doing an investigation themselves. I said, “Let’s put our investigations together.” By the time they did that and both came back saying, “Yes, we think it’s a good idea”, and I was already booked to go there to try to lobby to do it, in the end it became a visit—it was exactly the same visit, we didn’t change it—to sign up the agreements in the end. Everything just meshed beautifully, but we worked hard too on flights from Indonesia through Garuda—to get direct flights from Jakarta. The flights from Japan had been cut and we tried to re-establish those with Japan Airlines, but at the time they were just coming out of a huge financial losses and weren’t ready, but I see now that they’re ready to have a go at that again. But you know, Tourism WA is a great organisation and they work hard all the time behind the scenes, and people don’t know about it, to promote Western Australia elsewhere, not always successfully and not always in the right areas, as the tourism council is always quick to tell us, but overall I think they do an excellent job.

Ms Jennie Carter: Rottnest Island.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes; I love Rottnest Island and loved being minister responsible for it, but it’s been in the doldrums for a long period of time and the board that have been responsible for managing it have to do it totally on whatever income they generate, with very little funds coming out of state government to support them. It’s been a struggle for them for a long period of time. Tourism numbers were wavering and looking like going down, so I put some other members on the board and tweaked it a little bit. We looked at proposals that would help develop Rottnest into the future and make it a better place. 184 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

One of the first issues was the golf course. I have to say that as a keen golfer I was keen to see a much better quality course, because I think that would attract people to go to the island, particularly people from the golf clubs, to go and spend time on the island, especially in winter, which is our quiet time. We don’t have to do anything to promote Rottnest in summer; people love it, they pack the place and it’s a very popular destination. But the trouble all the businesses have is that they have all these people there during the summer period when the weather is great but they’ve got to run their businesses for the whole year and often lose money for the rest of the year, so we needed to try to generate a lot more daytrippers when the weather is good throughout the year and a lot more people going there for winter. To do that you’ve got to have facilities, you’ve got to have services.

We struggled with the development of Mt Herschel [hotel/resort]. Someone had the contract to do it and then they fell over with their funding and then we went out again and had someone else but still not done. We were trying to upgrade the services for all parts of the community. The camping part we improved, and put a lot of money into improving the quality of the area around people wanting to do tents. We went out to contract to find someone who would do a higher quality of tent, so glamping, and that now is in the process of being built. We talked to Hotel Rottnest, which had an area of land and wanted to spend money on improving it and on developing a conference centre on the island, because having a conference centre would be a great source of additional people. Although they haven’t started building that, we have approved a contract for them to do that development and build more accommodation and a conference centre over there.

The golf course, as I said, when I went there, it was just dirt and sand greens, and they’d put in a couple of those plastic greens. I played a round there, did a beautiful drive onto the green, on the par three last hole of the nine—it’s a nine-hole course— and proceeded to 10 or 11-putt on this revolting plastic course. I said, “No, that’s it. We’re going to do a decent course.” We needed water, of course, but we had a wastewater facility that could generate the water required with some upgrading to that facility to reticulate the whole course. We put funds in to do that and went out for tender and got a company to design the course, design the greens, and also a company to run the management of it. If you go to the course now, you’ll find it equal to any similar nine-hole golf course in Perth—like Cottesloe, for example. The greens are great. We’ve got an issue with quokkas there because, of course, the 185 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW quokkas got out of control with all this grass to grow and they bred like crazy, so that’s an issue they still have to resolve, but even so it’s a fantastic course. All the fairways and greens are now reticulated. There’s a lawn over them and high-quality grass on the greens. What they’ll be doing now is going to all the golf clubs, trying to encourage people to come as groups, come and play for two or three days midweek or on a weekend, stay at the island, use the accommodation, use all the facilities there and play golf. I think that will grow and grow as a source of people coming. Plus, international visitors, particular Japanese, love to play golf and I think it will be, again, a source of attraction.

