Dear Tony Abbott,
I was at home one Thursday morning when the police knocked on my door and delivered the news that immediately shattered my life. It was only 32 days later that you would personally stand up in parliament to speak of my son, Jordan Rice.
My childhood sweetheart and partner of thirty years, Donna, and my son Jordan were both swept away in the 2011 floods that raged through Toowoomba.
It wasn’t until I got down to the police station that day to identify their bodies and pick up my other son, Blake, that I realised just how close I had come to losing him as well.
He told me what had happened in the car. That Jordan had been grabbed by the rescuers to be taken to safety – but he pulled away and pushed his little brother Blake out to them.
Jordan’s last words were “take my brother first”, as just moments after he got Blake to the rescuer he and Donna were taken by the flood waters.
I’ve seen transcripts of the triple-zero call that Jordan made from the car just before he died. Jordan was a very shy kid, he didn’t like to talk much and I’d never seen him speak on the phone before – he was just 13 years old.
To know he’d had the strength to make that call, get the rescuer to take his brother, then got his mother and him onto the top of the car as it began to fill with water. He must have been terrified, he didn’t know how to swim. To know he was able to hold it all together that well just makes me so proud. Actually proud doesn’t even begin to describe it.
It’s your words in parliament that are actually closer to how I think of Jordan. You said he was “emblematic of the Australian spirit”. You said he should be awarded the Cross of Valour, the highest civilian bravery award. Those words and your support, back then, to say that Jordan deserved a bravery award meant something to me. It gave me something past grief.