‘Cancer just takes things away from you, one thing at a time’: Inside ex-MP’s terminal cancer battle

He has dedicated his life to standing up for his community. Now as retiring Stretton MP Duncan Pegg battles terminal cancer it is the community rallying around him.

They’re praying for Duncan Pegg.

They’re lighting candles at Our Lady of Fatima, they’re burning incense sticks at the Chung Tian Temple, they’re bowing their heads at the Gurdwara Sahib, and they’re kneeling on prayer mats at the Kuraby Mosque.

All across the Brisbane electorate of Stretton – from Runcorn and Calamvale to Sunnybank Hills and Eight Mile Plains – Catholics and Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus are gathering in their churches, temples and homes to pray for Pegg, 40, the local Labor member who recently announced his resignation for health reasons.

Much-loved MP Duncan Pegg has announced his retirement from politics to focus on fighting cancer. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

And if they’re not praying, they’re dropping off food – Chinese moon cakes, plump Lebanese maamouls, Greek pastakias – such is the standing Pegg has in Stretton, Queensland’s most multi­cultural community.

Pegg announced his retirement to the Queensland Parliament on April 22, in a speech which saw members from both sides of politics in tears, and all members up on their feet in a standing ovation at its conclusion.

His resignation came 18 months after a cancer diagnosis in late 2019 which saw the politician continue to work during his treatment, but, as Pegg said in his resignation speech: “I will no longer be able to both fight cancer, and also fight for my local area in a manner in which my community deserves.”

And it is that community which is now supporting Pegg through his cancer, which he tells Qweekend has now been diagnosed as terminal.

“I’m still undergoing treatment, but I do have terminal cancer,” Pegg, who was first elected in 2015 after an unsuccessful tilt at the seat in Labor’s disastrous 2012 election, says.

“I’ve been fortunate in that all through this I’ve been able to keep representing my community, and that I’ve been able to tolerate some pretty heavy chemo, but things changed for me quite quickly.

Duncan Pegg with Annastacia Palaszczuk at a community celebration to thank Duncan for everything he has achieved for Stretton at Sunnybank Performing Arts Centre.

“The Monday before I resigned, I got a really bad test result on my scans, and I just realised I am not going to be able to do this job to the standard it should be done, and so I rang the Premier and told her on the Thursday that I had to leave.

“It was tough to make that call because this is the best job I have ever had in my life, and I have met some exceptional people and made some exceptional friends among the people of Stretton, where you won’t find a better community anywhere in the world.”

For her part, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk says that Pegg is “just a thoroughly decent man”.

“Duncan is one of those rare people who believes politics can actually do some good, and you only have to look at Duncan to see that it’s actually true.

“He took to being a local member like a duck to water. Stretton has a higher proportion of people born overseas than anywhere else in the state. Duncan got to know them. He became the common link to all of them.

“They love him,” the Premier says simply.

Duncan Pegg with work colleagues at his Sunnybank Hills office. Picture: Mark Cranitch

“Love” and “politics” is not a usual word pairing, but then again Pegg is something of an unusual politician; the former lawyer is a quiet achiever, someone who studied up to Level 2 in Mandarin to better communicate with his constituents, and someone who can have a “passable” conversation in several other languages.

Someone who, former Labor politician and now Australian Rugby League Commission member Kate Jones says, “never courted the limelight”.

“Duncan is cricket mad, and if you were choosing a team he’d always be one of my first picks, because he just gets on with it.

“When I was Minister for Education, honestly I couldn’t escape him for the best reasons, in that he was always in my ear advocating for resources and support for his community.”

It was that community which came together – along with many Labor Party heavyweights including Palaszczuk, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers – at a community farewell event for Pegg last month.

Held at the Sunnybank Performing Arts Centre (SunPAC), tickets to the 300-person event went in a matter of hours, and a long waiting list meant it was decided to stream it on Facebook Live. Outside the venue that night, people who couldn’t get in came anyway, waiting patiently to wish their local member well.

Michael Glaros with wife Athena.

Among the crowd at SunPAC was 62-year-old Michael Glaros, whose then-17-year-old son Alphaeus was stabbed in the neck in late 2017 by a mentally ill man outside a Dan Murphy’s bottle shop in Sunnybank Hills.

“Alfie had just graduated from high school, he was about to go to Schoolies on the Gold Coast and this guy comes out of nowhere, takes a steak knife out of his pocket and tells my boy ‘you are going to die, you c..t’.”

