Noel Hicks

Noel Hicks
Noel Hicks
Member of the Australian Parliament; for Riverina and Riverina-Darling
	In office; 18 October 1980 – 31 August 1998
Preceded by	John FitzPatrick
Succeeded by	Kay Hull
Personal details
Born	4 November 1940; Adelaide, South Australia
Nationality	Australian
Political party	National Party of Australia
Occupation	Draughtsman

Noel Jeffrey Hicks (born 4 November 1940) is a former Australian politician.

Early life and career

Born in Adelaide, he was a plumber and road design draughtsman. Having moved to Broken Hill, he was mayor of Broken Hill City Council 1974–75 and 1976–77.

Parliament of Australia

In 1980 he was elected to the Australian House of Representatives as the National Country member for Riverina, based on Broken Hill. He was the first non-Labor MP since Federation to represent Broken Hill in the Federal Parliament, but moved with his family to the larger town of Griffith the following year after committing to do so during the election campaign. At the Federal Election held in March 1983, despite defending a margin of only 0.5%, he retained the seat in the face of strong swings elsewhere to the eventual Hawke-Keating Labor Government.

Riverina was further enlarged in 1984, and renamed as the Division of Riverina-Darling. Hicks overcame another notional Labor majority, as well as former Country Party Member John Sullivan—now representing the Liberal Party—to win it. He was reelected from this seat in 1987 and 1990 against spirited Labor opposition.

Riverina-Darling was abolished in 1993, with Griffith and Wagga Wagga being combined in a recreated Riverina, while Broken Hill was transferred to the neighboring Division of Parkes. After declining a Liberal Party proposal to move to the Senate, Hicks opted to contest the new Riverina, now a safe conservative seat, despite some commentators' predictions that traditional Liberal voters in Wagga Wagga would hesitate to vote for a Nationals man from Griffith. However, he won the seat easily, relegating Liberal candidate future-Senator Bill Heffernan to third in the count behind the ALP candidate, former Wagga Wagga Mayor Pat Brassil.

He held this seat for two more terms until retiring in 1998.[1]

gollark: Same syntax, even. How creative.

gollark: It does, yes.

gollark: Doesn't C# have lambdas now too?

gollark: Fortunately, TLS 1.3, the best TLS, dropped this, and now *all* is AES/ChaCha20.

gollark: TLS kept terrible cryptographic algorithms around for ages for backward compatibility, for instance.

References

Carr, Adam (2008). "Australian Election Archive". Psephos, Adam Carr's Election Archive. Retrieved 25 May 2008.

Civic offices
Preceded by George Dial	Mayor of Broken Hill 1974–1975	Succeeded by Raymond Sawyers
Preceded by Raymond Sawyers	Mayor of Broken Hill 1976–1977	Succeeded by Kevin Clarke
Parliament of Australia
Preceded by John FitzPatrick	Member for Riverina 1980–1984	Division abolished
New division	Member for Riverina-Darling 1984–1993	Division abolished
New division	Member for Riverina 1993–1998	Succeeded by Kay Hull

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.

[Psephos-1] Carr, Adam (2008). "Australian Election Archive". Psephos, Adam Carr's Election Archive. Retrieved 25 May 2008.