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Speaker, 16 November 2004 to 17 October 2007
Liberal Party of Australia
David Hawker (b.1949) was the 25th Speaker of the House of Representatives.1 Remembered as a ‘quiet achiever’,2 Hawker strove for fairness in the Chamber but was at times accused of partisanship by the Opposition.
Hawker was born in Adelaide into a prominent SA family. His great-grandfather, George Charles Hawker, was Speaker of the SA House of Assembly, and his father’s cousin, Charles Hawker, was a member of the House of Representatives. When Hawker was four, the family moved to a property in Apsley, in Western Victoria. He attended Geelong Grammar School, going on to study mechanical engineering at the University of Melbourne. After graduating, Hawker worked at a petroleum refinery and as a jackaroo before returning to manage the family property. He married Penelope Ahern in 1973. The couple had four children.
In 1973, Hawker joined the Apsley-Langkoop branch of the Liberal Party, becoming president the following year. He stood for Parliament in 1983, at the by-election for the seat of Wannon. Its sitting Member, Malcolm Fraser, had resigned following his loss of the Prime Ministership. Hawker defeated 18 candidates to secure preselection, and won the safe Liberal seat with a margin of over 20 per cent. He comfortably held the seat in the next nine elections.
Prior to becoming Speaker, Hawker served in various parliamentary positions, including as Opposition Whip and as a shadow minister. He sought the party’s nomination for the Speakership in 1998 and 2002 but on both occasions was overlooked in favour of Neil Andrew. After Andrew’s retirement in 2004, Hawker defeated Bronwyn Bishop to secure the Liberal Party’s nomination and was elected Speaker unopposed. Hawker emphasised that he wished to be a ‘courteous and fair’ Speaker, emulating his great-grandfather.3 He did not support the House of Commons practice of a fully independent Speaker and continued to attend party meetings. He held that, in the smaller House of Representatives, governments need every seat they have.4
At the beginning of Hawker’s Speakership, one journalist noted: ‘it’s been a long time since anyone has had such a horror start as Hawker’.5 He was accused by the Opposition of lacking impartiality, facing two dissent motions in his first few weeks as Speaker. The motions were unsuccessful, but he would continue to be accused of bias throughout the next two years. Nonetheless, he strove to increase public opinion of and interest in the Parliament, and wished to emphasise the cooperative and noncombative aspects of proceedings.
Hawker’s Speakership ended with the Coalition’s defeat at the 2007 election, although he continued as a member until the 2010 election. He then returned to the family property, continuing to serve on a range of boards and committees. In 2012 he was appointed an AO.
Jiawei Shen
Chinese–Australian Jiawei Shen (b.1948) became a practising artist in his early twenties. In the mid-1970s he was a member of the Shanghai Red Guard painting propaganda portraits during the Cultural Revolution. He completed postgraduate studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and was a professional artist at the Liaoning Art Academy throughout the 1980s. Shen exhibited as a solo artist at the Liaoning Art Gallery in Shenyang and participated in group exhibitions in China, France, Bangladesh, and Tokyo. Forced to leave China because of his painting depicting heroes of the Nationalist movement, he arrived in Sydney in 1989, subsequently drawing portraits of people at Darling Harbour to make ends meet. He has since become a regular finalist in the Archibald Prize and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. He has also won the Sulman and Gallipoli Art Prizes in 2006 and 2016 respectively. He has painted commissioned portraits of Pope Francis and Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, as well as HMC portraits of Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove, Prime Minister John Howard, and Speaker of the House of Representatives Bronwyn Bishop.
6
David Peter Maxwell Hawker
by Jiawei Shen
2007
Oil on canvas
136 x 90.5 cm
Historic Memorials Collection, Parliament House Art Collection
References
1. Information in this biography has been taken from the following unless otherwise sourced: C Parker, ‘Hawker, David Peter (1949–)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2021; P Hudson, ‘Hawker ready to keep the herd in line’, The Age, 21 November 2004. Websites accessed 30 August 2021.
2. A Johnson, ‘After 26 years as member for Wannon, David Hawker says it’s time to retire’, The Standard, 31 May 2009, accessed 28 July 2021.
3. D Hawker, ‘Speaker – Election’, House of Representatives, Debates, 16 November 2004, p. 11.
4. G Milne, ‘Not a Soft Speaker’, Sunday Telegraph, 21 November 2004, p. 102.
5. M Seccombe, ‘Nothing to Speak Of’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 December 2004, p. 28.
6. 'Jiawei Shen: b. 1948‘, National Portrait Gallery, 2018; S Engledow, ‘Shen Jiawei: the Popular Pet Show’, National Portrait Gallery; ‘Archibald Prize 2011: Jiawei Shen’, Art Gallery of NSW; ‘Jiawei Shen’s Archibald Paintings’, Australian and Chinese Institute for Arts and Culture, Western Sydney University; ‘Shen, Jiawei’, A McCulloch, S McCulloch and E McCulloch Childs, eds, The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art Editions in association with The Miegunyah Press, 2006, p. 878. Websites accessed 25 March 2021.