In Memoriam: Emeritus Prof. Colin Hughes

It is with sadness that the ANU School of Politics and International Relations notes the news of Emeritus Professor Colin Hughes’ passing on 30 June. Colin was a long-serving faculty member of the Departement of Political Science and is fondly remembered by his colleagues.

Professor Hughes' Obituary may be read here - while some reflections from his former colleagues appear below.

Relfections from some of Prof. Hughes' former colleagues

Prof. Ian McAllister

In an age where political scientists relied on papers and books for the raw material of politics—such as voting returns, dates of elections and candidates—Colin Hughes provided an invaluable service to the discipline by collating these statistics in an easy-to-follow format. With his colleague Bruce Graham, he produced a series of handbooks which have provided generations of political scientists with the essential materials for literally dozens of articles, books and theses.

But Colin Hughes was not just a collector of facts, he also knew how to use and interpret them. Starting with his research on the West Indies and then moving on to focus on Australia, he produced a range of important books which were concerned with such topics as the colonial heritage, the design of federalism, the role of the press, and race relations. Following his successful academic career, Colin then became Australian Electoral Commissioner, a role which neatly combined his legal background with his intellectual interests in public policy and electoral systems. During his time he initiated a series of projects to enhance the efficiency of the electoral system, as well as personally visiting every electoral office in the country—no minor achievement. Colin Hughes had a remarkable career which combined success in the fields of scholarship and public policy.

Emeritus Prof. John Warhurst

I remember Colin as a most congenial and friendly colleague who was always interested in what younger staff members were doing. He was a real gentleman. He was also renowned as a dedicated and hard-working academic, scrupulously fair, whose routine reputedly had him at his desk in the Coombs Building at 6.00 each morning to make the most of the undisturbed time to work.

Emeritus Prof. Marian Sawer

Colin Hughes was both meticulous in getting the facts right about Australian electoral history and legislation and passionate about the ‘rules of the game’ being observed. He was the ideal person to be the first Australian Electoral Commissioner and to help institutionalise the high standards of electoral administration he believed in. He was always the ‘go to’ person for elusive facts and his Handbook of Australian Government and Politics 1890–1964 has pride of place on my bookshelf. He was also generous with his time and wide-ranging in his interests, as I found when he was briefly a supervisor of my PhD.

Colin’s chapter on institutionalising electoral integrity for my 2001 book Elections: Full, Free and Fair sums up his thinking on the principles and practice of electoral management. In contrast, Limiting Democracy: The Erosion of Electoral Rights in Australia (2006), expressed his alarm over partisan proposals to combat supposed electoral fraud by measures effectively limiting the comprehensiveness of the electoral roll. The bringing together of political scientists and electoral officials first in the Democratic Audit of Australia and now in the Electoral Regulation and Research Network is part of his inheritance and a distinctive contribution to the practice of political science. He set high standards for us all.

Gillian Evans, Research Assistant

Colin was among those who taught me to be a reasonable research assistant. He was always courteous, polite, with a quiet intensity in explaining whatever task to be done. He was sometimes very funny. In 1974–75 we would read the major Australian newspapers with amazement, then a sort of horror as the Whitlam government unraveled. I did see him after his retirement, he never lost interest in electoral politics and as the years went on talked often of the US political system and notable people he had known. He and Gwen had a long, happy, very harmonious marriage and Gwen's death devastated him. There is perhaps no need to say any of this except I always enjoyed working for him.

Prof. John Wanna

I first ‘met’ Colin Hughes through the pages of Images and Issues (1969) a brilliant and much under-rated book on electoral politics at the sub-national level and more importantly on the importance of political culture, voter identification and surveys of voter intention. The book studied two state elections which resulted in relatively similar outcomes (Country-Liberal victories in Queensland). He could have analysed these events as examples of stability and change (as Don Aiken was doing federally) but instead he chose to dig deeper and explore the heat and noise of election campaigns, what images did the main parties try to maintain or sell to the public, and what issues rose in salience in the lead up to the campaign. Then he explained the relatively unchanged outcome partly on party dynamics but more squarely on image management and how parties managed issues. His thesis that elections were about heat and noise but that very little changed in electoral outcomes was valid from the 1950s in Queensland (with its malapportioned system) until the decades following the 1989 election, after which the state entered a turbulent period from which is has never recovered - and the antithesis of Hughes’ 1960s portrait. I moved to Queensland in 1985 and began reading his The Government of Queensland (1980) which was part of the UQP series on state governments. This book, which was a handbook for Queensland state politics for decades was a masterful overview of the state, its political economy, political history, electoral distributions, party structures, cabinet and administration and even local government. In all his assessments of the highly polemical Queensland politics he was measured and analytically diagnostic but never opinionated. I once wrote a chapter for a collection of essays he was editing in which I wrote that the report of the inquiry into official corruption in the 1980s (Fitzgerald Inquiry) had ‘assumed the status of holy writ within an insular and traditionally ill-educated Queensland society’. Colin did not directly challenge this but in the editing process he changed ill-educated to ‘traditionally illiberal’.

I had much more to do with Colin personally when he chaired the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission in the early 1990s, making submissions and appearing as witnesses before his inquiries. He single handedly changed the voting system in Queensland to become optional preferential voting – after agreeing with a proposition we put to him that to insist that voting remain compulsory and also force voters to compulsorily preference all parties was fundamentally non-democratic and merely served the main parties’ cartelised interests. Although the parties and the QEC did not appreciate this change, and indeed opposed it, they came to prefer it once One Nation appeared on the scene (until recent years when the minority Labor government reintroduced compulsory preferentialism to prevent Green voters exhausting their votes). As some of the initial enthusiasm for EARC’s work dissipated with time, he once remarked in his dead-pan humour that one of the public benefits of EARC was that it provided a hot cup of tea to many of the homeless waifs and strays that availed themselves of the hospitality when public hearings were being held. Some of us also participated with many of his electoral research projects conducted while he was the federal Electoral Commissioner and immediately after in the Electoral Research Conferences.

I was not part of Colin’s generation of scholars; he had completed most of his profession life and achievements before I had started mine. He was generous to a fault in providing assistance to keen honours and PhD students gently correcting their ahistoricalisms and factual lacunae with the patience of a saint. The breadth, quality and quantity of his research output never ceased to amaze me. Once he retired from his commission work and as a political scientist at UQ he was still in much demand in both the national and state media – to explain electoral issues, changes to rules, the implications of changes and further ideas for reform. In radio interviews on current electoral politics he was immensely informative although he usually chose to stick to technicalities and would rarely give an opinion. I never heard him criticise a politician or political party in public although he was a strong advocate of hard rules and regulations to contain political behaviour presumably because we could not trust them to behave with detached propriety. Colin played a very significant role in charting the contours of our discipline, contributing to its literature, its range of topics, insightful themes and analytical rigour. He was a well-regarded educator at both the ANU and UQ and many generations of students benefitted from his insights and forensic mind. He will be truly missed but fondly remembered. Vale Colin Hughes.