CONDOLENCES
Senator CASH (Western Australia—Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) (15:58): I rise on behalf of the coalition to pay tribute to the Reverend Michael Carter Tate AO, a former senator for Tasmania, Minister for Justice, ambassador and Catholic priest, who passed away in Hobart on 5 June this year aged 80. I too acknowledge the members of his family and friends who join us in the Senate gallery today.
Few people have actually served our great country in so many different ways. Fewer still have left public life at its height to take up the priesthood. Michael Tate did both, and, when he died, he was still serving as the parish priest at South Hobart.
He was born in Sydney on 6 July 1945 and grew up in Hobart, where he was educated at St Virgil's College. At 18, as a first-year law student, he was seriously injured in a car accident and spent months in hospital. He later said that this gave him a second chance at life and a sense that he could not live a self-centred one.
He graduated in law from the University of Tasmania with first class honours in 1968, and then he studied theology at Oxford. He returned to lecture in constitutional law and became dean of the law faculty in 1977. That was the year he was elected to the Senate for Tasmania.
He then took up his seat on 1 July 1978 and ended up serving this place for 15 years. His first speech was about conscience. He argued that the National Service Act failed to protect a person who objected to a particular war without objecting to all military service.
In 1983, he introduced a private senator's bill to change that, and, in 1992, the parliament passed legislation that recognised particular conscientious beliefs. He chaired the Constitutional and Legal Affairs Committee and the Scrutiny of Bills Committee from 1983 to 1987. In 1984, he chaired the Senate's select committees examining the conduct of High Court justice Lionel Murphy.
He reached his findings based on the evidence alongside the Liberal and democrat members, rather than his Labor colleagues, and paid a political price for it. He, though, called it a hard decision but an honest one. From 1987 to 1993, he served in the Hawke and Keating ministries as Special Minister of State and then Minister for Justice.
He played a key role in establishing the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and initiated a national review of gun control laws after the Hoddle Street and Queen Street shootings. He received threats to his life and lived under police protection, and he kept doing the job. After leaving the Senate in July 1993, he served as Australia's ambassador to the Holy See and to the Netherlands.
It was at the end of that posting that his life took its most remarkable turn. When he made his farewell call on Pope John Paul II, he was asked where he would go next. He replied that he would be studying for the priesthood.
When the Pope called it a 'late vocation', he corrected him: it was an early vocation, long deferred. He said the call had been nagging at him since he was a boy. A poem by WH Auden finally convinced him not to leave it any longer.
The poem imagines a man reduced to tears of shame on hearing the poems he may have written. Michael Tait said he did not want to cry those tears himself. He left the embassy residence in The Hague to study with the Dominicans at Cambridge, then in Rome and in Melbourne.
He was ordained at St Mary's Cathedral in Hobart on 19 May 2000. Gough Whitlam, Bill Hayden, Lionel Bowen and John Button were all in the congregation. He joked that obedience would be his great problem and that being docile and humble did not come easily to a politician.
He also said that he did not want anyone to see him as a Labor politician in a Roman collar, because he could not serve then his whole congregation. So he stayed out of public debate and gave himself wholeheartedly to his parishes. For 26 years, he served as a parish priest at Bridgewater in Brighton, Sandy Bay, Huon Valley and South Hobart.
He was also a consultor to the archdiocese and, for a time, its vicar-general. He founded the way of St James pilgrimage in the Huon Valley. In 2010, he returned briefly to public office as Tasmania's first parliamentary standards commissioner.
The tributes from those who served alongside him in the church described a pastor who well and truly knew his people. A fellow priest recalled that only recently had Father Tate rung him to ask him to look in on someone who had moved into a neighbouring parish so that they would not be lost in the system. That's the type of person he was.
Archbishop Tony Ireland, who gave him the last rites, described him as a faithful pastor who loved his people. On behalf of the coalition, I extend our sympathy to his family, his friends, his former colleagues and the parishioners of South Hobart who have lost their beloved priest. May he rest in peace.