Michael Crutchfield

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michael Crutchfield (born December 12, 1961) is an Australian politician. He is currently the member for South Barwon in the Victorian Legislative Assembly.

Crutchfield was born in Melbourne, but attended high school in the coastal city of Warrnambool. He studied to become a teacher at the University of Western Australia before returning to Victoria and taking up a position as a teacher at Chanel College in Geelong. Two years later, however, he left the position and took on a position as a career firefighter with the Country Fire Authority.

He ran for and was elected to the council of the City of Greater Geelong in 1995. He was a popular and high-profile councillor, and subsequently served as the city's mayor from 2000 to 2001. Crutchfield remained on the council after losing the mayoralty, and contested Australian Labor Party preselection for the state seat of South Barwon, which was considered a safe seat for the conservative Liberal Party of Australia, and had never been won by Labor before in its history. Aided considerably by a statewide landslide victory for Labor, Crutchfield defeated long-serving incumbent Alister Paterson, and took up his seat in parliament.

Though he had been a high-profile mayor, Crutchfield has been a relatively low-profile backbencher since being elected to parliament. He has been criticised in particular for steadfast support of government plans in the face of near-unanimous opposition in his electorate, most notably on the planned route for the Geelong ring-road, the siting of the Marshall railway station and the former site of the Torquay Primary School.

Crutchfield gained notoriety for his sarcastic responses to constituent emails. When constituents told him of their intention not to vote for him if he continued to support damaging projects for the electorate he replied with such taunts as; "woopy do" and, "big deal" [1]. When the Public Transport Users Association asked Crutchfield to participate in the Car-Free Challenge, his response was that the challenge was "absolutely ludicrous" [2]