Tony Whitlam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Antony Philip Whitlam QC, (born 7 January 1944), Australian politician and judge, is the son of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and Margaret Whitlam. He was born in Sydney and educated at Sydney Boys' High School and the Australian National University in Canberra, where he graduated in law.
In 1975 Whitlam was elected to the Australian House of Representatives for the safe Australian Labor Party seat of Grayndler in central Sydney. His father was at that time Leader of the Labor Party and had just been dismissed as Prime Minister by the Govenor-General, Sir John Kerr. Labor was heavily defeated but Whitlam easily won Grayndler. He became only the second federal MP to serve in the House at the same time as his father. He is also the only child of an Australian Prime Minister to be a federal MP (Kevin Lyons and Brendan Lyons, sons of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, were Tasmanian state MPs).
In 1977 there was a redistribution of electoral boundaries in New South Wales, and the Division of Lang, adjoining Grayndler, was abolished. The sitting Labor MP for Lang, Frank Stewart, challenged Whitlam for Labor endorsement in Grayndler and defeated him. Whitlam was forced to stand for another seat, the marginal Liberal seat of St George, where he was defeated at the December 1977 election by the sitting Liberal member, Maurice Neal.
Whitlam did not return to politics. Instead he had a successful career at the Sydney bar, before being appointed a judge of the Federal Court of Australia in 1993. In 1994 he was also appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory.
