Alan Griffiths

Alan Gordon Griffiths (born 4 September 1952) is an Australian former politician who represented the Division of Maribyrnong for the Australian Labor Party from March 1983 to January 1996. Griffiths was a senior Minister in the Hawke and Keating governments and is now a businessman and non-executive director. Griffiths specialises in commercialising new technologies, including the road alignment software, Quantm, which has been used on Australasian, US and Asian infrastructure projects. Griffiths subsequently worked in a variety of jobs before entering politics, including as a taxi driver, political adviser and lawyer. At one point he worked as a powder monkey in the South Australian desert

Griffiths showed early entrepreneurial flair. In the early 1970s, while working in a shipyard, he raffled his first pay check, selling tickets to workmates and earning well above the value of his wage.

Griffiths' first contact with politics came in the early 1980s, when he worked in the office of then New South Wales Premier, Neville Wran, before being elected to the Federal seat of Maribyrnong in 1983. He said the Australian Tourist Commission would focus on promoting Australia as a destination for travelers with special interests in sport, the environment, culture, arts, food and wine and that the Commonwealth Department of Tourism was examining ways to give tourists more opportunities to enjoy Aboriginal culture. The Task Force, which was instructed to examine the differing effects of industry and economic structural change between regions, was led by the then ACTU Secretary, Bill Kelty and reported back to Griffiths in December 1993.

As Chair of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee in 1989, Griffiths headed a government inquiry into insider trading. Griffiths told the media at the time that anecdotal evidence suggested there was a wide spectrum of involvement in areas of insider trading in the business community and it was therefore incumbent upon governments to ensure they took whatever steps were available to prevent that sort of business behavior.

Griffiths also chaired a Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee inquiry into progress made towards the achievement of equal opportunity and equal status for Australian women, to mark the fifth anniversary of the enactment of the Sex Discrimination Act in Australia.

Griffiths said at the outset of the inquiry that "anyone who takes seriously the issue of the status of women and opportunities for women in Australian society, will concede readily that vis-à-vis the male of the species, they are, in most areas, at something of a disadvantage. It's a moot point of course, the extent to which legislation can change the objective circumstances and the subtle forms of discrimination that they face, but certainly very few people with an interest in the area would argue that you shouldn't have things like sex discrimination legislation and affirmative action legislation".

Griffiths went on to say that while more opportunities were opening up for women, the inquiry wanted to find ways "to ensure that the Parliament has an ongoing role in trying to bring about...the impetus for change". Official visits to Indonesia, South Korea and Japan, December 1990; Bali, February 1991; Papua New Guinea, April 1991; Italy, France, Poland, USSR and UK, July 1991; Tahiti, Chile and USA, October–November 1991; Hong Kong and Japan, March–April 1992; New Zealand, April 1992; Brazil and USA, June 1992; Spain, UK and USA, July 1992; Indonesia and Singapore, September–October 1992; Taiwan and Hong Kong, October–November 1992; Indonesia, November 1992; Vietnam, December 1992; Japan, Malaysia and Hong Kong, June–July 1993; Indonesia, September 1993; Japan and China, October–November 1993. An inquiry by the former head of the Department of Prime Minister, Mike Codd, into the scandal cleared Griffiths of any wrongdoing. Griffiths was also cleared of any wrongdoing by the Australian Federal Police, who were alerted to the matter by Griffiths. Despite being cleared by the Codd inquiry – an investigation which Griffiths had also requested – he announced at the Victorian ALP Conference in April 1995 that he would not contest the 1996 election, which Labor lost. In his resignation speech, Griffiths acknowledged the allegations had taken "a lot of momentum out of my career". But he had waited for "total vindication" before declaring his resignation. "I am in the happy situation of being totally vindicated," he told the media at the time. "I spoke to the Prime Minister this morning who I might say tried to talk me out of announcing my resignation and who confirmed his previous public commitment that I would return to the Cabinet as soon as possible. But there is life after politics, and I intend to pursue life after politics." It automates the process through which roads and railways are designed and costed and presents the planner with a range of options. In early 2006, Quantm was selected by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program – Transportation Research Board as one of eight technologies enabling highway and railroad planners to successfully factor in environmental concerns in transportation decisions

Shopitize Since 2010, Griffiths has been Executive Chairman of Shopitize based in the UK. The technology uses data from shopper dockets to provide FMCG companies with statistics that can help brands to better understand consumer spending habits across channels at the level of individual products and provide more targeted offers. The Shopitize platform enables Griffiths is a co-founder of Shopitize, with former banker Irina Pafomova, and former management consultant Dr. Alexey Andriyanenko. The technology platform is reported to have attracted significant funding from international investors.