Gareth Evans Eulogy, State Memorial Service, Melbourne Arts Centre, 23 May 2025

Race Mathews had a wonderfully rich and productive life, which he lived to the full for 90 years. He accepted his last years of declining health with serenity, and died — as I guess we all hope we will — peacefully and painlessly, surrounded by loving family. But none of that means that we — his family, friends and admirers — will mourn his passing any less, or miss him any less.

This is simply because — for all of us who have known or worked with him in any capacity, private or public, over the decades — Race will remain etched in our memory as one of the most completely admirable people we have known, combining high intelligence, idealistic vision, compassion and courage with an almost complete lack of ego, and a capacity to accept with grace whatever the fates threw at him. His old colleague from the Whitlam days, Richard Hall, captured a sentiment which I know a great many will share, not just here today but across the country, when he said of Race that he was “the most decent man I ever met”.

There is a lot to be said about Race’s life away from politics and public policy and public service, and I know Iola and other family members will say it better than I ever could, as Iola has already done so brilliantly in her biography — covering all facets of his life — published last year It is my privilege, and pleasure, to have been asked to focus primarily today on what made the public life of Race Mathews so special and memorable.

This was indeed an extraordinary record of accomplishment, with — to me — six major contributions really standing out.

The first came in the early 1960s with the important role Race played, with others, in building the foundations for the federal intervention in the Victorian Branch of the ALP, without which (as became clear in 1969) the Whitlam Government could never have been elected. It began when he and his close friend and mentor David Bennett were invited by the young and electorally hungry MP, Clyde Holding, to join a new Education Policy Committee, and began to work away at replacing the manically anti-State Aid policy, supported by the then ruling Trades Hall junta, which had become the most visible barrier to the ALP’s wider community acceptability.

This enterprise later morphed into a wider crusade in favour of fundamental reform of the State Party’s representational and decision-making structures. Race worked closely with the newly formed Participants group, led by lawyers and fellow Fabians including John Button and John Cain, and initiated a series of grass-roots branch-led challenges of his own to the ruling hierarchy, all of which created momentum for the ultimately successful 1970 Federal Executive intervention. Party democracy, and membership empowerment, remained a lifelong preoccupation for Race, and one in which he immersed himself organisationally again in the early 2000s, although then with rather more mixed results.

The next step in Race’s public life was a momentous one, which he described as “the most tumultuous, and by far the most rewarding, five years of my career”: his appointment in 1967, at the age of 32, as Gough Whitlam’s principal private secretary. That happened on John Menadue’s recommendation, Gough’s retiring PPS having been much impressed by Race’s great ability to organise networks of policy experts.

Race rapidly became an indispensable member of Whitlam’s small-but-perfectly-formed staff, working on research, campaign organisation strategy, and most of the huge policy issues — including education, urban and regional development, and above all the absolutely groundbreaking new national universal health insurance scheme, Medibank (later Medicare) — which were crucial to the new leader’s messaging, and ultimately his 1972 victory.

No-one to my knowledge ever said of Race what Whitlam once famously said of Keating, with his infatuation with Jack Lang and Rex Connor, “Paul has always preferred older men”. But Race did say of Gough, “I was in awe of him, and I loved him”. Certainly bits of Gough rubbed off on him for decades thereafter, not least his wonderfully stentorian speaking style. It wasn’t as breathy, and it probably also owed something to Race’s first career as a carefully enunciating speech therapist, but it was certainly memorable, and did occasionally lend itself to parody.

Race’s third big public contribution was to stand for, and win, the highly marginal seat of Casey in 1972, which, along with the victories of Tony Lamb in Latrobe, David McKenzie in Diamond Valley, and Max Oldmeadow in Holt, with all of whom he worked closely, was critical in at last getting Labor over the line. He was a brilliant electoral technician, introducing modern campaign techniques including targeted direct mail and a sophisticated door-to-door canvassing strategy, as well as being his usual indefatigably energetic self in personally knocking on thousands of doors and organising and speaking at countless local meetings.

The fourth big public contribution Race made, after the crushing blow of the defeat of the Whitlam Government and the loss of his own federal seat in the 1975 Dismissal election, was to the election — after an even longer period in the wilderness than federal Labor — of a Victorian State Labor Government. Initially by becoming principal private secretary to Opposition Leaders Clyde Holding and Frank Wilkes from 1976 until 1979, then by winning in 1979 (and holding until 1992) the seat of Oakleigh, and then by acting as secretary to the Shadow Cabinet in the run up to John Cain’s victory in 1982.

Race’s basic, and indispensable, contribution here, applying all his experience with Whitlam, was to turn the leader’s office into an effective professional operation of a kind capable of winning government, and staying there long enough to work substantial change, as John Cain and his long-governing successors certainly did. It should be acknowledged that there was nowhere to go but up when he first arrived in Clyde Holding’s office: Robert Ray tells me that one of Race’s first discoveries was three tea-chests full of not only unanswered but unopened correspondence, with quite a few of the letters containing cheques.

