A former Labor Senator from West Australia and finance minister in the Hawke Government.

On 24 January 2006 had an opinion piece published in The Australian. He wrote:

Since the 1980s, Australian Labor Party policy has been incrementally hijacked by well-heeled, self-indulgent, morally vain and would-be authoritarian activists, whom the media misdescribes as the intelligentsia ...

A proposal to establish a wind farm in Denmark, West Australia, an area much loved and populated by politically correct green nimbies, is being torpedoed by the residents. Consequently, federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell has refused to allocate it any money from the federal renewable energy slush fund, because the green nimbies, including the local Green state parliamentarian, don't want it. Be alert for many repeats of this hypocrisy.