Barry Jones (Australian politician)
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Barry Owen Jones, AO, FAA, FAHA, FTSE (born October 11, 1932, Geelong, Victoria) is an Australian politician.
He was educated at Melbourne High School and Melbourne University. Jones began his career as a schoolteacher at Dandenong High School, where he taught for nine years, before becoming a household name as an Australian quiz champion in 1960. From 1962 onwards, his interest in politics and civil liberties manifested itself. He campaigned against the death penalty throughout the 1960s, particularly against the execution of Ronald Ryan.
Political career
Jones' political career began in the Victorian parliament where he represented the electorate of Melbourne as an MLA from 1972 to 1977 when he resigned to take up federal politics. In 1977, he was elected as a member of the Australian Labor Party to the Federal seat of Division of Lalor in Victoria, which he held until his retirement in 1998. He was Minister of Science in the Hawke government from 1983 onwards, where he presided over the growth of organisations such as the CSIRO. From 1992, he served as national president of the Australian Labor Party (upon the resignation of Stephen Loosely, from whom he had lost the position in a split vote a couple of years earlier), and was a member of the committee for the National Library of Australia. He was also the Vice President of the World Heritage Committee from 1995 to 1996.Barry Jones was the chief architect of the Australian Labor Party's Knowledge Nation education concept, as chair of the Chifley Research Centre's Knowledge Nation Taskforce [link].
Jones has been a prolific author of political and sociological books including:
- Decades of Decision, 1965
- The Penalty is Death (editor), 1968
- Macmillan Dictionary of Biography (editor), 1981
- Sleepers Wake: Technology and the Future of Work, 1982.
External links
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