When you're a brand new journalist, a city girl fresh in the Canberra press gallery, and your radio station tells you that as well as being a political reporter you're the rural reporter and you're required to file daily for the National Rural News, you're really lucky to have a primary industries minister like John Kerin. In 1985, when I stepped into the rural reporter role for the biggest commercial radio network, that covered the rural areas run out of 2UE, things could have gone very wrong. Yes, my parents both came from country New South Wales, but I was born and raised in Sydney, so, aside from having lived in an agricultural city in Mexico for a year, farm visits were the sum total of my agricultural experience.

Minister John Kerin and his staff were generous in educating me about the issues, explaining things slowly to my no doubt naive questions and filling the gaps in my knowledge. As the longest-serving minister in the primary industries portfolio, Kerin knew what he was talking about. That's how I always referred to him, as 'Kerin', in the tradition of journos relying on surnames to reduce confusion. In my memory, John Kerin was a kind, often funny, relaxed interviewee, who was apparently grateful that I was paying attention to his agricultural portfolio and sharing his words with farmers around the country.

It wasn't always an easy time, with the tariffs in Europe and the US meaning an unfair playing field for our producers. In 1986 I spent time in Cairns with John Kerin and trade minister John Dawkins at the Ministerial Meeting of Fair Traders in Agriculture, which became known as the Cairns Group. The first Cairns Group
meeting brought together a collection of agricultural exporting countries from South America, Asia, the Pacific and Canada, with the goal of caucusing to get agriculture on the agenda of the Uruguay round of the multilateral trade negotiations. They were ultimately successful in doing this. Prime Minister Hawke, speaking at the meeting, described how bad the situation was for farmers in this way:

I think it is no understatement to say that the GATT ministerial meeting at Punta Del Este in September to consider the launch of a new round of multilateral trade negotiations will be the main and probably only opportunity over the next decade for setting in place multilateral mechanisms to restore some sanity in the international agricultural trading system.

The Prime Minister went on to say:

The task before this group of fair traders is to develop tactics for maximising its influence in putting an end to the economic madness now pervading world agricultural trade.

The distortion of the world agricultural production and trading system has reached ludicrous proportions.

John Kerin was a key part of the discussions that ensued. He did relationship building. He negotiated. All those things took place over a few days in Cairns. Witnessing his efforts firsthand, outside of the private meetings that were held, remains clear in my memory. John Kerin would have had us laughing at a joke here and there as he came out to regroup. Prime Minister Hawke described it thus:

John Dawkins and John Kerin have been untiring in their pursuit of agricultural trade reform.

That's what we saw in action in Cairns in 1986. The other thing we would have asked John Kerin was if he had plans to impress his fellow ministers from around the world with his chook-hypnotising skills.

When I saw John a few years ago in Canberra, his warmth, humour and decency continued to shine through. It's a privilege to be able to record a tribute to him in this place. Vale, John Kerin.