Join former SA Premier Hon Lynn Arnold AO for the launch of Dunstan era Attorney-General Peter Duncan’s memoir. These two political contemporaries will turn back the clock and consider the nature of political power in SA in the 1970s and 1980s. Published by Wakefield Press. Drinks and nibbles provided.
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RSVP by 3 May 2024.
Speakers: Former SA Premier Hon Lynn Arnold AO and Former Attorney-General Peter Duncan
Peter Duncan
Peter Duncan was the reforming Attorney-General to the South Australian Premier, Don Dunstan. He was a Minister in the Hawke government and Parliamentary Secretary to the Attorney-General in the Keating Government, making him one of the very few in Australian history to successfully move from the State legislature to Federal Parliament and to occupy Ministerial positions in both jurisdictions.
From the Horizon, volume one of Peter Duncan’s forthcoming frank, fearless and always entertaining political autobiography, gives us a ringside seat to politics as practised over decades of change. It takes us to the end of Duncan’s parliamentary career, illuminates what successive Premiers and Prime Ministers were really like and what happened behind closed doors. It is up front and personal, telling Peter Duncan’s own story from childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, to the defeat of the Keating Government.
This is a brutally honest autobiography that paints a portrait of an imperfect man whose many achievements in the cause of a more progressive state and nation must be remembered.
Peter Duncan’s Private Members Bill in the South Australian parliament (1973-1975) was the first in the Westminster system, world-wide, to treat homosexuals and heterosexuals equally, encouraging former High Court Judge, Justice Michael Kirby, to describe him as ‘the father of gay law reform in Australia’.
He confronted Australia’s leading organised crime figure Abe Saffron and closed the Saffron empire in South Australia removing his corrupting influence from the State.
He reformed not only laws but legal practice and agencies. An activist Minister and local member, Peter was involved in early environmental law reform including the victory over the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania. A lawyer himself, he set up a successful legal practice in Adelaide that still bears his name. He played an important role in saving the youngest of the Bali Nine (the teenage drug mule Scott Rush) from the firing squad.
With its broad canvas, attention to detail and insightful anecdotes, Peter Duncan’s no-holds-barred From the Horizon is funny, sad, informative, idiosyncratically Australian and unambiguously authentic. A gripping read!
