Ted Mack (politician)

Mack was born in the Sydney suburb of Paddington and educated at Sydney Boys High School, graduating in 1950. He completed national service in the RAAF in 1951–1952 at Albury.[2] At the University of New South Wales, he trained as an architect, graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture in 1958. Following graduation, he married Wendy, with whom he has two daughters, one of whom is consumer activist Jenni Mack,[3] and two sons. He and his wife travelled to Europe and worked in London 1958–61. Returning to Australia he worked as an architect mainly on hospitals and public housing until 1974 and in private practice until 1980.[4] He supervised the construction of the Port Kembla district hospital (1961–63) and was later appointed as Architect-in-charge of Hospital design and construction at the NSW Public Works Department in 1966. In 1972 he was appointed as Assistant Chief Architect at the NSW Housing Commission. In 1975, he was appointed to a committee chaired by H.C. Coombs (former Governor of both the Commonwealth and Reserve Banks) to monitor and advise on Aboriginal housing in remote areas of Australia. Between 1974 and 1980, Mack was also employed as a part-time tutor at UNSW in architecture.

Mack began to take an interest in politics in 1970 after the North Sydney Municipal Council approved construction of a 17-storey office block near his residence. He subsequently ran for election to the council in 1974 and was successful. He was re-elected as an Alderman in 1977 and 1980. He was elected by the council as mayor in 1980, 1981, and 1982. He was re-elected by popular vote in 1983 and 1987.[4] He began his term as mayor by selling the mayoral Mercedes-Benz car to help buy community buses. For the next eight years he used his 1951 Citroen as the mayoral car at no cost to the ratepayers. He relinquished his private architectural practice on becoming mayor.

He introduced open government policies making all council meetings, committees and council files open to the public. There were no meetings of any sort from which the public or press were excluded while he was mayor. Public participation in decision making was created through the establishment of some 24 precinct committees, some 3000 public meetings and 36 referenda over his eight years as mayor. Under Mack's leadership the council decided all decision making is ultimately the right of the public not aldermen – irrespective of the merits of the public decision. He initiated a policy of raising funds from sources other than rates, with the result that rates fell from 66% of council's income in 1980 to 38% in 1987. In that year North Sydney was named as the top Sydney council in an independent financial analysis. This enabled the council to establish a large public works program without using rates or loans to fund it. The works program consisted of several new and renovated parks, four multi-storey car parks, four new childcare facilities, four renovated community centres and one major new community centre, four new tennis centres, two renovated public swimming pools, major library extensions, major renovations to North Sydney Oval, over one hundred new public housing dwellings (funded by the State Government), major streetscape improvements throughout the municipality, seats, signs, footpaths, lighting, forty bus shelters, some 50,000 street trees and a substantial number of commercial and retail establishments providing an income stream for council. Mack ensured that his name was not on any of the opening plaques for these facilities. He received a 90% vote at the 1987 mayoral election.

In 1981, he decided to run as an independent for the newly created New South Wales Legislative Assembly seat of North Shore, based in North Sydney.[4] On paper, it was a comfortably safe Liberal seat; the North Shore has been the power base for the Liberals (and their predecessors) in Sydney for over a century. Mack nominated for North Shore after noticing that its new boundaries were virtually coextensive with the boundaries of the Municipality of North Sydney. Mack considered that being both mayor and state member for electorates that covered nearly identical boundaries would make both positions more effective. His opponent was state opposition leader Bruce McDonald. After the first count on election night he pushed the Labor candidate into third place, and ultimately defeated McDonald on Labor preferences—one of the few times a major-party leader has been defeated at any level in Australia. Mack did not accept a mayoral allowance for the next seven years. He was returned by comfortable margins in 1984 and 1988, the latter election coming as the Coalition won government in a landslide. Shortly after his 1988 victory, he abruptly retired from all of his offices.[5] He did so just two days short of serving seven years in parliament, which would have made him eligible for parliamentary pension entitlements in excess of $1,000,000. Mack had always taken a dim view of what he perceived as the excesses of public political office, and decided to retire in protest. His retirement from both local and state government resulted in three by-elections for North Sydney ward alderman, North Sydney mayor and state member for North Shore. All three people he recommended for these positions were elected.

Despite living nearby, for a time, he refused to travel across the Sydney Harbour Bridge or through the Sydney Harbour Tunnel in protest at the secret contract and awarding of all tolls to Kumagai Transfield for 30 years.

After 18 months out of politics, mainly spent camping in the outback, Mack achieved even broader fame by winning the federal seat of North Sydney in 1990. The seat had long been regarded as a blue-ribbon Liberal seat; it had been held by the Liberals or their predecessors since Federation. However, Mack defeated incumbent Liberal MP and Shadow Foreign Minister John Spender on a large swing. Mack led on the primary vote, while Spender lost over 18 percent of his primary vote from 1987. He was elected on the fourth count after Democrat and Labor preferences flowed overwhelmingly to him. Mack was narrowly re-elected in 1993.[6] During his tenure in federal Parliament, Mack opposed unilateral tariff removal, privatisations and was the only vote against Australian involvement in the Gulf War. In his speech on 22 January 1991, Mack said:

This war is about oil, because 40 per cent of the world's oil reserves are in this area. This war is about years of greed, of intrigue, of malevolence by local despots and the developed world. Saddam Hussein is a Frankenstein monster created over the last decade by the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, China, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other western European countries that supplied him with billions of dollars of armaments, and with the technology for chemical and nuclear warfare. France built Saddam's nuclear reactor. In the years 1983 to 1989, United States trade with Iraq increased from $571M to $3.6 billion. Only one month before the invasion, the United States Department of Commerce tried to push through a $7.6m deal to sell Iraq nuclear parts.

He successfully opposed the appointment of an Indonesian general involved in East Timor as ambassador to Australia. He also introduced a private member's bill for citizen initiated referendums as practised in Switzerland. He served on the transport and communications committee for six years.

Mack chose to retire from federal parliament at the 1996 election for the same reason he had previously chosen to retire from state parliament − to avoid receiving a parliamentary pension.[1] When the Liberals held their preselection contest for the seat, they did not know at the time that Mack would not renominate, and Joe Hockey won the nomination with very little opposition. It is widely believed that Hockey would have faced a more rigorous preselection contest had it been known that Mack was retiring.[7] North Sydney had always been a comfortably safe Liberal seat on a "traditional" two-party preferred basis, and it had been an almost foregone conclusion that it would revert to the Liberals once Mack retired. As expected, Hockey easily won the seat, and later went on to serve in various ministerial roles including Treasurer.

Mack was elected as an independent Republican delegate to the Australian Constitutional Convention.[6] He opposed the model favoured by the Australian Republican Movement. Along with Clem Jones, he was a director of Real Republic and was appointed to the official ten person "no" committee for the 1999 referendum.

In 1997, Ted Mack was elected as one of the one hundred "National Living Treasures", organised by the National Trust of Australia. After his retirement from federal parliament he was an occasional media political commentator, and was chosen to deliver the 2013 Sir Henry Parkes Oration entitled "The State of the Federation" at Tenterfield.[8]