Jones,
Barry Owen (1932– ). Australian politician, writer and
lawyer, born in Geelong. Educated at Melbourne University, he was a public
servant, high school teacher, television and radio performer, university
lecturer and lawyer before serving as a Labor MP in the Victorian Parliament
1972-77 and the Australian House of Representatives 1977-98. He took a
leading role in reviving the Australian film industry, abolishing the
death penalty in Australia, and was the first politician to raise public
awareness of global warming, the ‘post-industrial’ society, the IT
revolution, biotechnology, the rise of ‘the Third Age’ and the need to
preserve Antarctica as a wilderness. In the Hawke Government, he was Minister
for Science 1983-90, Prices and Consumer Affairs 1987, Small Business 1987-90
and Customs 1988-90. He became a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO,
Paris 1991-95 and National President of the Australian Labor Party 1992-2000,
2005-06. He was Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Convention 1998. His
books include Decades of Decision 1860 (1965), Joseph II (1968), Age of Apocalypse (1975), and he edited The Penalty
is Death (1968). Sleepers,
Wake!: Technology and the Future of Work was
published by Oxford University Press in 1982, became a bestseller and has
been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish and braille. The
fourth edition was published in 1995.
He received a DSc for his services to science in 1988 and a DLitt in 1993
for his work on information theory. Elected FTSE (1992), FAHA (1993),
FAA(1996) and FASSA (2003), he is the only person to have been elected to all
four Australian learned Academies. Awarded an AO in 1993, named as one of
Australia’s one hundred ‘living national treasures’ in 1998, he was elected a
Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1999. His
autobiography, A Thinking Reed, was published in 2006 and The Shock of
Recognition, about music and literature, in 2016. In 2014 he received an AC
for services ‘as a leading intellectual in Australian public life’.
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