Politics
In 1967 Fitzgerald was elected to the ACT Advisory Council as a "True Whig", promising to take no action as a mock platform. He was re-elected in 1970, with 21% of the vote, ahead of the Liberal Party candidates and second only to the Australian Labour Party (ALP) team. For many years, Fitzgerald was a member and chairman of the ACT Historic Sites and Building Committee (later renamed the Heritage Council), a body that had been established at his initiative. The Committee sought to protect historic homesteads and buildings, during a time when Canberra was rapidly being extended into surrounding rural areas.
Fitzgerald was initiated into politics when he stood for the Australia Party (founded by Gordon Barton) as its candidate in the May 1970 by-election, running for the House of Representatives seat of Canberra. He won the highest vote of any Australia Party candidate in any election, but was eliminated from the vote count in a final distribution of preference votes. In 1972, Fitzgerald stood again as an Australia Party candidate for the same seat in the Federal election of that year.
Fitzgerald was elected the President of the National Press Club for two terms, 1969–70 and 1970–71, and remained on the committee for many years. As a monarchist, he was a founding member and chairman of the ACT & Region branch of the ACM and played an active role in the Australian republican debate. In 1998, he was the ACM's primary candidate in the election of delegates to the Constitutional Convention, but lost on a final distribution of preferences to the ARM candidate, Frank Cassidy.
Read more about this topic: Alan Fitzgerald (satirist)
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“One might imagine that a movement which is so preoccupied with the fulfillment of human potential would have a measure of respect for those who nourish its source. But politics make strange bedfellows, and liberated women have elected to become part of a long tradition of hostility to mothers.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous.... Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)