Australian Dictionary of Biography

Joseph Anstice Rafferty (1911–2000), politician, was born on 10 January 1911 at Launceston, Tasmania, fourth of seven children of English-born Rupert Anstice Rafferty, school administrator, teacher, and lieutenant colonel, and his Tasmanian-born wife Sarah Rose Anne, née Plummer. Joe was brought up under the strict—and occasionally violent—discipline of his father, a Boer War, Gallipoli, and Western Front veteran. At age four he was found to be almost blind in one eye, with low vision in the other. As a result, he missed much of his early education, entering school aged eight at Wivenhoe State School where his father was head teacher. Leaving school at fourteen, he worked as a dogsbody at the King Island co-operative store, then as a telegraph messenger for the postal service. In his later teens his eyesight improved, allowing him to complete his schooling at Launceston State High School. He went on to work as a Commonwealth government pensions clerk while undertaking self-funded study at the University of Tasmania (BA, 1941), an extraordinary achievement considering his early impediments.

In 1940 Rafferty’s employment with the public service took him to Canberra for work with the Department of the Interior, then in August 1943 to Melbourne. There he commenced law studies at the University of Melbourne but did not graduate. That June he married his first wife, Miriam Kathleen Richards, an accountant, at St John’s Church, Devonport, Tasmania: they had two sons, Andrew and David. In 1945 he joined Australian National Airways, becoming its personnel manager. By 1953 he had a strong enough reputation for engaging with unions and resolving disputes to establish an industrial relations consultancy. He joined the Junior Chamber of Commerce, serving as its president in 1950.

After failing in two attempts at Liberal Party preselection for Legislative Assembly seats, and being placed third in a hotly contested by-election for the Melbourne City Council in 1954, Rafferty in 1955 finally won preselection for Caufield by just five votes. He entered parliament at the May general election, part of the Liberal wave which saw (Sir) Henry Bolte elected premier. Electorate boundary and name changes saw Rafferty later become the member for Ormond (1958–67) and Glenhuntly (1967–79).

Rafferty climbed the political ladder slowly, spending several years on the backbench before serving as chairman of committees in the Legislative Assembly (1961–65) and then as parliamentary secretary to cabinet (1965–70). He perhaps did himself no favours while presiding in the assembly in September 1962, when he rebuked Bolte for a tirade against a Labor member of the Legislative Council. This defied sage advice Rafferty reportedly received from a senior colleague when he entered parliament that ‘Henry is the premier and he is the boss. Just do as you are told and don’t go shooting your mouth off at tangents’ (Hamilton 2000, 26).

The short and dapper Rafferty finally entered cabinet in June 1970 as minister of labour and industry, a portfolio well-aligned with his professional expertise; he was also appointed assistant minister of education. He proved a capable minister, with Bolte’s successor (Sir) Rupert Hamer adding to Rafferty’s heavy responsibilities the portfolios of consumer affairs (1973) and federal affairs (1975), before moving him to the contentious portfolio of transport (1976). Rafferty had the task of revising the highly controversial Melbourne Transport Plan of 1969, a massive program of megaprojects that had become the subject of growing community resistance. He was instrumental in reining in the excesses of the plan and of the imperious transport authorities by insisting on fewer freeways, and less emphasis on public transport focused on the inner city. In this and other endeavours he earned a reputation as a tough and competent minister, tenacious enough to drive an agenda and take on significant vested interests.

Despite this reputation as a safe pair of hands, Rafferty courted publicity and controversy from time to time. During 1976, he appears to have lied about his year of birth to avoid facing a full preselection convention for his seat of Glenhuntly. In an attempt to curb Opposition momentum from a by-election victory in 1978, he released secret tapes of a police interview with Dolph Eddy, a Labor frontbencher falsely accused by government members of supplying a convicted murderer with plans for a new remand centre.

After his first wife died in 1972, Rafferty quietly married his secretary, Lynette Jones, at St Peter’s Church of England, Eastern Hill, Melbourne, on 16 June 1973, having been secretly engaged for three months. Upon his retirement from parliament in April 1979, Rafferty took the plum job of Victorian agent-general in London. He looked back on his main ministerial achievements as introducing late night shopping, outlawing pyramid selling, establishing the Industrial Training Commission to manage training for skilled trades, and banning smoking on public transport. He approved of the Cain government’s decision to shift the agent-general’s role away from general representational work and towards trade, investment, and tourism promotion.

Following retirement from his London post in 1983 Rafferty travelled extensively, the Age publishing some of his travel writings. In his many letters to the editor he frequently railed against such Labor figures as Bob Hawke and Joan Kirner, while in the last year of his life he rang the Bracks government’s transport minister, Peter Batchelor, to complain about having fallen flat on his back, courtesy of a collapsing tram seat. Rafferty died at Caufield North on 14 June 2000 after a short illness and was cremated, survived by Lynette and both children from his first marriage.