Ted Mack set the standard!

Edward Carrington Mack was born at Paddington in 1933, and has lived almost his entire life near North Sydney. He entered politics during the 1970s when the local council decided to build a 17 story office block against his back fence.
Mr Mack believed that the most important principle established at the Nuremberg trials was that everyone must take responsibility for their own actions. (the defence of the accused Nazis that they were only following orders was rejected by the Nuremburg Tribunal). From this he concluded that every person has the tight to be involved in every decision that affects them. This is a much deeper conception of democracy than the idea of representative democracy that we are used to in this country. In its directness, it seems close to that of the original inventors of democracy, the ancient Athenians.
Elected to North Sydney Council in 1974, Mr Mack became mayor six years later. He immediately sold the mayoral Mercedes and bought community buses with the proceeds. Mack was instrumental in introducing mechanisms which made open government possible, including numerous residents committees and referenda. After four thousand public meetings, North Sydney Council became the most open in Australia.
            The people of Sydney consistently responded to Mr Mack's sincere approach to democracy by repeatedly electing him as an Independent against whatever candidates the major parties stood against him. To be elected to Parliament as an Independent is most unusual in Australia; Ted Mack was the first person for 50 years to serve as an Independent at all three tiers of government. He won the state seat of North Shore in 1981, and the very safe federal seat of North Sydney in 1990.
            Mack achieved national fame for the strong stand he took against politicians paying themselves too much. He returned his gold travel passes, never took an overseas trip at public expense, and collected only that part of his superannuation which he had personally contributed, deliberately retiring from NSW State parliament two days before he was due to receive the conventional $1 million superannuation payment. By such actions Mack showed up the self-serving motives of all the other politicians, and earned their enmity. His political opponents spared no effort trying to discredit Mack, but were quite unable to make the smallest stain on his character or on the NSW public's high esteem for Ted Mack.
           Mack's was often a lone voice in the House of Representatives. His was the “only vote against the Gulf War, the only vote against the sale of Qantas, the only vote against the third runway and the only vote against having a nuclear establishment at Lucas Heights”.  He supported the individual's right to a dignified death under voluntary euthanasia. He also opposed to “fundamentalist economic rationalism”, unilateral tariff removal policies, sale of public land, sale of the Commonwealth Bank, GST, Australia's involvement in Bougainville, the nuclear industry and limitations on free speech.
           But he is realistic and refreshingly modest about his own achievements in Parliament: “Very little, because I don't think parliament is very relevant to any particular achievement”.. He is quoted as saying that the “whole place is so seductive, like any self-serving institution, the only defence against it is not to be there”.
This is because the two-party system has become “so rigid that it's overwhelmed any sense of democracy. Really all we have is an elected dictatorship. The parliament as such is just a piece of window dressing ... power resides in the executive, which totally dominates parliament.” 
           The concentration of media ownership and unfettered economic globalisation are two of the biggest threats to democracy today but, he says, that will be for others to fight. Mack is unlikely to write an autobiography. “Books tend to be self-justifying”, he says, and “the record of such books is not good”. 
           Due to ill-health, Mr Mack retired from public life in 1994. His record of twenty years selfless service is without parallel in post-war Australian history.

(Source: Frank Noakes)