Interestingly, I went there about a month ago, so it was still spring, and we had a great couple of days there. As I went over, the ferry was just packed with people of Asian origin, so people coming here on holiday to WA have to go to Rotto and get a selfie with the quokkas—that’s become the fashionable thing to do. The numbers have increased enormously over the last couple of years of people going to Rottnest. The last thing was a marina. We’ve done a lot of work to design a marina, gone out to contract. I don’t think the contract has been awarded yet, but we’re down to a particular operator who has been chosen as the best person to do the job. To make it viable we’d provide little strip of land next to where the marina would go to help the finances of the joint facility, because marinas are always expensive to run and don’t tend to make a profit. People are trying to be negative about it, saying it’s all there for the elite with their big boats to go and stay. Well, it is partially for them, because they help pay for the running of the facility, but it’s more for ordinary people in the street who might have a boat who want to go to Rottnest. At the moment you can go there for a daytrip, but you can’t stay; the only place to put your boat is at a few moorings tied up to the shore. I had mine there once and smashed all the back when the weather got a bit rough and pounded it against the dirt. I want people in little boats to be able to go and have a pen for the day, have the kids and the family there or get out and unload their Esky and go ashore and have a great time without having to do what we do now. Now, if you’ve got an Esky you have to go and unload on the jetty, and if you’re lucky enough to get access to a mooring, you tie it to a mooring and then you’ve got to swim ashore, because if you’ve got a little boat, you don’t have a tender like the big boats do, because they get off on the tender and go ashore. I want somewhere where people can put their boats. Hopefully, I’ve heard it whispered that the Labor Party is going to support it, even though it was negative about it during the election campaign. I think it will be a great additional facility for Rottnest Island. 186 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Once those suite of things are done, we’ll get a huge growth in the use of Rottnest in future years. So I’m very proud of what’s happened, even though I would’ve preferred a few more things to have happened by the time I left, because I didn’t have quite enough time to get them all locked into place.

Ms Jennie Carter: It’s very odd, of course; Rottnest always has this sort of role in people’s lives in WA—that’s the remembrance.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: There are critics of what we’ve done and the people who would like it to go back to the old days of not a lot of facilities and roughing it there. That’s fine for them, but there are people who would love to go who want a different sort of service—tourists who want to have something more upmarket, a higher quality of accommodation and facility. We’re catering for them at the one end and people who just want to camp in a tent at the other, and make sure that everybody’s got the opportunity to use the island.

Ms Jennie Carter: It’s also interesting, too, that the Quod is going to be closed, I read.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, that was part of the agreement we did. That whole complex—the Lodge—we reached agreement with them for a major upgrade. The deal was that they had to hand back the Quod because of the Aboriginal significance of that building. Some of our senior members didn’t have confidence in the person who had management of that facility that he would actually do it, that he had the financial capacity to do it; nevertheless, we had to proceed. The trade-off was that whether or not he did the development, he had to give the Quod back. So, that was something we were pretty tough on during negotiations. As it turns out, he’s not showing any sign of doing it. I’m not sure if he’s trying to sell it or has sold it, but the deal remains, nonetheless, that we got the Quod back.

What I would like to see, I have to say, is more effort and funds put into greater recognition of the Aboriginal burial area on the island, because we put together a plan that doesn’t require a lot of money—$2 million or $3 million, as I recall, which is a lot of money to some, but in the total context of the history of that site, I think it’s something that we should get on with and put the money in and develop that site better to recognise the numbers of Aboriginal people who died on the island. 187 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: Do you think that will come?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I do; I think it’ll come for sure. It’s almost like the Aboriginal apology; it’s not as big. Aboriginal people from all over Western Australia were taken in chains to that island and died there of infections or harsh treatment—just being away from home. That’s a significant part of the history of Western Australia.

Ms Jennie Carter: Very important.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: That’s all on that.

Ms Jennie Carter: We might close it there and pick it up later.

End of Interview 7

188 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Interview 8

Ms Jennie Carter: This is recording 8 of an interview with Dr Kim Hames. The interviewer is Jennie Carter. The interview is being conducted on Thursday, 23 November 2017.

Kim, in the last part of your parliamentary career, between 2012 and 2017, I know that Colin Barnett said that he saw you as a natural successor.23 We touched on why you didn’t run for the leadership, or you weren’t interested; was there any other thing about that that you’d like to mention?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I don’t recall him saying that I was his natural successor. I’m surprised to hear that because I always made it clear to Colin that I had no interest in taking on that role. I have to say that I thought about it with brief enthusiasm a few times, but I didn’t for a couple of reasons. You know, they say people rise to their greatest level of incapacity, or something of that nature, and when I looked at the ability of Colin, and Richard for that matter, the presence that they carried, the influence they had on other people, the knowledge they had not just of their own portfolios but the whole state and how it operated, I, frankly, just didn’t think I was up to the task. I didn’t think my skills would look good enough to take on that role, and you need someone who has the capacity to influence a broad range of people. I had people say to me along the way that they would happily support me doing that, but I don’t think I had that same level of support that people might otherwise have given. Even if I look at my hockey days, I wasn’t the person that people would look to become the captain of the team. I was always a good strong part of the team, but not someone others would regard as a natural leader. I think that while I was happy to lead on occasions and lead when Colin was away, and I enjoyed the role as Acting Premier—and I think I could’ve done it—I just don’t think I was the best choice for that sort of position. We needed someone to be an outstanding leader—to lead the party and to lead the state, in my view, and I don’t think I fitted that role.

