Mr MARLES (Corio—Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence) (15:49): Today we herald an unsung giant. For those of us who have been engaged in the engine room of our party, the unions or the broader labour movement over the last 30 years, we had the opportunity to watch, engage, tussle with and ultimately admire Linda White. The engine room is where Linda spent the bulk of her career, out of the limelight and behind the scenes, dealing with difficult issues where tireless service is demanded and where big decisions are made. The vital statistics of Linda's career say it all: 25 years as the assistant national secretary of the Australian Services Union; 15 years on the ACTU executive; 10 years as an ACTU vice-president, 20 years on the ALP national executive—as the Prime Minister said, the longest-serving woman on that body—and nine years on the national executive committee. At the ASU, Linda particularly championed the rights of clerical workers—the vast majority of whom are women. Because of Linda there are now thousands of women in this country who are paid more and who enjoy conditions of employment such as paid parental leave which enable them to balance work and family much better. They are the beneficiaries of her work, but so is our nation. The innate dignity of their work, which Linda always understood, because of her work, is now much better honoured in the Australian workplace. In the ALP, Linda brought an eye to detail to finances, to government and to administration. That our party is well run is wholly unremarkable, but everybody in this chamber knows that when the reverse is the case it can be disastrous. I think Linda's greatest achievement is her commitment to her championing of her defence of the ALP's affirmative-action targets. The legacy of her work is sitting behind me now: a caucus which is now made up of equal numbers of men and women—in fact, slightly more women than men. Having been a member of this caucus since 2007, I cannot overstate how much better it is that we are a caucus which properly represents those who vote for us. We are able to harness the full talent of our base. The issues that we speak about, and the way in which we speak about them, are completely different, and the outcomes are there for everyone. It has to be said that in my time in engaging with Linda by and large I sat across the table, and I can attest firsthand that Linda was tough. When there were issues that mattered to her, it was like wrestling with a wall; she just didn't move. Yet while it might have been difficult to debate with Linda when there were difficult issues, I found myself, as so many others did, instinctively looking to Linda to make sure that, collectively, we were getting the answer right. When she was in the minority, she, as Rachel Griffiths so beautifully put it in that wonderful service last Thursday, held her dissent with grace and registered it, and then we all moved on as one. I knew Linda for 25 years, but as I listened to those speeches last Thursday it occurred to me that there was so much about Linda that I didn't know: her involvement in and love of the theatre and the arts; her love of the MCG; and her fun and abidingly loyal friendships with those in her inner circle. I came away from last Thursday, to be honest, wishing I had known Linda better. In that, I take away a lesson. Towards the end of last year I had the opportunity to ask Linda how she was enjoying being in the Senate. She was absolutely loving it—a closer scrutiny of the laws that we make, a deeper inquiry into the impact that those laws have. If you take a step back and you look at Linda's life, she was born to be a senator—which makes it all the more tragic that her time in the Senate was cut so short. But I take solace that, in these last few years, Linda finally received the recognition that she deserved and that she left this world doing a job that she loved on behalf of a party that she loved even more. Vale, Linda White.