.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

UK Against Fluoridation

Saturday, June 03, 2006

One to thank for it!


True Blue in House of Lords
By FIONA HUDSON
03jun06
BARONESS Trixie Gardner does not know the names of all 722 fellow peers in the House of Lords but they know hers.

The lone Australian woman in Westminster's Upper House clocks up 25 years on the red leather benches this month and has stood out since the day she arrived.

Ranked the 13th most active speaker this year, the forthright blonde rarely misses a sitting day.

While fusty Brits doze on the benches around her, the 78-year-old listens alertly and throws in her two cents worth in an accent that is charmingly posh with only the faintest tinge of Ocker.

Despite living in Britain for more than 50 years, the Conservative has not relinquished her Australian citizenship and injects her homeland into the House at every opportunity.

Almost as soon as the Sydney University dentistry graduate entered parliament she used the platform to encourage the Brits to add fluoride to their water.

Through the years, she has advised them to import echidnas to fight a termite outbreak and drawn on experiences Down Under on topics ranging from P-plate drivers to pension reform. No subject is out of bounds. She was first on her feet to raise the issue of screening tests for prostate cancer.

"One of the Lords came up to me later to thank me and said no man would have dared bring that subject up in the House," she says.

Most peers adopt UK place-names as their titles. The only two antipodean males in the House are Lord May of Oxford and Lord Broers of Cambridge. Baroness Gardner was having none of it. She fought for, and won, special permission to use her birthplace, Parkes, NSW.

"My roots are so deeply Australian I don't want to let them go," she says.

The eighth-born child believes her older siblings helped shape her style. "I'm used to getting in quickly, you've got to speak up," she says.

Amazingly, she did not have to utter a peep to break into the House of Lords. The first she knew of her appointment was a white envelope with the Number 10 Downing Street insignia in her letterbox in 1981. Her friend Peter Thorneycroft, chairman of the Conservatives and himself a Lord, mentioned her name to then prime minister Maggie Thatcher, who was on the hunt for good women. "I suppose its because I'm very interested in whatever is happening. I'm interested in people," she says. "And I want to help them."

A quarter of a century later, she has settled into her life peerage.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home