STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator CADELL (New South Wales—Nationals Whip in the Senate) (13:55): On Friday of this week, I'll be returning to the Hunter Valley where we'll be celebrating life and mourning the loss of Warrant Officer Brett Wild, retired. Brett was a personal friend of mine. He began his military path with Citizens Military Forces before joining the 1st/19th Royal New South Wales Regiment, subsequently transferred to the 21st Construction Regiment and qualified as an army engineer within the Australian Military Forces.

In 1999, Brett went in and rolled into the continuous full-time service under the auspices of the Army Personnel Agency, and then over the next nine years he went to Special Operations Command, 8th Combat Engineer Regiment, 5th Combat Engineer Regiment and then the Special Forces Training Centre at Singleton, where he eventually settled down. In 2008, following service related injuries, Wild accepted a discharge and settled in the Hunter Valley full time where he kept an interest by purchasing some armoured vehicles himself, which he drove around his farm—it's always good to have friends with tanks—and he also set up the Hunter Pet Motel, where he looked after pets and animals and, quite interestingly, set up a concierge service at Newcastle Airport where you could drop your pet off and it would be limousined up to his place to stay while you went on holidays.

He was also a driving force behind the Branxton-Greta memorial, which honoured the service of Hunter people and connected both the Branxton and Greta war memorials with a cycleway between them. He designed the project to represent the 10,288 service members that came from the Hunter in World War I and subsequent conflicts. In the launch of the initiative, he bought $1.95 million from the Cessnock Council from the RSL subbranches and the business chamber.

We will miss him. We will miss his service. I will miss a friend, and I join with the Singleton subbranch to celebrate the service of a good man.

Vale Brett Wild.