CONDOLENCE MOTION - MR RAYMOND STEELE HALL

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (15:09): Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I rise to support this motion in memory of the great man Steele Hall and acknowledging Joan and her extended family. Steele's service has been well put to the chamber. His sense of getting things right was essentially lost in the premiership here in South Australia. He did the electoral reform process that he thought was the right thing to do, and the Chowilla dam process. He looked at everything and weighed it up as, 'What is the right thing to do here?' He was a man of true conviction who served not only this state but this nation for decades, and I doubt whether the service will ever be equalled in this country.

He was a man of great conviction, and I remember, as a Liberal Party member in Hammond after the 2002 election, the time when we saw Peter Lewis run as an Independent Liberal and deliver power to the Labor Party. Steele came down and met with me and other Hammond electors out at Karoonda and he just wanted to see if we could get a different decision and do what was right, and there was quite a bit of turmoil around that. I acknowledge Steele's support at the time, not just for Hammond but for the Liberal Party of South Australia.

One thing I truly treasure is something I have got in my electorate office now. I was in Liberal headquarters as a candidate—I think it must have been in early 2005; I was preselected in 2004—and there were quite a few items that were going to be thrown out, and I said, 'What's that black table there and those black upright stands?' and they said, 'That's Steele Hall's cabinet table.' I said 'Well, that's not going anywhere.' I rang my brother, and then said to them, 'I'll be back here Monday with two utes and a trailer and we'll be taking what we can get on board,' and we did. It was just going out in the skip otherwise, which I could not believe.

This big cabinet table—and I saw it on the news the other night on Channel 7 and I thought, 'That's got to be the same one.' It came in two big pieces. It's a couple of big, heavy pieces of timber with its big upright stands and in a nice deep black colour. I had it in two different sections in my campaign office, and then when I got my office that I have now it was put together in my meeting room as it would have been in the day. Every day when I walk past it to get into my office I always have a little smile about Steele Hall, and I will keep doing that.

He was a man whose nickname was Tin Shed, and I know in one of the debates around the Festival Theatre it was indicated that someone would rather have a Steele Hall than a tin shed. Truly, I believe Steele Hall was a man of steel for this state and this country, and my deepest condolences to you, Joan, and the family, and thank you all for your care for Steele in the latter years of his life. Vale Steele Hall.


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