Ted Mack (politician)

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(Ted) Edward Carrington Mack (born 20 December 1933) is an Australian politician. He is the only person ever to have been elected and re-elected as an independent to local, state and federal government in Australia, and is often referred to as the "father of the independents".

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[edit] Early life

Mack was born in the Sydney suburb of Paddington and educated at Sydney Boys High School and trained as an architect at the University of New South Wales, graduating with a B.Arch in 1958. He married Wendy in 1957 and has two daughters and two sons.

[edit] Political career

Mack began to take an interest in politics in 1970 after the North Sydney Council approved construction of a 17-storey office block against his back fence. He subsequently ran for election to the council in 1974 and was successful, serving until 1988. He was elected Mayor of North Sydney in 1980, holding the position until his retirement from council in 1988. During his term as mayor, Mack sold the mayoral Mercedes-Benz car, buying buses instead and instituting reforms to improve accountability.

In 1981, Mack decided to shift into state politics, and ran as an independent for the recently created New South Wales Legislative Assembly seat of North Shore.[1] He was successful in what would normally have been a safe Liberal seat, and served as a state MP until 1988, when he retired two days before he was due to qualify for his parliamentary pension entitlements, as a statement against the excesses of public political office.

[edit] Federal politics

After two years of being out of politics, Mack achieved even broader fame by winning the federal seat of North Sydney in 1990, defeating incumbent Liberal MP John Spender. During his time in federal politics, Mack opposed unilateral tariff removal, privatisation, Australian involvement in the Gulf War[2] and the appointment of an Indonesian general as ambassador to Australia. Mack retired at the 1996 election for the same reasons he had quit state politics eight years previously.

Mack was elected as an independent Republican delegate to the 1998 Constitutional Convention. He opposed the model favoured by the Australian Republican Movement. Along with Clem Jones, he is a director of Real Republic, and is known to be a proponent of Citizen Initiated Referenda.

Despite living nearby, for a time he refused to travel across the Sydney Harbour Bridge or through the Sydney Harbour Tunnel in protest at the secret contract and awarding of all tolls to Kumagai Transfield for 30 years.[3]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Mr (Ted) Edward Carrington Mack (1933 - ). Members of Parliament. Parliament of New South Wales. Retrieved on 2007-04-19.
  2. ^ In his speech on 22 Jan, 1991, Mack said

    This war is about oil, because 40 per cent of the world's oil reserves are in this area. This war is about years of greed, of intrigue, of malevolence by local despots and the developed world. Saddam Hussein is a Frankenstein monster created over the last decade by the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, China, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other western European countries that supplied him with billions of dollars of armaments, and with the technology for chemical and nuclear warfare. France built Saddam's nuclear reactor. In the years 1983 to 1989, United States trade with Iraq increased from $571m to $3.6 billion. Only one month before the invasion, the United States Department of Commerce tried to push through a $7.6m deal to sell Iraq nuclear parts.

  3. ^ Ted Mack - The Independent. Selwyn Johnston. Retrieved on 2007-04-19.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Parliament of Australia
Preceded by
John Spender		 Member for North Sydney
1990 – 1996		 Succeeded by
Joe Hockey
Persondata
NAME Mack, Edward Carrington
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mack, Ted
SHORT DESCRIPTION Australian politician and architect
DATE OF BIRTH 20 December 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH