Simon Crean

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Simon Findlay Crean (born 26 February 1949) is an Australian politician. He was leader of the Australian Labor Party, and hence Leader of the Opposition at the Federal level, from November 2001 to 2 December 2003.

Crean was born in Melbourne, Victoria. He is the son of Frank Crean, a federal Labor MP from 1951 to 1977, who was Deputy Prime Minister in the government of Gough Whitlam. He was educated at Middle Park Central School, Melbourne High School and Monash University. Following his graduation from Monash University with degrees in economics and law, Simon Crean worked in a number of trade unions before becoming an official with the Storeman and Packers Union, of which he became General Secretary in 1979.

In 1977, his father Frank Crean retired from Federal politics and made the seat of Melbourne Ports vacant. The ALP pre-selection was between Simon Crean and Clyde Holding. Holding defeated Crean in the ALP preselection for Melbourne Ports.

In 1981 Crean became Vice-President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), and in 1985 he was elected the organisation's President. In this role he played a key role in negotiating agreements on wages and other industrial issues with the Labor government of Bob Hawke. In 1990 he left the ACTU to go into politics.

At the 1990 elections, Crean was elected to the seat of Hotham in the Australian House of Representatives, and immediately entered the Hawke ministry as Minister for Science. He became Minister for Primary Industries and Energy in 1991 and Minister for Employment, Education and Training in 1993.

Following the Labor Party's 1996 election defeat, Crean contested the deputy leadership of the party but was defeated by Gareth Evans, 42 votes to 37. He was an Opposition frontbencher until Labor's defeat at the 1998 election. He was then elected Deputy Leader of the Opposition and became shadow Treasurer in succession to Evans. In November 2001, following Labor's third consecutive election defeat, he was elected unopposed as the Leader of the Opposition following the resignation of Kim Beazley.

On February 4, 2003, Crean led the Labor Party in condemning Prime Minister John Howard's decision to commit Australian troops to the United States-led military action in Iraq.

Through most of 2003, consistently poor polling led to constant speculation of a leadership challenge by Beazley, though a reasonably successful Budget reply speech and the controversy over Peter Hollingworth gave Crean a small fillip. Nevertheless, to end the constant rumblings over a challenge, Crean called for a leadership spill. Polls continued to suggest that the public much preferred Beazley to Crean; nevertheless, when the vote was taken on 16 June 2003, Crean won by 58 votes to 34.

By November, however, polls continued to show Crean trailing Howard badly as preferred Prime Minister. On 27 November 2003 a group of his senior colleagues told Crean that he had lost the party's support and should resign. Crean said he would "sleep on it." On 28 November, however, Crean announced that he would stand down. He became the first federal Labor leader to be replaced without having contested an election. (The former Liberal leader, Alexander Downer, suffered the same fate in 1995.)

After Crean's resignation, Beazley and the Labor Party's Treasury spokesperson, Mark Latham, announced that they would contest the Labor leadership. At the meeting of Labor MPs on 2 December, Latham defeated Beazley by 47 votes to 45.

Latham then appointed Crean as the Opposition's shadow Treasurer, which gave him a continued prominent role in Australian politics. However, in the aftermath of Labor's defeat in the 2004 election, many in the Labor Party felt that Crean's performance in the campaign was poor and he was partly responsible for Labor's defeat: as a result, Crean resigned from his Shadow Treasurer position. At Latham's insistence he was re-elected to the Opposition front bench and became Shadow Minister for Trade.

Crean retained this position when Beazley returned to the leadership in January 2005. In the June 2005 reshuffle, however, Crean was demoted to Shadow Minister for Regional Development. He faced a preselection challenge for his seat from Martin Pakula, a member of his former union, a move which he blamed on Kim Beazley [1], his former union, Martin Pakula, Hong Lim, and the Labor Right. Beazley refused to publicly support either candidate, but several front-benchers including Julia Gillard supported Crean [2]. Crean won preselection after an unexpectedly strong win, recording around 70% of the votes in the first stage of voting (a vote which involves local ALP members in that area who have voting rights) led to his opponent's withdrawal.

Since his victory, Crean has identified a number of people responsible for the challenge to his preselection. In particular, he attacked Senator Stephen Conroy describing his front-bench colleague as "venal."

Following the defeat of Kim Beazley and election of Kevin Rudd as Federal Labor leader in December 2006, Crean was reappointed as Shadow Trade Minister and also retained responsibility for regional development.

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Preceded by:
Gareth Evans		 Deputy Leader of the Australian Labor Party
1998–2001		 Succeeded by:
Jenny Macklin
Preceded by:
Kim Beazley		 Leader of the Australian Labor Party
2001–2003		 Succeeded by:
Mark Latham
Persondata
NAME Crean, Simon Findlay
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Australian politician
DATE OF BIRTH 26 February 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
DATE OF DEATH living
PLACE OF DEATH
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