Kelvin Thomson MP
Member of the Australian Parliament for Wills
Incumbent
Assumed office 2 March 1996
Preceded by	Phil Cleary
Personal details
Born	(1955-05-01) 1 May 1955 (age 57) Coburg, Victoria
Nationality	Australian
Political party	Australian Labor Party
Alma mater	University of Melbourne
Occupation	lawyer, public servant, electorate secretary
Website	www.kelvinthomson.com.au

Kelvin John Thomson (born 1 May 1955) is an Australian politician. Since March 1996 Thomson has been an Australian Labor Party member of the Australian House of Representatives, representing the Division of Wills in Victoria.

Early life[link]

Thomson was born in Coburg, Victoria. He has been active in improving the local environment of Pascoe Vale and north-western Melbourne from a young age. He received a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne and, finishing first in his class, he was awarded the Supreme Court Prize for Law.

He joined the Australian Labor Party in 1975 and was a public servant and electorate secretary to Senator Gareth Evans before entering local politics serving as a councillor in the Coburg City Council from 1981 to 1988. He was the deputy mayor from 1983 to 1984 and 1987 to 1988.

Kelvin Thomson was married to Victorian Labor MP Marsha Thomson until they separated in 2003. They have two children.

Politics[link]

State parliament[link]

In October 1988, Thomson was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly as the member for the Electoral district of Pascoe Vale. He was a member of the Opposition Shadow Ministry from 1992 to 1994, and in 1994 he served as the Manager of Opposition Business.^[1]

Federal parliament[link]

In 1996, Thomson was elected to the seat of Wills, formerly a blue-ribbon Labor seat that had been held by Bob Hawke. However it had become less safe for Labor. In 1992 the independent Phil Cleary won a by-election, and in 1993 Cleary again defeated the Labor candidate, who received only 41.9% of the primary vote, although Labor retained government. In the 1996 election, in which Labor’s support slumped badly and Paul Keating’s government was destroyed, Thomson became the Labor candidate and proved himself a strong campaigner. He won the seat, gaining 50.0% of the primary vote., ^[2]. He has held the seat since then. In the 2007 election, which Labor won, Thomson achieved a swing, on the two-party preferred vote of 5.5%, and received 56.9% of the primary vote. ^[3] In the 2010 election, which resulted in near defeat for Labor, Thomson like other Labor incumbents lost some ground on the primary vote. (51.81%); yet he achieved, a further slight positive swing on the two-party preferred vote (0.24%).

In August 1997, Thomson joined the Opposition Shadow Ministry. From 2003 to 2004 he was Shadow Minister for the Environment and Heritage; Shadow Minister for Regional Development and Roads, Housing and Urban Development from 2004 to 2005; and in June 2005 he was appointed Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Shadow Minister for Human Services. After the election of Kevin Rudd to party leadership in December 2006, Thomson was appointed to the position of Shadow Attorney-General.^[1]

On 9 March 2007, Kevin Rudd informed the media ^[4] that his office had received an anonymous tip-off that back in 2000 ^[5] Thomson had provided Melbourne gangland figure Tony Mokbel with a personal reference, saying he understood Mokbel had been married for the past eight years and that he had been "a responsible, caring husband and father".^[6] It was later revealed by the media that up until 2000, there had only been one mention of Tony Mokbel in the media, a positive article in the Herald Sun about the contributions Mokbel's businesses made to the local economy in Moreland, in and near Thomson's electorate of Wills.^{[7] [8] [9]} Thomson resigned from Labor's front bench after the reference became public. He also released the text of the letter, commenting that he did not know Mokbel and that "The reference, as you will be able to see, was more of a pro-forma character (reference)." ^[10]

The Sydney Morning Herald coverage emphasized that Kevin Rudd was under pressure over "allegations surrounding his past meetings with disgraced former Western Australian premier Brian Burke" ^[11]; and that Thomson "had no choice but to resign, especially since [the Prime Minister] John Howard raised the bar a week ago by sacking Ian Campbell for doing nothing more than meeting, in his then-capacity as heritage minister, a delegation which included Burke." ^[12] The same article suggested that the sort of reference Thomson had written was similar to thousands of pro forma references supplied by MPs to their constituents, and that it was an open question whether Thomson "would have suffered the same fate" had he not moved, in the seven years since writing the reference, to the position of Shadow Attorney General. It also commented: "Thomson's relegation to the backbench will be a setback for Labor. Ever since December, when Rudd promoted him to shadow attorney-general, he has dealt the Government more grief over David Hicks than Labor did collectively over the previous five years. Of the big changes to Labor's frontbench under Rudd, Thomson was the standout surprise performer." Thomson has not since been returned to the Labor cabinet. He chairs the Parliament’s Treaties Committee, and has frequently served as acting Speaker.

Since 2009 Thomson's speeches and media releases have often dealt with problems of Australian and global population growth. ^[13] In August 2009, following a terrorist scare, Thomson attracted controversy with his comments regarding the link between high immigration and allegedly poor screening of immigrants for terrorism.^[14] Thomson repeated his call to cut immigration levels in September 2009 following the release of a report indicating that the population of Australia would grow to 35 million by 2049. Thomson said that Australia was "sleepwalking into an environmental disaster", and predicted that such a population would tend to outgrow its resources of "food, water, energy and land".^[15]

He has since been an advocate for sustainable population levels in Australia, and has proposed a 14 Point Plan for Population Reform ^[16] This aims to stabilize Australia’s population at 26 million by reducing skilled immigration and cutting the net overseas migration program to 70,000 per annum. The plan would also "abolish the Baby Bonus" but increase the refugee program from 13,750 to 20,000 per annum.

Kelvin Thomson describes himself as a keen environmentalist and naturalist; and as an MP he has been strongly anti-nuclear, pro sustainable population, and pro action on climate change. ^[17] In 2011 and 2012 he was prominent in leading opposition inside the Australian Federal Parliament to the export of live cattle and sheep for meat. ^[18]

In 2012 Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, examined Labor’s views on population and environment in his book Bigger or Better?^[19] Lowe found Labor’s stated and de facto population policies, like those of the Liberal Party, to be confused and inconsistent. Lowe argued that these were distorted by a pro-growth ideology that was in conflict with the evidence, and by a failure to understand the infrastructure costs of rapid population growth. By contrast he discussed and commended the arguments in four separate papers by Thomson, noting that collectively these proved that “Thomson is not a ‘one-trick pony’ obsessed with population to the exclusion of other important issues, but a politician who is thinking deeply about our security and ways to ensure a better future”.^[20] Lowe also expressed surprise that so much had been made of “Thomson’s anodyne reference” for Mokbel, given that Thomson had done “what most MP’s do quite routinely, writing a reference for a constituent”. ^[21]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Home Page
• www.youtube.com/kelvinthomsonmp