Ms Jennie Carter: To recap on one of the issues we were discussing last time, you were involved in August 1997 for the return of Yagan’s head from England. When

23 Colin Barnett named Kim Hames as his ‘likely successor’ because “He is an outstanding Deputy Premier”. Daily Telegraph 9 January 2011. 189 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW we talked a little about that, you indicated that you would like to do that in more depth.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Just to go through the story of what happened. Of course, Yagan’s head was missing; he was decapitated when he was killed. His head was sent to London and it was preserved in a museum. To his great credit, Ken Colbung did a huge amount of research around that. The head had been buried. He discovered where it was buried and sought permission from the British government to dig out the head and take it home. So he came to me and talked about that and we discussed that as an option. I was fairly enthusiastic in supporting him doing that, so I funded, through the Department of Indigenous Affairs—with the very strong recommendation and support of Ben Wyatt’s father, Cedric, who was chief executive at the time. We put together a funding package to fund Ken Colbung and a group of Aboriginal elders of different persuasions, I guess you might say, because they weren’t a cohesive whole—they were all fairly independent characters—to go to retrieve the head from the grave where it was buried.

I have to say as the minister I was very keen to go with them, so I made sure that my inclusion was funded as part of that trip. However, I was very disappointed when it came back that Robert Bropho was totally against me going, despite the fact that we were funding it. In effect, he said that if I went, he wouldn’t go. While I wasn’t too concerned with Robert Bropho and what he thought—he was a person for whom I’ve got very little time, if any—but I imagine the publicity that would have gone around that, that I thought would take away from the enterprise being undertaken, and even though I desperately wanted to go, this was about an Aboriginal person and it was right that the Aboriginal people were the ones to go to retrieve the head. So I said that I wouldn’t go and, duly, the group went off.

They had complications when they were there because the head actually had another person buried over the top of it—a young girl; so her cask was on top of Yagan’s head. But Ken Colbung and his team worked through that. I think I would’ve been a good help in negotiating those difficult discussions. Nevertheless, Ken was able to do that and they had to come in from the side. They had permission from the relatives of the child who was buried, because they knew who that was. They came in from the side and extracted the box with Yagan’s head from underneath without disturbing the cask on top. They came back in triumph. Yagan was their warrior, someone who they all greatly admired and saw as the head of the resistance, if you 190 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW like, of white invasion, so his return was greatly celebrated. Then, of course, we had to work out what to do with it. So it was put in a secret place that only the Aboriginal people who brought it back knew where it was.

Ms Jennie Carter: And you didn’t know?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I didn’t know, no; and nor did I want to know. It was Aboriginal elders’ business. But then we had to look at what to do with it. First, we looked for the rest of Yagan’s body. The gravesite, which is out near where Middle Swan Road meets Great Northern Highway—the rough location was known, but not the exact site. The grave had been lost. We paid for archaeologists to do ground radar, looking for the body, trying to find it. I think that happened over about a year. Then it was finally agreed that there was a location where we would have a memorial that was in the rough vicinity of where the grave was thought to be. Again, through the Department of Indigenous Affairs, we funded the building of that memorial, designed by the Aboriginal people involved. I was fortunate enough to be there—I think I did the opening. I’m not sure; it might’ve been the Premier who went. But, whatever, I was there on the occasion.

It was interesting, much later to that, probably a year or two later, my adviser on Indigenous matters, Neville Collard, found a new copy, which had been translated, I think, from someone who was from Holland, who’d been over here as a botanist at the time, after Yagan’s burial, who’d written in a journal. He’d published his story of going up near the Bulls’ farm. The Bulls owned a farm right out there. In fact, Neville Collard’s descendants, the Shaws, has also owned a farm out that end up in the Swan Valley. It told the story of starting at the Bulls’ house, going for a walk, walking to what was the start of the Swan River in those days, because it didn’t all come through as it does now, all the way from Northam. There were probably rivers coming down that flowed into there, but there are a lot of tributaries around that area of Upper Swan where the Swan River was deemed to start. So he talked about how he walked back there and as he came back and he’s walking back to the Bulls’ house, how he passed Yagan’s grave. Neville and I went looking. We parked at the Bulls’ house and, of course, followed the roads, because that farm location is still there, so we knew where he started. We walked in the direction. People who walk in the bush follow natural landmarks and natural features in the land so you don’t deliberately walk up the hill if there’s a valley you can follow instead, and so you follow natural directions. 191 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

