Australia's loss.(Vale Paddy McGuinness)(Obituary)

THIS WEEK the parliament has eulogised Bernie Banton, Matt Price, Sir Charles Court and Sir Edmund Hillary, and I rise this afternoon to praise a man equally worthy of parliamentary tribute, namely, the journalist and editor P.P. McGuinness, who died last month.

For more than thirty-five years, Paddy helped to shape Australia's public debate as a writer, an editor of the Financial Review, a columnist on the Australian and the Sydney Morning, Herald and, finally, as editor of Quadrant, Australia's finest intellectual magazine. In this final role, he gave a forum for Keith Windschuttle to bring more academic rigour and less political correctness to the study of Indigenous history.

Paddy loved ideas. He had an unquenchable intellectual curiosity and he endowed the Centre for Independent Studies library with what is probably this country's finest collection of Marxist documents. Paradoxically, Paddy was an early advocate of economic reform, the tariff cuts, the privatisations and the deregulation begun by the Hawke government and deepened by the Howard government, but unlike so many other economic rationalists he was not oblivious to the short-term pain of change and never lost his affinity with average wage earners.

The eclectic crowd at Paddy's funeral ranged from John Howard, John Stone and Peter Coleman to Bill Hayden, Eva Cox and Bob Ellis, but it also ...