Don Dunstan

Donald "Don" Allan Dunstan AC QC (* 21st September 1926 in Suva , Fiji ; † 6. February 1999 in Adelaide , South Australia ) was an Australian politician of the Labor Party and two-time Prime Minister of South Australia .

Life

Don Dunstan as a teenager

Don Dunstan began his political career in 1943 while campaigning for the Conservative Country Party while he was still a student, but soon changed his political stance and later justified it with the following words:

"I've often been described as a congenital rebel - and in fact my rector at St. Peter's College repeated this description on more than one occasion." repeated that phrase on more than one occasion. ')

In 1953 he was elected to the legislative assembly of South Australia for the first time as a candidate for the Labor Party and, twelve years later, at the Labor Party convention in Sydney in 1965 , the words "White Australia" were removed from the party platform.

On June 1, 1967, he became Prime Minister of South Australia for the first time, but suffered an electoral defeat the following year, which meant that he had to cede the office of Prime Minister to Steele Hall of the Liberal and Country League on April 17, 1968 . During his first term in office, the so-called six o'clock swill was changed , the rush to hotel bars in Australia and New Zealand to drink alcoholic beverages before the bar closed early. South Australia was the last state to end the closure with a law introduced by Don Dunstan. Around five months after the end of his term of office, the first legal beer was drunk there after 6 p.m. on September 28, 1968.

After another election victory of the Labor Party, he was Hall's successor as Prime Minister on June 2, 1970 and was then able to win four victories with the party in the elections to the legislative assembly of the state .

His tenure, which lasted until February 15, 1979, was marked by social reforms such as the decriminalization of homosexuality and thus became the first Australian state to implement this. To underline his personal attitude towards such reforms, he once appeared in 1972 in pink shorts in the parliament building instead of the traditional gray suit and said that with this action he wanted to bring some reform will into the conservative hallways of parliament. He was also known as a promoter of arts and culture such as the Adelaide Festival of Arts . In addition, he was the first prime minister of the state to enforce property rights for Aborigines .

Dunstan's term of office led to a change in the conservative south of Australia for decades between 1933 and 1965 and to one of the most progressive states in Australia in the 1970s.

Web links and sources

• Biography (rulers.org)