We went up to the top. We found our way in steps by car at the top and then we walked back down through the valley and up past where you would expect Yagan’s grave to be. Where I think it is, is actually not where the burial site is, but I’m fairly sure that it’s going to be under the road just where it does a curve around to the right where the existing memorial site is, so it’s probably only 500 metres away from where the memorial is. Frankly, I think, rather than dig up road to try to find a grave that you’re not even sure where it is, it is much better to let Yagan’s body lie where it is and his head is in close proximity with the special memorial at that location. As it’s clear, I had a fair involvement all the way through, but, of course, Ken Colbung needs to take the credit for what happened, because without him, it wouldn’t have happened.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, it’s also interesting that while they were in England, it was the death of [Princess] Diana, or her funeral, at the same time.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Was it? I didn’t know that.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes, it sort of overshadowed things.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I didn’t realise it was the same time.

Ms Jennie Carter: I’m also interested in your relationship with your colleagues. In 2015, there was an issue with you and Rob Johnson. Do you want to talk about that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, I’m happy to talk about that. Rob and I were colleagues and, to some degree, friends. He got into Parliament at the same time as I did and we followed similar paths. He became a minister right at the end of government; I think he was a bit resentful that a couple of the rest of us got in before he did—Mike Board, Rhonda Parker, myself and John Day. He was made parliamentary secretary the first time round, but was made minister just before we lost government. But we got on well, and when I came back, again, we got on well. He was made Minister for Police under Colin. I forget how long he served; I think it was about three years as Minister for Police and I thought he did a reasonable job. But towards the end of that time, as we were coming up towards the next election, Colin wanted to get some new blood into Parliament and get some new people there. He looked to see who he 192 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW should replace. Rob Johnson was chosen by Colin as being one of those people. I have to say, that wasn’t something I disagreed with, because you have to make places, and while Rob was a reasonable minister, he wasn’t among the best ministers, and he was getting on in years—close to what I am now, in fact.

I think he was in his late 60s at the time and it was thought he’d had a fair go. He had been a minister in the previous government, a minister in this government, served three years, and if someone had to go, he was the appropriate person. But from that day he didn’t speak to me again. He obviously blamed me as well as Colin for his demise and he just turned into the most bitter man I’ve ever met. He was quietly bitter at the start for a long time, but spoke very negatively about Colin at every opportunity that he got. He clearly hated me at the time for my perceived involvement—as I say, didn’t speak to me at all, other than he started having a go at me in the Parliament. He’s on our side, part of our team, speaking out in Parliament against me and other ministers. He clearly got to hate lots of ministers; he clearly hated Troy Buswell. Anyone who took over as Minister for Police he was vindictive against and was unendingly vindictive against Colin. Eventually he moved off and became Independent. During that time he was vicious in his attacks on government from the other side of the house. In fact, you could see him conspiring with the Labor Party at every opportunity to try to attack the government.

But while he was still on our side and a backbencher, he was standing up one day, again attacking me in a speech, and despite me fairly strongly disagreeing with lots of things he was saying, you had to sit there quietly and just listen. When the incident occurred, there were not a lot of people in the house; a lot of people would disappear as soon as Rob started talking, myself included where I could, but because the debate was on health, I had to stay there and listen to him. There were about four or five Labor members on the other side who were talking amongst themselves. David Templeman on the other side was laughing at me, but not in an unpleasant way; he was laughing at me that Rob was getting stuck into me and I couldn’t do anything [chuckles]. So I quietly, in a way that I thought nobody could see, signalled to David Templeman with my hand, and mouthed the words he’s a “w”—I don’t need to say the rest of the word. That’s what he was. Nobody in the Parliament saw that except David, but of course Rob Johnson was sitting up behind me and even though it was right in front of me, he had a view down the corridor. He said, “What’s that you did minister? Did I see you do an obscene gesture?” He did it himself. There is no picture whatever of me doing this; nobody would’ve known, 193 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW except he chose to make an issue of it. So the image went Australia-wide; in fact, maybe even further than that. With him doing this gesture, repeating what I had done, but in a public fashion. So, yes, it became famous that I’d said that. In fact, subsequently, someone did it in Queensland Parliament, I think, and they said that this person had done the same as I had done in Western Australia. But, as I’ve said to many people, I wasn’t saying it to him, I was saying it about him [chuckles] and, to be honest, I still think it’s true.

Ms Jennie Carter: But you didn’t deny it when it was said?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, someone else tried to say I was pulling a cord in the train or something—I think the Premier might have said that—but, no, that’s what I said. His bitterness knew no bounds. It’s a shame, because he’d had a long career in Parliament. He was reasonably well respected and he’d had a great opportunity given to him by the Liberal Party to be minister, by the people of his electorate and the people of Western Australia, to play a role that he played and gave reasonable service to. He could have retired with great dignity and respect and support across the system, but because his bitterness took a hold of him he is now despised by most members of our side of Parliament; in my view, laughed at by the other side who used him to attack us and sullied his reputation. He won’t see it that way, of course. He’ll think he stood up against something that was bad and he probably feels proud of what he did and tried to do. I certainly don’t agree and I think sometimes people need to move on with dignity and respect.

