People Australia

Jack Little, n.d.

John Albert (Jack) Little (1914-1980) boot clicker, trade union official and Australian Senator

Birth: 13 October 1914 at Maryborough, Victoria, son of native-born parents John Richard Jeffrey Little (1884-1961), shoe shop manager, and Florence, née Terry (1885-1964). Marriage: 10 September 1938 at North Richmond Methodist Church, Victoria, to Ila Elizabeth Clark (1916-2016), a photographic examiner born at Meeniyan, Victoria. They had two sons. Death: 25 November 1988 in hospital at Preston, Victoria; usual residence Otterington Grove, East Ivanhoe. Religion: claimed membership of the Church of Christ; buried with Anglican rites. 

• Educated at East Brunswick and Thornbury State Schools. Protestant (Church of Christ) Sunday school teacher before 1938. Worked as a boot clicker.
• Official in the Victorian Boot Employees Federation. President of the Boot Trade Employees Federation, Victorian branch, in 1944-45. Treasurer and full-time union employee from 1948 to 1954. Federal vice-president from 1949 to 1952.
• Delegate to Trades Hall Council and Australian Council of Trade Unions from 1949 to 1953. THC representative on Melbourne University Extension Board.
• Visited and studied industrial and social problems in United Kingdom, Europe and United States of America in 1952 on Commonwealth Bank industrial relations scholarship.
• Joined Northcote Australia Labor Party in 1940. Secretary of the Deakin federal electorate State executive from 1949 to 1955; president 1953-54. Prominent industrial grouper.
• Expelled from the ALP in 1955 and was a foundation member of the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), which became the Australian Democratic Labor Party - DLP.
• Member of the Legislative Council of Victoria for Melbourne North from a by-election in August 1954 until 1958 (defeated). DLP leader in the Legislative Council from 1955 to 1958. State leader of the DLP from 1961 to 1968.
• Contested seats of Northcote (Legislative Assembly) in 1961, 1964 and 1967, the Federal seat of Batman in a by-election in 1962 and again in 1963, the Federal seat of Higinbotham in 1966, and the Australian Senate in 1958, 1961 and 1964.
• Was elected to the Australian Senate in the November 1967 elections, taking his seat on 1 July 1968. Was DLP spokesman on health. Defeated in the double dissolution election of 1974, he was an unsuccessful candidate in the Senate double dissolution election of December 1975.
• After parliament worked as a newsagent.
• Melbourne Cricket Ground trustee from 1969. Racehorse owner.
• Cause of death: acute renal failure and multi-infarct dementia.

Geoff Browne, Biographical register of the Victorian Parliament, 1900-84 (Melbourne, 1985); Joan Rydon, (ed), A biographical register of the Commonwealth Parliament 1901-1972 (ANU Press, 1975); Joan Rydon, John Albert Little, in Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: https://biography.senate.gov.au/little-john-albert/.