Fred Daly
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For the winner of the 1947 Open Golf Championship see Fred Daly (golfer).
Frederick Michael Daly (13 June 1913 - 2 August 1995) was a long-serving Australian Labor Party politician, Minister for Administrative Services in the government of Gough Whitlam and a member of the Australian House of Representatives for 32 years from 1943 to 1975.
Daly was born in Currabubulla, a small town in northern New South Wales, and was educated at Catholic schools, becoming a clerk in the Department of the Navy and an official of the Federated Clerks Union, a stronghold of the Catholic right wing of the labour movement. At the 1943 election he unexpectedly won Martin, a previously safe United Australia Party seat on the North Shore of Sydney. He rapidly established himself as a skilled and witty debater, and became a protege of Ben Chifley, Labor Prime Minister from 1945.
Labor was defeated at the 1949 election, at which Daly shifted to the safe Labor seat of Grayndler. Daly spent the next 23 years as an opposition frontbencher - one of a generation of Labor politicians whose career opportunities were greatly reduced by the splits and internal conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s. As a right-wing Catholic, Daly had many sympathies with the right-wing group which left the Labor Party in 1955 and later formed the Democratic Labor Party, but he remained loyal to the party and defeated several attempts by the left to challenge his party endorsement.
Daly became well known as one of the great humourists of the House. Among his well-known lines were: "the Country Party has two election policies - one for people and one for sheep," and "He (Billy Snedden) couldn't lead a flock of homing pigeons."
From 1967 onwards Daly was a strong supporter of Gough Whitlam in his battles with the left wing of the party, and in 1969 Whitlam made him shadow minister for immigration. But his support for retaining some elements of the White Australia Policy in Labor's platform caused Whitlam to remove him from the portfolio. When Labor won the 1972 election - by which time Daly was the longest-serving member of the House - he became Minister for Services and Property (in 1974 renamed Administrative Services).
This put Daly in charge of, among other things, the Australian Electoral Commission, and he tried to pass legislation which would have abolished the malapportionment of electorates in favour of rural areas (see Australian electoral system), but his bills were defeated in the Senate. After the 1974 election he was able to get many of his reforms to the electoral system passed.
When the Whitlam government was dismissed by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr in November 1975, Daly announced his retirement at the election which immediately followed. He delayed his announcement to the last minute to ensure that Whitlam's son Tony Whitlam was able to secure endorsement for Grayndler without opposition.
In retirement Daly published two volumes of humorous memoirs, From Curtin to Kerr and The Politician who Laughed. He remained active in the New South Wales Labor Party until his death in 1995, when he was accorded a state funeral at St Brigid's Church, Marrickville attended by a huge crowd of Labor loyalists.
| Preceded by Arthur Calwell |
Longest serving member of the Australian House of Representatives 1972–1975 |
Succeeded by Kim Beazley (senior) |
