Australian Dictionary of Biography

Wilfred George Petersen (1921–2000), politician and activist, was born on 13 May 1921 at Childers, Queensland, eldest of five children of Queensland-born parents Peter Petersen, carpenter, and his wife Hilda Eva Isabel, née Engstrom. Educated at Childers and then Bundaberg State High schools, George was compelled by the Depression to leave at the age of fifteen, taking work as a telephonist in the Postmaster-General’s Department at Bundaberg. He later worked in the pensions office of the Department of Social Services and moved to Brisbane.

Enlisting in the Citizen Military Forces for service in World War II, Petersen was called up for full-time duty in the 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion on 22 January 1942. He transferred to the Australian Imperial Force as a trooper on 1 August 1942 and trained in North Queensland as a signaller in the 2/5th Commando Squadron, which saw action at Balikpapan, Borneo, Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), in July and August 1945. From November he was with the 2/27th Battalion, a component of the force occupying the Celebes until January 1946. He was discharged on 26 June in Brisbane. On 19 December 1947 at the General Registry Office, Brisbane, he married Elaine Verna Tout, a library assistant.

While on army leave in 1943 Petersen had joined the Communist Party of Australia. He was convinced of its ideological and political worth until 1956 and the revelations about the excesses of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. In 1957 he left Queensland for the Wollongong office of the Department of Social Services. This move was more than simply a change of workplace. It coincided with his disillusion with international communism, his reading of works on and by Leon Trotsky, and his joining the Australian Labor Party (ALP), which he served as secretary of its Unanderra branch (1958–69). He also formed a small group convinced by Trotsky’s strategy of entryism to impose change from within a political party, but later conceded this approach was a mistake.

On 24 February 1968 Petersen was elected to the New South Wales parliament for the seat of Kembla (later renamed Illawarra). He did not believe change was only possible through parliament, however, and, in fact, carried out his most constructive work outside it. His principal concerns were for the health and welfare of his constituents. In his maiden speech he set out the agenda that he would follow until he left parliament: it included improving the circumstances of the thousands of workers in and around the Port Kembla industrial complex, advancing women’s rights and employment, reducing industrial air pollution, addressing housing and transport issues, opposition to the Vietnam War, and progress towards socialism. In 1970 the minister for health, Harry Jago, called Petersen ‘disloyal and traitorous’ (NSW LA 1970, 5433) for wearing an anti-Vietnam War badge in parliament.

Besides these matters, Petersen advocated for numerous others, including the legalisation of abortion and homosexual law reform, introducing private members’ bills on both issues. He was a constant critic of the New South Wales Department of Corrective Services and the treatment of prisoners. His efforts in this cause contributed to a royal commission into New South Wales prisons chaired by the judge John Flood Nagle. He also campaigned tirelessly for the three Ananda Marga members—Tim Anderson, Ross Dunn, and Paul Alister—who had been convicted over the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing to be freed. In his view this rebuff ‘to the political police was the most important single act that [he] performed in [his] twenty years in State Parliament’ (Staples 2000, 196). His marriage to Elaine having ended in divorce in 1975, he married Mairi Isobell Wilson Gould, née McPhee, a teacher and prominent labour figure, on 4 October 1975 at the Registrar General’s Office, Sydney. In 1977 he returned the Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee medal he had been awarded.

Although Petersen eventually saw successes on abortion law reform, prisoners’ rights, and homosexual law reform, in one area he experienced failure. In May 1987 he addressed a rally of more than six thousand workers at Wollongong Showground, pledging his opposition to the Labor government’s planned changes to workers’ compensation, before delivering his bitter opposition in parliament. ‘On behalf of millions of workers and their dependants facing attack under the provisions of this anti-worker legislation, and particularly on behalf of workers on the South Coast who have made their feelings against it well known,’ he stated, ‘I reject these bills’ (NSW LA 1987, 12481). His voting against the government in the Legislative Assembly brought automatic ejection from the ALP. In the aftermath he formed another labour party, the Illawarra Workers Party, for which he unsuccessfully ran in the March 1988 election.

Petersen was a member of many industrial and community organisations, including the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties, the Preserve South Shellharbour Beach Committee, and the Australian Conservation Foundation. He was also an enthusiastic voice in the Illawarra Union Singers. Survived by his wife and his stepdaughter Natalie, and by the daughter and son of his first marriage, Eve and Eric, he died on 28 March 2000 at Shellharbour; he was cremated. Bob Gould later wrote that Petersen ‘was an energetic, painstaking and ingenious parliamentarian’ (Gould 2000). Jim Staples described him as ‘a tribune of the common people’ who ‘sought everywhere to lift the masses up’ (2000, 196).