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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (9 May) . . Page.. 1330 ..
MS TUCKER (continuing):
not supporting it. I want to make that quite clear in this place. I seek leave to table the press release that came out of the Chief Minister's office. I think that it is quite scandalous.
Leave granted.
MS TUCKER: That is all I wanted to say.
MR KAINE (5.45): In the short time available to me at this time I would like to note the passing of a very good friend and to pay my own small tribute to him. Members may know that Peter Mazengarb passed away a week ago. Peter was a man who was very active in this community and I think it is worth taking a few minutes to reflect on his passing.
Peter spent most of his life in the military. He had a distinguished career there and retired with the rank of brigadier. But for me, the defining characteristic of Peter Mazengarb was not the fact that he had been a military officer. I did not know Peter during his military career. Although his service generally coincided with my time in the Air Force, we never met then. I met him later.
Those who knew Peter Mazengarb will know that he was a very active and energetic person. He was a person with a ready wit. He was a great talker, a great conversationalist. He was a raconteur; he could always tell you a good story. His greatest characteristic, in my view, was the fact that he had a very wide network of people he knew and with whom he could work. That network extended as high as to cabinet ministers in the Commonwealth parliament; so, when organisations or people needed some help or wanted something done, they would very often call Mazo and Mazo would get onto someone, somewhere and the problem would be solved.
In my view, he was a great contributor to this community, both at the communal level and at the personal level. Many of us in this place would have had Peter on the end of the phone many times or knocking on our door because someone, somewhere needed some help and he saw us as the people who could provide it. In fact, when he "retired" from the military he seemed to turn his energies and his resources to the task of helping others. He did that by private initiatives-many people were the beneficiaries of Peter's personal initiatives and actions-but also by working through organisations such as the Returned and Services League and Legacy.
Through those activities, he touched the lives of a very large number of people in this community and, because of his associations with organisations such as the RSL, right across Australia. I think that there are many people in Canberra, in particular, who have been and are beneficiaries of Peter's efforts on their behalf and there are many organisations that have had the benefit of his services over recent years.
I think that those of us who have been touched by Peter in our lives will deeply mourn his passing because of the type of person that he was and the kinds of things that he did for so many people. As far as I am concerned, Peter was a good friend and he was a good man to have around when you needed some help. Mr Speaker, it is my hope that Peter's
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