Noel Lawrence Beaton (28 December 1925 – 18 December 2004) was an Australian politician. Born in

Mooroopna, Victoria Mooroopna is a rural town located north of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It is on the banks of the Goulburn River opposite the larger town of Shepparton. The Midland Highway crosses the river between the two towns. At the 2016 census, Moor ...

, he was educated at state schools and was a volunteer firefighter in his home town, before serving in the military from 1945 to 1947, after which he became a sports journalist and broadcaster. In 1960, he was elected to the

Australian House of Representatives The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Parliament of Australia, the upper house being the Senate. Its composition and powers are established in Chapter I of the Constitution of Australia. The term of members of the ...

as the

Labor Labour or labor may refer to: * Childbirth, the delivery of a baby * Labour (human activity), or work ** Manual labour, physical work ** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer ** Organized labour and the labour ...

member for

Bendigo Bendigo ( ) is a city in Victoria, Australia, located in the Bendigo Valley near the geographical centre of the state and approximately north-west of Melbourne, the state capital. As of 2019, Bendigo had an urban population of 100,991, makin ...

, narrowly winning a

by-election A by-election, also known as a special election in the United States and the Philippines, a bye-election in Ireland, a bypoll in India, or a Zimni election (Urdu: ضمنی انتخاب, supplementary election) in Pakistan, is an election used to f ...

for that seat that followed the death of

Percy Clarey Percy James Clarey (20 January 189017 May 1960) was an Australian trade union leader and politician. He served as president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) from 1943 to 1949 and represented the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in t ...

. Melbourne newspaper

The Age ''The Age'' is a daily newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, that has been published since 1854. Owned and published by Nine Entertainment, ''The Age'' primarily serves Victoria (Australia), Victoria, but copies also sell in Tasmania, the Austral ...

later reported that his 133 vote winning margin was probably because of the

donkey vote The domestic donkey is a hoofed mammal in the family Equidae, the same family as the horse. It derives from the African wild ass, ''Equus africanus'', and may be classified either as a subspecies thereof, ''Equus africanus asinus'', or as a ...

, but his personal following grew steadily “until it reached about 1500 in 1966, a time when

’s Australia-wide vote was at an all-time low.”Article, "Political spirit goes haunting", The Age, 20 May 1969. During his time in Parliament he became a leading contributor on petrochemical policy,

Don Whitington Bertram Lindon "Don" Whitington (31 January 1911 – 5 May 1977) was an Australian political journalist and author. Life A member of the Whitington family of South Australia, whose family arrived in Australia in 1840, Don Whitington was born in ...

(1964), The Rulers, Fifteen Years of the Liberals, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, p.141 served as Shadow Minister for Primary Industries, wrote regional development into Labor policy Obituary, "A Tribute to Noel Beaton", Bendigo Advertiser, 5 January 2005. and was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. For his achievements, he was widely considered a potential Minister in a Labor government. As a local MP however, Beaton took greater pride in the many small victories he won for individual residents of his sprawling regional electorate. He was particularly proud of his success in helping save Bendigo's Chinese Joss House. Discovering that elderly members of the Chinese community were still using the derelict building as a place of worship, but had to do so in secret because it was on Defence Department land, he persuaded the Department to hand over the land for the benefit of the community. The Joss House was eventually restored and opened to anyone who wanted to worship there or just learn about the city's rich Chinese heritage. Beaton retired from parliament on 9 April 1969, and never again held political office. His personal following at the time he retired from politics was such that both Labor and Liberal candidates in the resulting by-election publicly claimed to aspire to being like him. After retiring from political office, Beaton returned to journalism, running the editorial side of regional daily newspaper the

Bendigo Advertiser The ''Bendigo Advertiser'' (commonly referred to as ''"The Addy"'') is an Australian regional newspaper. It is the daily (Monday–Saturday) newspaper for Bendigo, Victoria, and its surrounding region. The paper is published by Australian Communi ...

during the early 1970s. In that role, he helped to rescue the city's historic town hall from planned demolition, with a front-page article that caused angry public protests. Beaton died in 2004.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Beaton, Noel Australian Labor Party members of the Parliament of Australia Members of the Australian House of Representatives for Bendigo Members of the Australian House of Representatives 1925 births 2004 deaths 20th-century Australian politicians People from Mooroopna