N.S.W. Political Leaders Have Affinities

Northern Advocate, 27 May 1941, Page 7

N.S.W. Political Leaders Have Affinities

The leaders of the two main parties in the New South Wales elections were alike in many respects.—The Premier (Mr. Mail’) began life as a blacksmith. The Leader of the Opposition (Mr. McKell) began as a boilermaker. Mr. Mail- is 50. Mr. McKell is 49. Both are short, thickset, with big jaws, muscular hands and wrists. Both shone as amateur boxers in their youth, and both now breed Corriedale sheep, Mr. Mair on one of the show properties in the Albury district, Mr. McKell on a smaller property near Goulburn. Both reached their present political positions at the same time, and in very similar circumstances.

Mr. Mair won in a trial of strength with Mr. Spooner, M.H.R., after Sir Bertram Stevens had resigned the U.A.P. leadership. Mr. McKell won in a bitterly-con-tested fight with a former well-known Premier, Mr. Lang, in the Labour caucus.

Dour, Determined Mair

Mr. Mair is dour, determined and forthright in his speaking and nine years in Parliament has failed to wean him from the direct method. When he first took office he asked to be excused from social functions because “he was not a social man” 4 and on country tours he moves among the crowd in his shirt sleeves rather than spend time on formal receptions. He takes pride in the fact that four generations of his family have occupied the same pew in Scots Church, Melbourne. After leaving Wesley College, Melbourne, he took a job as a blacksmith in a Victorian country town rather than join the family iron firm, but he entered the fold later, became a successful business man, grew wheat in Victoria’s dust bowl and then settled down on a magnificent estate near Albury. When elected to Parliament he gave his salary—less expenses—to unemployment relief funds. McKell Was Boilermaker Mr. McKell is a native of Pambula, on New South .Wales’ fertile South Coast, went to school in Sydney and was apprenticed as a boilermaker at a harbourside dock. At 25 he entered Parliament, studied law in his spare time and was called to the bar in 1925. No longer a poor man, he has a comfortable property in the country and is a keen follower of racing and cricket, but he still lives in a modest terrace house in Redfern, an inner suburb of Sydney, in the electorate he has represented for 24 years. He dresses quietly, takes off his collar and tie in his rooms on hot days, smokes cigars, reads widely and well, particularly finance, economics, and better class fiction. He likes nothing better than to shut the door of his office, or to sit in his living-room at home, and talk about cricket, or boxing in the days of Les Darcy.