Fred Paterson

Frederick Woolnough Paterson , usually called Fred Paterson , (born June 13, 1897 in Gladstone , † October 7, 1977 in Sydney ) was an Australian lawyer and politician . Paterson is well known in Australia for being the only member of a Communist Party , the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), to be elected to parliament.

Early years

Paterson was the sixth of eleven children of William Hunter Paterson, a Scotsman, and his wife Edith, née Jeffery. As a schoolboy he won a prize in a writing competition; he was also a successful athlete and rugby union player .

Fred Paterson studied at the University of Queensland before World War I before joining the military. In January 1920 Paterson received a place in theology at Oxford . After returning to Queensland, he entered the CPA and began studying law in 1923 . Around 1924 he held seminars on the theory of Marxism and then worked in workers' education.

On April 11, 1924, he married Lucy Ethel Blackman. The marriage remained childless and was divorced in September 1931. He passed his lawyer exam on March 18, 1931. His marriage to the 23-year-old Kathleen Claire took place on March 30, 1932. With her he had two sons.

Politician

In 1930 Paterson was arrested for allegedly seditious speech. From 1931 he worked as a lawyer in Brisbane and Townsville . From May 1937 on he wrote as a journalist in a communist magazine, the North Queensland Guardian . When the Great Depression began, he was politically active in the sugar industry, where he turned against the social and racist policies practiced there. At that time the employers used Italian workers as wage suppressors against the workers employed there. Paterson led the campaign against it successfully and he worked as a lawyer and as an activist for the CPA. During this time he gained a reputation as a brilliant speaker. During the late 1930s, the CPA grew into a political force in northern Queensland.

In 1939 he was elected to Townsville City Council and was the first member of the Communist Party Australia to be elected to such a body. He was re-elected in 1943. In the same year he ran for the Division of Herbert , but was not elected. The following year he won the Parliament of Queensland a deputy seat in the Electoral district of Bowen (constituency Bowen ). Thus Paterson succeeded as the only member of the CPA in the history of Australia to be elected to the parliament of Queensland. He was re-elected in 1947.

politics

After he was elected to parliament, he continued to work in the trade union movement and strongly criticized the government. In 1948 he took an active part in the controversy over the increase in the wages of the state railway company in Queensland. This dispute between trade unions and the then Labor government of Edward Holan , which led the railway company, resulted in the Queensland Railway Strike . During the strike, he took part in a protest demonstration in Brisbane on March 17, 1948 for six strikers imprisoned during the railway strike. The demonstration resulted in a conflict with the police and Paterson called back a police officer by shouting a violent attack on a protester. He was knocked down from behind and seriously injured in the subsequent fall and was then unable to work for months. The matter has never been investigated or sued.

In the election to the federal parliament in 1950, Paterson was not re-elected. Prime Minister Robert Menzies was leading an anti-communist campaign during the Cold War that aimed to ban communists from working in public institutions. With this election defeat, Paterson's political career ended.

However, he continued to participate in the successful resistance to the anti-communist campaign of Menzies. He took part in other political activities of the trade unions and the Communist Party of Australia. In 1952 Paterson went to Sydney. In 1950/51 he defended the CPA before the High Court of Australia against the prohibition by the Communist Party Dissolution Act (1950). In 1953 he defended Adam Ogston before the Sydney magistrate for allegedly inflammatory articles in the Communist Review newspaper . In 1961 the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement commissioned him to represent two Aborigines in their lawsuit against the Hopevale Mission in Cooktown , Queensland, for abuse.

literature

• Ross Fitzgerald: The Peoples Champion: Fred Paterson- Australia's Only Communist Party Member of Parliament : St Lucia, Queensland: 1997: ISBN 0-7022-2959-8

Web links

• Australian Dictionary of Biography at adbonline.anu.au
• Article on Fred Paterson at greenleft.org.au

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Report on greenleft.org.au ( Memento of the original from May 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed March 21, 2010