His fifth contribution, and much bigger than summarisable in a few sentences, was as a highly effective state minister for the Arts, and for Police and Emergency Services and later Community Services, from 1982 to 1988. As police minister he developed a very productive relationship with Mick Miller, a Commissioner ahead of his time in his respect for decent values and standards, in achieving new levels of professionalism in a force not previously notorious for them. As Emergency Services minister he had to meet the challenge of the Ash Wednesday bushfire disaster; and repairing afterwards the organisational deficiencies shown up by it. As Community Services minister, he initiated major reforms in child protection and intellectual disability services.

And as Arts Minister, probably the best fit of all his ministerial role, Race was almost universally regarded as an outstanding success, overseeing the development of this Southbank Arts Precinct where we gather today, bringing the Spoleto Festival to Melbourne, rejuvenating the local film industry, revitalising regional art galleries and supporting community outreach programs. It was a role that he loved, and the arts community loved him.

Throughout his time in the State Parliament, Race was, as he had been in the federal Parliament, a superbly conscientious local member, kind and compassionate in responding to individuals’ problems, even when — sometimes to the understandable despair of his family — they would telephone him at home in the middle of the night. He was attentive to the legion of local interest groups who clamoured for his attention, and even as member for Oakleigh developed an interest in the fortunes of his local football team – despite (one of the few flaws in his character as a Victorian) his interest in sport of any kind hovering somewhere on the spectrum between Barry Humphries and Philip Adams.

The remaining great public policy achievement of Race which really stands out was his leadership of the Victorian, later Australian, Fabian Society – on and off over five decades, but very much more on than off. Quite simply put, the Fabian Society was the think-tank that mattered most, as the Labor Party regained its feet in the 1960s and 1970s, and Race Mathews, initially rescuing and more than once re-rescuing it from dysfunctional oblivion, was its heart and soul then, and since.

The pamphlets the Society published, the policy debates that it generated on all the great policy issues of the day, the public attention it so often stimulated, and the level of engagement it attracted from so many who became key ministers in the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating Governments, were achievements of long-enduring significance, not just for the Labor Party, but the whole country.

Of course, not everything in Race’s political life was an unalloyed series of triumphant wins. There were plenty of losses and disappointments and embarrassments along the way, as is the almost universal experience of any of us who have spent any time at all employed in this most bloody and dangerous of trades. Some of those disappointments — including early rejected State ALP Office employment applications, pre-selection knockbacks and his despatch to the back-bench, and non-election as speaker, toward the end of his state parliamentary career — were, as Race always frankly acknowledged, due to his almost ineradicable naivete about the conspiratorial machinations of the ALP factions.

A party apparatchik Race was not born to be, and would never become. But being an idealistic wonk — totally committed to transparent internal democracy, and much better at policy making and delivery than manipulating the system for personal or factional political advantage — is something most normal people would regard as a considerably more endearing character trait.

A less public dimension to Race’s life than all of the roles I have described — though it wasn’t for want of trying to convert a private passion into more visible practical outcomes — was his decades-long intellectual commitment, consistent with his socialist awakening in adolescence, to the principles of distributism. This is the theory, based originally on Catholic social justice thinking, that ownership of the means of production should be widely distributed, rather than concentrated in the hands of the state or a wealthy minority.

After his retirement from politics, Race spent years on this project: researching, writing and university teaching, aimed at achieving in Australia the retention and expansion of credit unions and mutual societies and, above all, the take-up on a significant scale of workers co-operatives on the Basque country’s Mondragon model. A huge amount of effort without, he would ruefully acknowledge, a huge amount to show for it – other than not just one, but two doctorates, and two books! But such is the lot of visionaries: some flames are just harder than others to ignite.

Of course there was much more to Race’s life than just politics and public policy, all of it again wonderfully recorded in Iola’s biography, including his early childhood adventures and state-school education; his Melbourne Grammar-inspired flirtation with communism; his only-slightly-longer flirtation with a private sector career; his embrace of teaching, and in particular speech therapy, as a vocation; his lifelong passion for science fiction; and his absorption in music, and just about every genre of film.

I can’t conclude without mentioning that Race’s life story is, along with everything else, also very much a love story – one movingly told by Iola in her book and by Race himself in his own words in its first four chapters, when he was still up to writing them. A story about Race’s love for his parents and grandmother Bill-Bill. A story about his deep love for his five children – Sean, Jane and Vanessa, and Keir and Talya (although, like most professionally-consumed and often-absent political fathers of our generation, myself included, he didn’t always show it at the time to the extent they craved). A deeply moving story about Race’s intense love for his first wife Jill, who so tragically died of cancer after just 15 years together. And it’s a story, which I am sure will be beautifully told by Iola again today, about the abiding love of her and Race for each other through 52 years of wonderful marriage.

Let me just say this, finally, about Race Mathews, my own dear friend for more than 50 years: if only we now had more people in political and public life like him.

This eulogy draws in part on the author’s speech launching Iola Mathews’s biography Race Mathews: A Life in Politics, published in P&I in October 2024.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2024/10/celebrating-race-mathews/