Electoral District of Perth - History

History

The electoral district of Perth was created as one of the initial 30 single-member districts, and one of only six in the Perth–Fremantle area. Its first member, who was elected on 10 December 1890, was Dr Edward Scott, a doctor by training who had been elected as Mayor of Perth the previous year. He resigned in December 1891, and was replaced at the resulting by-election on 12 January 1892 by Thomas Molloy. Molloy became embroiled in a controversy regarding provision of state aid to private schools, which he and fellow Catholic MLAs Timothy Quinlan and Alfred Canning supported. The Catholic Vicar General, Father Anselm Bourke, established the Education Defence League with their assistance. However, the issue became a major one in the 1894 election amongst the voting public, and all three MLAs lost their seats, Molloy losing to George Randell, a prominent Congregationalist who had led the cause against state aid. Randell became the Opposition Leader to Premier John Forrest, but stepped down from that role a year later in July 1895, and did not contest the 1897 election, which was won by a supporter of Forrest.

In the 1901 election, after which the Oppositionists under George Leake were able to form a minority government, Frank Wilson, formerly the member for Canning, won the seat. After five months, the Leake government failed, and the governor eventually invited Alf Morgans of the Ministerial Party to form a government and appoint a six-member Ministry. Morgans appointed Wilson minister of mines and commissioner of railways on 21 November 1901. Until 1947, members of parliament who were appointed as ministers were required to resign their seat and recontest it at a ministerial by-election, which was normally a fairly non-eventful matter. However, Leake and his allies contested the six by-elections with such organised campaigning that three of the six ministers, including Wilson, were defeated.

In 1911, the seat was won for the first time for the Australian Labor Party by Walter Dwyer, a lawyer who helped to draft the Industrial Arbitration Act 1912 during the first Scaddan administration; however, he was defeated by James Connolly of the new Liberal Party in 1914. Connolly became a minister without portfolio in the new Wilson government in 1916, but resigned in June 1917 when appointed to the role of Agent General for Western Australia. Robert Pilkington won the subsequent by-election on 21 July 1917 and election two months later, before leaving for England in 1921. Harry Mann, a former detective who, amongst other things, oversaw gaming and racing, was elected in his place.

A controversy erupted in 1933 upon the establishment of a Lotteries Commission, to which Mann, along with John Scaddan and Legislative Council member Alec Clydesdale, were appointed. Several profitable newspaper competitions, including that of The Sunday Times, were prohibited due to being thinly disguised forms of gambling. In response, a Citizens' Reform League was formed to defend the crosswords, and at the elections later that year, both Mann and Scaddan lost their seats—with Perth being won by former Labor Senator Ted Needham, who was to hold the seat until its abolition at the 1950 election, and North Perth for the following three years until his retirement. One sideline to Needham's campaigns was watchmaker and jeweller William Murray, who had placed a public notice in The West Australian on 28 October 1930 stating that Parliament "has become an out-of-date instrument for achieving the will of Anglo-Saxon peoples" and seeking names and addresses of anyone wishing to work towards overthrowing it—and then ran for election as a Nationalist in 1936 and 1943.

The seat was re-established at the 1962 election with different boundaries—the neighbouring seats of West Perth, East Perth and North Perth having all been abolished in the 1961 redistribution—and was won by Labor's Stanley Heal, the previous member for West Perth. He was defeated at the 1965 election by Peter Durack of the Liberal Party, who was in turn defeated by Terry Burke in 1968. Burke, the brother of Brian Burke who went on to serve as Premier from 1983 until 1988, went on to hold the seat for 19 years until 1987. He faced some high-profile Liberal opponents, including future Legislative Councillor Bob Pike in 1971, historian and author Hal G.P. Colebatch in 1977 and Olympic swimmer Peter Evans in 1986.

Burke resigned in 1987, and Labor's Dr Ian Alexander, a City of Perth councillor and town planner from the party's left faction, won the subsequent by-election on 9 May 1987. He spent much of his parliamentary time on Aboriginal issues, sustainability and the environment and the Northern Suburbs Transit System project. On 4 March 1991, Ian Alexander resigned from the Labor party citing "frequent breaches of the party's basic principles and platforms", and sat as an independent until the 1993 election. Dr Alexander did not stand for election in 1993, and Labor's Diana Warnock, a former radio talk-show host, won the seat with 50.29% of the two-party-preferred vote against the Liberals' Hal G.P. Colebatch.

On 21 October 1999, Warnock announced her departure at the next election for personal reasons, and threw her support behind former Town of Vincent mayor John Hyde, a member of the Centre faction of the Labor Party who had the support of the Left faction and some Centre members of Parliament. However, the key Centre unions had backed former ministerial adviser Adele Farina for the post, and Labor's affirmative action policy for candidates in winnable seats meant that failing to pick a female candidate would risk sitting male MPs. A week later, the Centre faction openly split, with a breakaway group endorsing Hyde. On 5 November, Farina withdrew from the contest, leaving Hyde to be preselected unopposed ahead of the 2001 election. He maintained the seat for Labor at the election, becoming the first openly gay man to sit in the Western Australian parliament.