Barry Jones (Australian politician)

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Barry Owen Jones AO (born October 11, 1932, Geelong, Victoria) is an Australian polymath, writer, lawyer, social activist, autograph collector and former politician. In 1998 he was named as one of Australia's "National Living Treasures".

He was educated at Melbourne High School and Melbourne University where he studied arts and law. 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 on Bob Dyer's Pick a Box, a radio show from 1948, televised from 1957. He was famous for taking issue with Dyer about certain expected answers, and in one case he and Dyer devoted an entire half-hour program to a discussion of whether or not Warren Hastings could correctly be described as "the first British Governor-General of India".

An ALP member from 1950, he was a Federal candidate in 1955, 1958 and 1963, with a strong interest in education and civil liberties . He campaigned against the death penalty throughout the 1960s, particularly against the execution of Ronald Ryan.

Contents 1 Political career 2 Academic career 3 Writings 4 External links

[edit] Political career

Jones' political career began in the Victorian Parliament where he represented the electorate of Melbourne as a Labor Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) from 1972 to 1977, when he resigned to go into federal politics.

In 1977, he was elected to the House of Representatives as the Labor member for the Federal seat of Lalor in Victoria, which he held until his retirement in 1998. He was Minister for Science in the Hawke government from 1983 to 1990, in which role he presided over the growth of organisations such as the CSIRO, the creation of the Australia Prize, Questacon and the Commission for the Future.

In 1992, upon the resignation of Stephen Loosley, to whom he had lost the position in a split vote in 1991, he was elected National President of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). He served in the position until 2000. He became National President again in 2005-06.

Jones was the chief architect of the ALP's Knowledge Nation education concept, as chair of the Chifley Research Centre's Knowledge Nation Taskforce [1]. During this time he was also a member of the council for the National Library of Australia.

He was the Vice President of the World Heritage Committee from 1995 to 1996. He was a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO 1991-95.

In 1998 he was Deputy Chair of the fourth Constitutional Convention.

[edit] Academic career

Jones graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Laws and Master of Arts. Jones holds the honorary degrees of Doctor of Letters from the University of Technology, Sydney and University of Wollongong, Doctor of Science from Macquarie University and Doctor of Laws from the University of Melbourne.

In 1999 he was appointed an Adjunct Professor at Monash University and became a Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne in 2005.

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA); a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA); a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA); and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE): he was the first person elected Fellow of all four Australian learned academies. In 1999 he was elected a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.

He chairs the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority and serves on the boards of six medical research institutes. He chaired the Victorian Schools Innovation Commission 2001-05.

Barry Jones Bay in the Australian Antarctic Territory and Yalkaparidon jonesi, a rare extinct marsupial, were named after him.

[edit] Writings

Jones has been a prolific author of political and sociological books including:

• Decades of Decision 1860-, 1965
• The Penalty is Death (editor), 1968
• Joseph II, 1968
• Barry Jones' Guide to Modern History: Age of Apocalypse, 1975
• Macmillan Dictionary of Biography (editor), 1981
• Sleepers, Wake! Technology and the Future of Work, 1982
• Barry Jones' Dictionary of World Biography, 1994
• A Thinking Reed (autobiography), 2006.

He is reputedly the owner of the largest private autograph collection in Australia.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] External links

• Brisbane Institute page on Barry Jones
• Knowledge Nation Taskforce
• Antarctic Gazetteer entry for Barry Jones Bay