Bert Milliner

Bertie Richard "Bert" Milliner (17 July 1911 – 30 June 1975) was an Australian trade unionist, politician and Senator, representing the Australian Labor Party (ALP). He would have been a minor figure in Australia's political history but for the events that followed his sudden death. Those circumstances contributed to the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, which culminated in the dismissal of the Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr.

Biography Milliner was born at Kelvin Grove, Brisbane. He attended the local state school, served an apprenticeship as a compositor at the Queensland Government Printing Office and became a linotype-operator. On 26 March 1938 he married Thelma Elizabeth Voght, a schoolteacher.

He joined the Queensland Printing Employees' Union and was elected in 1934 to the board of management. A delegate to the Trades and Labor Council of Queensland, he was a member of the executive (from 1952) and treasurer (1960–67). As trade-union adviser on the Australian delegations, he travelled to Geneva to attend the thirty-seventh (1954) and forty-eighth (1964) sessions of the International Labour Conference. At the 1967 election he won a seat in the Senate. His term began on 1 July 1968. He sat on ten parliamentary committees and in 1974 was appointed temporary Chairman of Committees in the Senate.

Death and replacement Milliner died suddenly of a heart attack on 30 June 1975 in his Brisbane office. The question of his replacement then arose. Since the introduction of proportional voting in 1949 it had been a convention that when a casual vacancy arose through the resignation or death of a senator mid-term, the relevant state parliament would replace the senator with a person nominated by the departed senator's political party. On this occasion Labor nominated the unsuccessful candidate Mal Colston, however the Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen asked for a list of three names, which Labor refused to supply. Bjelke-Petersen then invited nominations from any financial member of the Labor Party. Albert Field, who was a Labor member but was openly critical of the Whitlam government, applied and was appointed by the Queensland Legislative Assembly.

Labor immediately expelled Field from the party because he accepted an appointment contrary to its wishes. Labor challenged his appointment in the High Court, arguing that he was still technically employed by the Queensland Public Service (an office of profit under the Crown) at the time of his acceptance of the appointment because he had resigned, but without giving the required two weeks' notice. Consequently, Field was on leave from the Senate for all but a few days of his term. The death of Milliner and his replacement by Field was one of the factors that enabled the Senate to block the Whitlam government's supply bills, which in turn led to the government's dismissal.