Ms Jennie Carter: And the fallout from the gesture incident?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I don’t think there was any fallout. Most people regarded it humorously. He wasn’t meant to see it; it was done just as a semi-joke with a member on the other side. Nobody would’ve known about it if he hadn’t made it public. To be honest, I think it detracted from him more than it detracted from me.

Ms Jennie Carter: But you did apologise?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I did, because I didn’t want it to be public that I’d done that. I don’t think it was appropriate for it to be public for a member of Parliament in the chamber to have done something like that, even though I never suspected anybody would see me do it. I don’t think it would’ve been a bad thing to do, and I’ve see a lot 194 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW worse than that done and said in Parliament. But, generally, it’s like being away on a footy trip—it happens quietly like that; stays behind closed doors.

Anyway, I don’t feel bad about it now and, in fact, I had a phone call a few months later from my daughter and I could hear all her girlfriends laughing in the background and I said, “What are they all laughing for?” And she said, “They’re all doing the gesture [laughter].” So I think you’ve got to take it light-heartedly. I don’t think you needed to be as serious as everybody was about something so simple, really.

Ms Jennie Carter: Yes. That is getting towards the end of your parliamentary career. When did you make the decision to retire and why?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, the trouble is I made it public and I shouldn’t have done that. I made it public early in the last term of government that that would be my last, and maybe because someone asked and, despite what people think of politicians, I don’t like to tell lies and I try to avoid that wherever possible. And I say it that way because, you know, my previous discussion with you that if your wife asks if she’s fat, you don’t need to be offensive, but the media asked me and I could have dissembled and said, “I don’t know yet”, but, in fact, I’d made up my mind already. By the next election, I would have done 20 years of Parliament and I would be nearly 64, and I thought that was a reasonable innings and that unlike Rob Johnson I should go at a time of my choosing with dignity. Not any attacking or—just go. I said that that was what I was going to do.

Of course, Labor used that against me and forever said I was in retirement mode. I had to fight back fairly strongly against that, but it became the never-ending theme of Labor. That’s why I probably regret having made it public as soon as I did. But I had made up my mind. Of course, that created a dilemma for Colin. Because they used that attack and line on me all the time, it did weaken my position so eventually he had to make the decision that he needed me to step down because I wasn’t going to be there after the next election. It probably happened slightly sooner than I wanted. I mean, Norman Moore, who’d announced his retirement, got to sit right up until a few months before the election, whereas I was stood down a year before. So, I had a year on the backbench. But I had a lot of years to serve doing what I loved doing and, again, I thought I’d had a reasonable innings.

195 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you discuss that—I mean, what did your family and Stephanie think of that?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Stephanie was keen on many occasions for me to put up my hand to take on the role after Colin if he was to go and, as I said, particularly towards the end when Colin was under threat in his position and talks of challenges and I had approaches from people wanting me to challenge. But I think one of my strongest attributes is loyalty and having said to Colin, you know, being his deputy, my job was to be there to support him every inch of the way, and I think I did that even when I didn’t always agree with what he made me do in terms of—we talked about that with losing tourism, but I always supported him. I greatly admired Colin and was happy to keep supporting him all that time. I think it was good for him to have someone who didn’t have his eyes on the leadership as his deputy. He knew he didn’t have to worry about my support. He knew he could focus on the issues that mattered for the state without worrying about if the deputy, who obviously had support from the members to be deputy, wasn’t going to come and try to undermine him.

Ms Jennie Carter: But your family—I mean, would your wife have wanted you to continue longer?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, I think probably, yes, not necessarily for a long time, but she knows I get bored easily. She knows I like to always have plenty to do and heard lots of stories about people who once they retire, get very painful to be with, and that’s probably been proven true, I have to say. But I think I retired at exactly the right time, given the results from the election. I wouldn’t have liked to have gone into opposition the way the team had, especially when they’d been so devastated, and I think it was time for new young blood to come in. So , who’s taken over from me, I think has huge potential. I think I retired at exactly the right time.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you start to mentor Zak before you retired or was this fairly recent?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Not so much, but remember he worked for Colin for a long period of time. We had a good relationship with him. I did give him advice on the way through to what he should do to win the preselection. So I didn’t try to influence people. The people in my electorate, the members, like to vote without influence and 196 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW while they asked me for my opinion, my advice was to look at all of the candidates, talk to them all, find out everything you can about them and then make your own decision about who you think is the best candidate, rather than being dictated to by anyone, myself or any factional leader, as to who they should support. So they did that and Zak came out on top and I was pleased he did, because he was a very good candidate although there was one other particularly good candidate who was against him. But, yes, he won with that support. So, it’s good. He’ll do well, I’m sure. I was always chair of his campaign committee, not that I did a lot. He did most of it. He’s a very good campaigner.