On the phone from his home in Sunnybank Hills, Glaros, a baker and with wife Athena, father to five sons, Alexander, Aristotle, Menelaos Alphaeus and Alkviadis, begins to cry.

“When an ambulance got to him and took him to the hospital the surgeon told him ‘I am going to try to save your life’, but he was in a shocking state, and he very nearly didn’t make it.

“Alphaeus was in intensive care for three weeks, then many weeks in the hospital after that and I just fell apart.

“I was so frightened, so angry, I didn’t know who to talk to, and a friend said: “You need to speak to Duncan Pegg, and I said ‘how’s a politician going to help me, help my son?’

“But I went to see him and when I told him what happened to my son, he started to cry and he said ‘I will do everything I can to help you’ – and he did.”

Glaros says Pegg used his legal and administrative skills to help the family wade through a compensation claim to Queensland Health, as the man who attacked Alphaeus Glaros was on a mental health order and should not have been in the community.

More importantly, Michael Glaros says, Pegg listened.

“He was always checking in on us, asking about my mental health, sending Alphaeus a huge Christmas basket in hospital, just listening to me.

“I’ve never met anyone like him, let alone a politician, and he just did it all with no fuss, you know? I’d do anything for Duncan Pegg, anything.”

Angelo Economou.

So too would Angelo Economou, 46, who on initially hearing of Pegg’s cancer diagnosis made a pilgrimage to the Yellow Rock Monastery in Sydney’s Blue Mountains to pray for a miracle for the man he says deserves one.

Economou, an engineer from Stretton, says Pegg postponed a chemotherapy session for one week to help him with a complex legal situation his family found himself in.

“A family member had defrauded our family, and we had to take on the Commonwealth Bank to make sure we didn’t lose our home and we very nearly did lose it until Duncan stepped in,” Economou says.

“I can’t tell you how stressful it was, but as our local member, Duncan helped us understand all the legal stuff we were just swimming in, he mentioned us in parliament, he advocated for us, and he was there for us in every way. I’m a tough guy, I really am, but when I think of what he did, even when he was so ill, I start to cry because you don’t think politicians are like that.

“He is my friend, I love him, I went to the Yellow Rock monastery which is a sacred place in the Greek Orthodox Church, a place where you can pray for miracles, because he is worthy of a miracle.”

Nadia Saeed, who says Pegg deserves an award for being an excellent human being.

Or at least, Nadia Saeed says, “some sort of award for being an excellent human being”.

Saeed, 22, and a former student of the Islamic College of Brisbane in Karawatha, part of the Stretton electorate, says Pegg was at “every school assembly, every concert, every graduation, cheering us all on.”

More than that, the now full-time Human Services student at the Queensland University of Technology, and winner of the 2019 Queensland Multicultural Award, says he was also there for her when she was racially abused at a local restaurant.

“It was a week after the Christchurch Mosque attacks happened (in March 2019 where a lone gunman killed 51 Muslims at prayer).

“I was at a restaurant in Kuraby with my mother and sister and I was in my hijab. A guy walked over to me and he was just really close to me, yelling that I should have died too, that he was glad all those people died and that I deserved to be killed.

“I was utterly terrified, I was shaking and I thought he was going to hurt me, when Duncan walked in.

“He came over and moved me away from the man, and he just really calmly told him to stop.

“The guy said ‘I’ll listen to you but I’ll never listen to her kind’, and Duncan said he was calling the police and got the guy to leave.

“Afterwards he got me some water, and was asking if I was okay and talking to my mum and sister and just calming us all down and he said something like ‘don’t ever let anyone try to make you feel like you don’t belong here, because you do’.”

Duncan Pegg as a child at family Christmas in 1991.

Duncan Pegg has always believed ininclusion.

In his maiden speech to parliament on May 6, 2015, he said he first joined Labor in 1998 at 17, spurred on by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party’s elevation to parliament.

“I have always been guided by the very rock solid belief that people are fundamentally decent, and that if we try to understand each other and each other’s cultures, we always do better as a whole,” Pegg says from his Sunnybank Hills office where he is ­“tidying up loose ends, making sure I’ve done everything I need to”.

Born in Townsville and raised in Rockhampton, Pegg is the eldest son to father Graham and mother Lindsey, and the first son in a family of five boys – Duncan, triplets, Grant, Cameron and Graham, 37, and youngest brother Lachlan, 34.

