Janine Haines

The Hon. Janine Winton Haines, AM (née Carter; 8 May 1945 – 20 November 2004) was an Australian politician who was a senator for South Australia from 1977 to 1978 and again from 1981 to 1990. She represented the Australian Democrats, and served as the party's leader from 1986 to 1990, becoming the first female federal parliamentary leader of an Australian political party. She was pivotal in "shaping the Australian Democrats into a powerful political entity that held the balance of power in the Senate".

Life Haines was born in Tanunda, South Australia, to a schoolteacher mother and policeman father, and travelled around South Australia with her parents and younger brother, due to her father's job.

Political career Haines became the assistant of Robin Millhouse, an important player in the South Australian conservative party the Liberal and Country League. Millhouse founded the Liberal Movement and the short-lived New LM which merged into the Australian Democrats in 1977. She was appointed to fill a casual vacancy in the Senate by the Parliament of South Australia, on the nomination of Labor premier Don Dunstan, on 14 December 1977. Haines was not a member of the Liberal Movement at the time of her appointment, with the party dissolving in 1976. A majority of Liberal Movement members, including Hall and second on the ticket, Michael Wilson, joined the Liberal Party, while Haines joined the Democrats.

Haines did not contest the 1977 Australian federal election, and her Senate term expired on 30 June 1978. She was elected for a six-year term at the 1980 Australian federal election. On 14 August 1986, she was chosen by Democrats members as Senate leader on the retirement of inaugural leader Don Chipp. She was succeeded as interim Senate leader for several months by deputy Dr Michael Macklin (Qld), pending the customary election of a new leader by party members, at which Janet Powell was successful.

Later career After leaving parliament Haines worked in a number of public positions including being president of the Australia Privacy Charter Council and deputy chancellor of the University of Adelaide. and inducted onto the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in the same year.

She wrote a book Suffrage to Sufferance: One Hundred Years of Women in Politics (Allen and Unwin, North Sydney, 1992, ) which has been a prescribed text in universities and schools.