Ms Jennie Carter: So in that last year, because you made your announcement early in 2016 that you would stand down, you’d lost the ministries or you retired from the ministries.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Colin needed to do a refreshment. We were under a lot of pressure as a government. It was important for him leading up to the election to have a team in place that would be the team to fight the election. So I would have preferred about a month later, to be honest, because the whole cabinet was coming to my electorate and he stood me down I think a week before that, which I was annoyed about. But it’s okay saying that here because I told him that myself. But anyway, he had to make decisions that were bigger than me and involved the whole structure of the party. So, that’s what happened. So, I was stood down in February or March; I forget which.

Ms Jennie Carter: You would have had a fair bit of leisure time then after working in a high powered ministry.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: In that last year, I was made Chair of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament and we had a fair bit of work to do on that committee and that was enjoyable. But, yes, otherwise just sitting there quietly on the backbench. It was very relaxing and peaceful. I would still get involved in debating issues in the chamber, so often I was called on to back John Day up as Minister for Health. Of course, he was fairly new to that role and I had all the information in my head, so I could stand up fairly freely and debate any issue around health without needing a lot of background notes. I think that helped John a fair bit. When you’re having an MPI on health, you need more than one person to stand up and take the debate to the

197 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW opposition, so I was able to do that supporting him. But otherwise I didn’t have a big role to play.

Ms Jennie Carter: Did you start thinking about life after politics and what you would do?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, I’d already started; all my life I had wanted to have a farm. I think I said earlier I wanted to do ag science and be a farmer. Dad said, “Buy a farm” and all those years I hadn’t been able to. So, he had a farm, but it’s not the same thing, as I found out. I anticipated that I wanted a farm and I anticipated what I wanted to have on it. Particularly, I wanted to have truffle trees on it, because as Minister for Tourism I had a lot to do with the Manjimup truffle festival and got to love truffles which I had never eaten before, and it takes seven or eight years before you get truffles, so I needed to buy the trees and plant them so I wasn’t too old by the time I would get them.

So about two years before retiring, we bought a farm down in Donnybrook and started—I’m always very keen on planning things, so I would lie there at night building chicken coops in my head and working out where the farm was going to be, what it was going to look like, where I was going to have brick walls and where I wasn’t, and where I was going to have the fruit trees. Every aspect of the layout of the farm, I’d be going through in my head planning it all. And, in fact, in the last three years I put just about all those plans in place. The house is almost built, done in the old-fashioned farm style that I remember as a child. The shed is built. The truffle trees are now three years old, all fenced off and reticulated. The orchard, because I love having a fruit orchard and vegetable garden and all that is about half an acre, all fenced off and reticulated. I put in two dongas and a roof over them and a big veranda at the front that visitors can stay in when they come if there’s not enough room in the house. I dug waterholes. I put reticulation in and patches of lawn. We bought 41 Wagyu X cattle and we’ve got 41 calves to go with it. I bought Wiltshire Poll sheep. We’ve got about 20 and 36 lambs at the moment; we keep the girls for breeding and the boys for eating. So, all the things that I had in my head and that went through—I haven’t built the chicken coop yet. That’s pretty close. I’m halfway through building the horse stables. So everything that was there in the planning in my head when I sat there bored sometimes in Parliament I have now put in place over the last three years.

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Ms Jennie Carter: And you generally live there now?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, but I’m there a couple of days a week on average.

Ms Jennie Carter: You’re doing a lot of the —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I’m up and down all the time. I’m doing work myself around there as well. I’ve got my owner–builder ticket, but I work with a local builder to do the building, but I’m constantly chasing people or getting things done as part of that. It’s great for kids to grow up in that sort of farming environment. It’s important that they know where the meat on the table comes from and that it doesn’t just come out of thin air. You’ve got to have an understanding of things in life and you’ve got to manage those things. I think it’s great for kids and kids who grow up in a farm life are very, very lucky, in my view, that they get a totally different perspective.

Ms Jennie Carter: But your children are all grown up now, aren’t they?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, but they got the advantage of my father’s farm, so for my son Benjamin, for example, who served in Afghanistan, his experience on the farm and a particular incident were hugely beneficial to him in being able to deal with a particularly nasty issue in Afghanistan. So, without our life growing up and taking them to the farm and doing stuff on the farm I don’t think he would have coped anywhere near as well.