Leaving Rockhampton High, Pegg first studied law at Griffith University, living on campus and getting up to the sort of hi-jinx you’d expect a 17-year-old boy living away from home would get up to.

It was, he says, a golden time, and one where he attended his first Labor meeting at a house “somewhere in Mount Gravatt where Linus Power (now state member for Logan) answered the door.

“He’s now a lifelong mate”, Pegg smiles, as was the always colourful Con Sciacca, the former Labor federal minister who died from cancer in 2017.

A young Duncan Pegg.

Leaving university (where he completed law and commerce degrees, majoring in politics), Pegg first worked as an articled clerk at Sciacca’s law firm, then as a lawyer for the National Union of Workers, before throwing his hat in the political ring.

“I have loved representing Stretton, every single minute”, Pegg says.

“We have the most beautiful communities, who have had to deal with things others perhaps don’t.

“When COVID happened, a fake memo was sent out as a press release and it said it was from Queensland Health warning people not to visit Sunnybank Hills or Runcorn because they’d catch the virus.

“Members of our Chinese community have been spat on; one of our challenges is we have the Kuraby Mosque here and if anyone wants to stir up trouble they know this is the place to go to deface things, or be aggressive towards Muslims.

“We have a house here with vile signs outside it, and we are looking at race hate laws to make a submission about it, because if that is legal, it shouldn’t be.

“I’m all for freedom of expression, but that’s vilification. Kids walk by those signs every day, and I don’t want our kids to see them or feel the hate behind them.

“I’ve gone to the police about it, and tabled it in parliament.”

Duncan Pegg at the huge community celebration in Sunnybank in his honour.

Now that he’s no longer in parliament, Pegg is concentrating on his health, getting what needs to be done, done, focusing his energy on “one or two things a day”, and feeling “thankful” for the love surrounding him.

“My mum has moved in with me, and my Dad is here all the time from Yeppoon where they live,” Pegg says.

“I have a former, long term partner and although we are no longer together, she is really supportive and caring also.

“My brothers are always here, one of them has taken time off work to be with me, my mates are rallying around, they come over and watch the footy with me and take me out to dinner – and there’s nowhere better to eat than Stretton,” he smiles.

Pegg is particularly partial to the honey chicken at Kings Chinese restaurant – “the best in the world” – and particularly keen to let the people of Stretton know what they mean to him.

“Cancer just takes things away from you, one thing at a time,” he says.

“At the moment I’ve lost a lot of feeling in my hands so I can’t write or type, and the treatment just saps your energy.

“Chemo can be rough, but one of the things that has got me through has been all the people who have sent me messages or dropped off things to the office, or prayed for me.”

Duncan Pegg. Picture: Mark Cranitch

Pegg chuckles.

“Kate Jones said to me, ‘You’ve got every religion covered’.

“My colleagues have been rock solid; Annastacia (Palaszczuk) has been exceptional, and then members of the LNP are also letting me know they’re there for me.

“So I’m grateful.

“The other thing that has buoyed me is real pride in some of the things we’ve been able to get done, like the major improvement to Beaudesert and Wembley roads, all the school upgrades we’ve done, and fighting off the closure of Illaweena Street in Stretton by the Brisbane City Council which would have cut off so many of our residents to accessible, easy travel.

“You look around and see real change from what you’ve done but everything, and I mean everything, I’ve been able to do is because my community has stood alongside me.

“They’ve literally stood beside me at announcements, they’ve mobilised with me at protests, they’ve handed out the flyers, they’ve been outstanding.

Duncan Pegg giving his valedictory speech in Parliament. Picture: Tara Croser

“I didn’t expect to retire from politics at 40 but I’ve had such a long and good run.

“I’m going to miss it, but what this has taught me is an understanding of people with serious illness, what they go through and what their family and friends go through.

“And it’s taught me the importance of living a full life.

“Don’t waste it; I’d like to think I haven’t.”

There’s no chance of that. Pegg has made his mark in and outside of his much loved electorate.

The conclusion of his final speech to parliament, where he thanked a lengthy list of staff, colleagues, community members, health care professionals, friends and family, was met by a robust standing ovation, stamping feet, clapping hands and loud choruses of “Hear, hear”.

The Speaker of the House formally ended the proceedings with: “Honourable members, given the last speech by the Member for Stretton, I will excuse you all for not being quiet while I stood up. Member for Stretton, this place will miss you too.”