Andrew Jones

Who is Andrew Jones?

Andrew Thomas Jones became one of the youngest ever Australian federal Members of Parliament when he was elected to the Division of Adelaide on 26 November 1966, aged just 22 years and 184 days. At that time, only Edwin Corboy had been elected at a younger age, but that record has since been broken by Wyatt Roy.

Born in Adelaide, Jones studied at the University of Adelaide and was working as a travel officer when he gained Liberal and Country League preselection for the apparently safe Labor seat of Adelaide at the landslide 1966 federal election. Much to the surprise of everyone except Jones, he won the seat, receiving a 10 percent two-party preferred swing to finish with 52.8 percent of the vote.

Extremely conservative even by general LCL standards, Jones ruffled feathers for his views, including his belief that alcohol was the devil's urine and claimed that "half the MPs in Parliament are drunk half the time". While he was forced to publicly apologise for these remarks, Jones caused further controversy by releasing a book, entitled Andrew Jones M.H.R by Himself, in which he made further comments on the "wickedness" of parliament, as well as a spoken word record.