Ms Jennie Carter: You see it as a refuge for you and your family?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I do. But more it’s for the children and the nieces and nephews, the grandchildren, to be able to come down there and experience, be able to play in the mud and get dirty and fish for trout in the dam or catch marron or all those things, to help round up the sheep and tail them and clip their ears and get in and help catch them and those things. I think it toughens children up for the trials of life. All the dreams about the farm weren’t about my enjoyment of the farm; it was about enjoyment of children. So, how I design it, what I do, what I make available, is for children to enjoy.

Ms Jennie Carter: How big is the farm?

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Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It’s 200 acres.

Ms Jennie Carter: So that’s quite—when you say truffle trees, what are truffle trees?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Truffles grow on the roots of I guess any tree, but normally it’s done on hazelnut and oak. We’ve got 120 trees. It’s not a huge truffle farm but 120 trees—half hazelnut, half oak. The roots are inoculated with truffle spores and they grow there. They’re harvested with pigs or dogs. It will be dogs for ours, because the pigs tend to eat them.

Ms Jennie Carter: Also your return to medicine. You’re still doing some practice.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Yes, well, I’d been out of practice for 12 years. When I lost the first election, in that four years, I went back and did some medicine. But this time I’d been out for 12 years not practising. I still kept registered and I was able to do that more as an administration role as Minister for Health and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency—AHPRA—supported that. I put through the legislation in Parliament to establish the registration of 10 different professions through there. I forget where I was up to.

Ms Jennie Carter: Returning to medicine after you retired from politics.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Initially, I wasn’t going to, but I have to say I’m spending lots of money on the farm so I needed to earn some extra. So, I’m currently doing a return to practice. I’m working doing workers’ comp stuff two days a week and I’m going to tweak that later so I can do general practice as well. I’d like to be able to go into the Kimberley and spend, say, a month a year doing relief GP work in the Kimberley somewhere. I love it up there. That’s the idea of retraining, plus earning a bit of extra income to support my lavish expenses at the farm.

Ms Jennie Carter: Thank you. Now, before we wind up, I noticed that in your valedictory address to the Parliament, you have a little poem. Now, your valedictory address is very interesting. Can you tell me a bit about why you wrote it and what moved you to say the things you did?

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Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Well, I did write it and that’s very unusual for me. Almost my whole time in Parliament I’d never read a speech because I’d seen Colin so many times would get up to do his speech and just do them off the cuff, and it just sounded so much better when people did that, so I trained myself to do that. Even Tourism and the Department of Health would get frustrated because they’d have speechwriters spend all the time writing speeches and I wouldn’t read them out; I would do my own speech. But what Colin taught me is to go through the speech that has been written for you, read it a few times, get it fixed in your head, underline and memorise a few key points that you want to make and maybe have them there that you can just glance at and get to those points, and then do your speech.

But for the valedictory speech, you’ve only got a certain period of time, it’s your last speech in Parliament, I wanted to get it right. I sat down and wrote it. It’s always hard, what to say in the end. I did a bit of my history and I’d never—because things that you’ve done in your life, you want to have down. In fact, what we’re doing now, but I never anticipated that I might need to do this. So I wanted to get a little bit down about the things I’d done, the places I’d been and what I felt strongly about and what I enjoyed in my time in Parliament. Of course, the last little bit was a little poem that I wrote because I wanted to get a bit of humour in there to finish. I’ve never been super serious and I’d actually made up this poem just in my head. I’d always been a bit into poems. Mum when we were kids got us to write poems on the toilet paper so while you’re there you sit and write it so the next person would read the poem. I used to do a few poems when I was younger. I had this thing in my head, and I know Psalm 23 fairly well because we’d had to learn that doing religion at school, so I just modified it a little bit. I’ll just say it again — I now have the opportunity to make a parting statement that partly refers to shadow Minister Roger Cook. Apologies to God and the creators of Psalm 23 — Yea though I walk through the valley of the Shadow of Roger, — That’s a play on Roger being shadow minister — I shall fear no evil, For Colin art with me, My friends doth comfort me. Surely their love will follow me all the days of my life, And I will dwell in the house of the Assembly forever. I finish — Well, not quite forever because it is now time to go … It’s goodbye from me, and it’s goodbye from him. 201 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Remember that was from The Two Ronnies, who would already say goodbye in that way. I just felt you don’t want to be too serious at send-offs. You need a little bit of humour. In fact, in my final speech to the people in my electorate, to the members of our branches, I read out a very raunchy poem that I’d actually written many years before that some of the elderly people there were a bit shocked at, but again I want to do something a bit different and a bit funny and most people enjoyed it.

