Christopher Ian Higgins (3 April 19436 December 1990) was a senior Australian public servant and economist. He was

Secretary A secretary, administrative professional, administrative assistant, executive assistant, administrative officer, administrative support specialist, clerk, military assistant, management assistant, office secretary, or personal assistant is a ...

of the Department of the Treasury from September 1989 until his death.

Life and career

Chris Higgins was born in

Murwillumbah, New South Wales Murwillumbah ( ) is a town in far north-eastern New South Wales, Australia, in the Tweed Shire, on the Tweed River. Sitting on the south eastern foothills of the McPherson Range in the Tweed Volcano valley, Murwillumbah is 848 km north-ea ...

on 3 April 1943. He attended

Ballina High School Ballina Coast High School is a government-funded co-educational comprehensive secondary day school, located on Cherry Street, in , in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, Australia. Established in 1956 as Ballina High School, the sc ...

. In 1960, Higgins came to Canberra as a Commonwealth Bureau of Statistics Cadet. He graduated in 1964 from the Canberra University College (now known as the

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies an ...

) with a Bachelor of Economics with first class honours in economics and statistics. He then won a postgraduate scholarship to study for his doctorate at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

under supervisor

Lawrence Klein Lawrence Robert Klein (September 14, 1920 – October 20, 2013) was an American economist. For his work in creating computer models to forecast economic trends in the field of econometrics in the Department of Economics at the University of Penn ...

. Between 1975 and 1989, Higgins was a senior executive officer in the Department of the Treasury, including as a deputy secretary from 1984. He was appointed Secretary of the department in September 1989. Higgins died in

Bruce, Australian Capital Territory Bruce is a suburb of the Belconnen district of Canberra, that is located within the Australian Capital Territory, Australia. The suburb was gazetted on 6 June 1968 and named for The Viscount Bruce of Melbourne (1883–1967), the eighth Prime Mi ...

from heart failure on 6 December 1990, aged 47, having just won a footrace. (Paul Keating by Troy Bramston p354 records that Chris Higgins had a heart condition and was advised to not run marathons. On the evening of 6 December he attended a veterans athletics meeting at the AIS. He first ran a 400m then a 3000m race in 12min 8sec coming in 12th place, immediately succumbing to heart attack afterward. The given for outstanding graduate study in Economics at the

is named for him.

References

1943 births 1990 deaths Australian National University alumni Secretaries of the Department of the Treasury of Australia {{Australia-gov-bio-stub