Jon Stanhope
Encyclopedia : J : JO : JON : Jon Stanhope
-->
Jonathon Donald Stanhope (born 29 April, 1951) is the current Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory, representing the Australian Labor Party.
Stanhope was born in Gundagai, New South Wales but moved to Canberra to study at the Australian National University. After graduation from his law degree, he became a legal officer for the public service and a staffer for a number of senior ALP figures, including leader Kim Beazley.
In 1998 Stanhope was elected to the ACT Legislative Assembly and immediately became party leader. Stanhope played a major role in the downfall of Kate Carnell's Liberal government, concentrating heavily on her involvement in the Bruce Stadium affair.
Stanhope was elected ACT Chief Minister in 2001 when Labor won 8 of the 17 seats in the Assembly, and came within 300 votes of winning a 9th, which would have granted majority government for the first time in ACT history.
Canberra was hit by bushfires in January 2003. Four people died and 500 houses were destroyed. Stanhope had made headlines in the week before the bushfires hit Canberra when he personally jumped from a helicopter into a dam to save the pilot of another helicopter which had crashed into the water. Stanhope was lauded from some sectors of the community for his support of those involved in managing the bushfire. Since the fires there has been considerable debate about his leadership of the community at the time. In May 2004 Stanhope admitted he had forgotten receiving a phone call from an Emergency Services worker on the day before the firestorm, despite previous insistence he had not, leading to some other sectors of the community to question whether there had been reasonable and adequate warning of the fire and that all that could have been done to prepare for the fire had been done by emergency services. Stanhope faced a no-confidence motion in the Assembly from the Liberal opposition, which if passed meant he would have been forced to resign as Chief Minister. Instead, the motion was downgraded to a censure motion by the influence of the Australian Democrats and passed in the Assembly, meaning Stanhope kept his job, and was subsequently reelected to form a majority government. The coronial inquest into the bushfire continues.
The ACT was the first (and still the only) jurisdiction in Australia to introduce a Human Rights Act, in 2004. Opponents predicted the Act would cause a flood of litigation, or transfer power away from the ACT Legislative Assembly. These predictions have not eventuated. The Act's main influence has been on policy development, ensuring legislative changes comply with the requirements of the Act.
At the 2004 ACT election, Stanhope and the ALP won sufficient seats to form a majority government, the first time in the Territory's history.
On 14 October, 2005, Stanhope took the controversial step of publishing the confidential draft of the Federal Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005 on his website [link] so that the community had a chance to consider and debate the proposed legislation. This action was both praised and vilified, despite the inevitability of the legislation becoming public once passed - without any opportunity for debate. Citing concerns about rights, he later refused to sign a revised version of the legislation, becoming the only state or territory leader not to sign away long-standing legal rights.
In June 2006 Stanhope came under fire over the 2006-07 ACT Budget. On the same day Queensland produced a budget with a surplus and New South Wales produced a budget with a $700 million deficit, the ACT Budget included rate rises, a change in the ACT's emergency services management which led to a senior public servant resigning, and the proposed closure of 38 schools and a college. The proposed closure of these schools is under consideration through community consultation until December, 2006. Despite these cuts the budget increased overall education funding. The ratings agency Standard & Poor's reaffirmed the ACT's AAA credit rating in the wake of the Budget. However, the hard decisions prompted outcry in the Australian media, with the Daily Telegraph labelling him "Stanhope-less" and an "economic vandal" on the front page of a special ACT edition. Soon after the budget the ACT's Civil Unions Act was overturned by the federal government- Despite the objections of Gary Humphries- an ACT liberal senator.
External links
- ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, [Rights at Risk: My Dissent from the Australian Anti-terror Bill], JURIST
|- style="text-align: center;" |- style="text-align: center;"
| Chief Ministers of the Australian Capital Territory |
|
|---|---|
| Follett | Kaine | Carnell | Humphries | Stanhope | |
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.