Ms Jennie Carter: You don’t want to repeat it?

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: No, far too raunchy for that.

Ms Jennie Carter: It must have been an emotional time, though, to actually leave Parliament.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: It’s more emotional because of the people that you leave and in particular my staff. So, the staff that had been with me through as a minister all that time. When I got back to being a minister, I resurrected some of the staff who had been with me before: Ian Wight-Pickin, who’d been my former chief of staff; Christian, who’d been my chief policy officer took over from Ian when Ian retired; and Melinda Hayes, who was the next in line policy officer, took over from Christian as senior policy officer and then took over from Christian to become chief of staff when he retired. I had those three in particular and my electorate staff, Amanda and Gaynar had been amazingly supportive and I’d had others along the way and in my previous time and that’s always the painful thing to say goodbye to staff, not that you’re not going to see them again but you’d been with them day in and day out and they’d been so supportive all that time, that that’s very sad. And Stephanie who’d been so supportive all those years during my time in Parliament—and apart from the fact that she was going to have to put up with me being around a lot more, we had worked together in all that time with me as a minister and a member of Parliament, and it was an era coming to an end; 20 years is a long time. So, it gets very emotional in those times at the end and particularly whenever—John Castrilli did a speech after me and we both cried during our speeches. It’s almost inevitable. You talk about family in a highly emotional time in a highly charged situation and everyone will find that tears come to your eyes. It’s almost inevitable.

Ms Jennie Carter: Before we wind up, Kim, is there anything you’d like to add to what we’ve been talking about? 202 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: I think we’ve been very thorough. You do think of little things along the way, but you’d be here forever if you were to deal with little instances that happened, funny things that happened, places you went, things you did it.

I just had dinner the other night with Terry Redman and “Tuck” Waldron, because I got to be good friends with them. It’s funny that I’m out having dinner with them as opposed to Liberal Party members, but they became good friends. Terry Redman was telling a story of when we were in China. We went with Fred Riebeling when he was the Speaker. He took a group of us to China and all of us got to become ministers subsequently when we were in government. It was Hon Terry Redman, Liz Constable, I think Paul Omodei, so a whole group of us went over there and there was one place that we were at and we had to go back and get something. We had these black government cars that had been taking us around out the front. So, Terry and I went outside and jumped in the car. I got into the front passenger seat. I’m not sure that it was actually at that time because I think I might have been Deputy Premier, so it might have been later. I jumped into the front passenger seat ready for the driver to take us away and Terry jumped in the back and the steering wheel was in front of me. The steering wheel was on the opposite side, so it was obviously an American car. I got out and there were these people in suits coming up saying, “What are you doing here?” We said, “We’re from the Western Australian government and we are going off to do something.” He said, “But that’s our car.” We’d got into the wrong black car [laughs]. There was another black car that was the government car and we’d just got some poor private people, we jumped into their car. We must’ve frightened the life out of them.

Just little funny things like that that happen. There’s lots of things like that but far too many to go through and, you know, that’s what you do if you’re really serious about telling everything.

Ms Jennie Carter: That’s right. And the friendships you have made are obviously —

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: So many along the way; particularly people in the tourism industry I became very good friends with and I still am now. So, there’s lots of those incidences along the way and I just had a great time as minister. And if I was asked would I do it again, I would do it again tomorrow if I had my life over again. Even the sad things that happen, the tough things that happen, the painful things that happen 203 KIM HAMES INTERVIEW don’t outweigh the excitement you get every day. I often thought—I’d drive past my surgery maybe on the way to the airport or something to fly to China to represent the government. I said, “I would still be sitting in there seeing patients today.” You never know what’s going to happen in Parliament, good and bad, and it creates a level of excitement that’s pretty hard to match in any other profession. There’s some things I would do differently, but I would certainly take the same career path again if I had the opportunity. Parliament is an amazing career that people should always take up if they get the opportunity.

Ms Jennie Carter: Thank you.

Hon Dr KIM HAMES: Thank you. I

End of interview 8

END OF INTERVIEW

Note added by Kim Hames on 3 June 2019. As a follow-up to the interview recorded above, if my children are reading this document, it is important to realise that this is a recording by the Parliament for the Parliament about my Parliamentary career. It is not an autobiography, and for that reason there are few references to my children or extended family. Please don’t be offended, as I have not deliberately left out stories about you all, but have followed the requirements of the interview.

I would also like to put on the record my gratitude to Stephanie, without whose love and support I would have been unable to undertake two such demanding careers in my lifetime—20 plus years in medicine and 20 years in Parliament.

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