Page 929 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 May 2020
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final days seem worthwhile and meaningful, despite the physical pain and feelings of hopelessness.
Throughout her challenges in life, her spirit remained strong. That glint in her eye never stopped sparkling and she continued to work for a better world. She was compassionate and supportive and, even to the end, still mentoring and inspiring people in her community. Deb was a true warrior for environmental and social causes, in the very best sense of that word.
On behalf of the ACT Greens, I thank other members for their contributions today and thank the Speaker for the offer of a morning tea to be hosted to celebrate Deb’s contribution to the Assembly once coronavirus measures allow. On behalf of the ACT Greens, I offer my sympathies to her two daughters, Samara and Eleni, and to the McIlroy, Foskey and Thompson families.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (10.25): I rise today to talk about my friend Dr Deborah Foskey. Dr Foskey was a wonderful woman. She was compassionate, giving, caring, resilient, intelligent, hardworking, gracious and courageous in the face of many trials. She was dedicated to creating a better world. I am very heartened, and I am sure that her family and friends will be equally heartened, by all of the positive words that the two other parties in particular have used to speak about Deb. She deserved them all, and I wish she could have heard them. As a small aside, without Dr Foskey’s contribution to this place, the Canberra community and the Greens, I have no doubt that I would not be here in the Assembly.
As other people have said, in the 1970s Dr Foskey was a forest campaigner who worked with the concerned residents of East Gippsland to establish national parks to protect the old-growth forest. She moved there in 1972, and built a house and her family. As my colleague Minister Rattenbury alluded to, she also formed a community there. She had the misfortune of forming one in a cold-weather community. I was in a warm-weather community. It is hard work, as we all know—forming communities.
Again, the same as me, she moved to the ACT in the 1980s for her and her children’s education. Tragically, as has been noted—and I will not talk more about it—her son, Brandon, died at Casuarina Sands.
Dr Foskey finished her master’s degree at the ANU, looking at Canberra’s development through a political and ecological lens. In 2003, also at the ANU, she finished her PhD in political science, focusing on humanitarian ways to apply international population policy. Academically, I suspect that she was the most qualified MLA that we have had in the Assembly.
Of course, Dr Foskey was not just an academic. She wanted change. She wanted a better, fairer and more sustainable world. As I have mentioned, she started off as a forest campaigner in East Gippsland, but after she moved to Canberra she became involved in electoral politics as well as community politics—and, of course, with the Greens. She ran for the Senate in 1998, for the Assembly in 2001, and successfully for the Assembly in 2004.
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