Steven Fielding (born 17 October 1960) is a former Australian senator for the state of Victoria and the former federal parliamentary leader of the Family First Party. He was elected to the upper house at the 2004 federal election on two per cent of the first-preference votes. He failed to gain re-election at the 2010 federal election. His term ended on 30 June 2011.
Early life
Fielding was born on 17 October 1960, in Melbourne, where he was raised in the suburb of Reservoir. His parents, Shirley and George Fielding, had a large family consisting of 16 children, and Fielding spent much of his childhood sharing a bedroom with five brothers in the family's three-bedroom home. His early education was at the local Keon Park Primary School, He later attended the nearby Merrilands High School.
Academically, Fielding suffered setbacks through an undiagnosed case of dyslexia, and this led to problems studying subjects such as English. Nevertheless, he excelled in mathematics, and his high marks in this subject allowed him to graduate with sufficiently high scores to gain entry into the Bachelor of Engineering degree at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he studied electronic engineering. Upon graduating in 1983, Fielding accepted a position at Hewlett-Packard, and later he moved into management at technology firms NEC and Siemens.
Fielding returned to university to undertake a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Monash University, completing it in 1992. He later moved to Wellington, New Zealand, where he worked for Telecom New Zealand in "change management" during a difficult time for the industry, as it was undergoing deregulation. He returned to Australia three years later, in 1995, and worked for United Energy, the Australian Yellow Pages and as a marketing manager at Vision Super.
Fielding entered politics in 2003 when he successfully stood as an independent candidate for the Knox City Council. He has described the decision to stand as "very last-minute", but others, such as the mayor of the council, Jenny Moore, and then Victorian Labor MP Peter Lockwood, said Fielding was very open about his intent to move into federal politics. Either way, both Lockwood and Labor MP Bob Stensholt have described how Fielding later made inquiries about the possibility of running for one of the major parties before joining Family First.
2004 election
Fielding was elected to represent Victoria in the Senate at the 2004 federal election. He was the first representative of Family First to be elected to the Federal Parliament.
Fielding's election was not expected – Family First had only been founded two years before the election, and it was not expected to succeed in its first federal election in Victoria. Like many senators, Fielding gained a quota under the Senate's proportional representation system by receiving preferences from other parties (see Australian electoral system). The Australian Democrats and the Australian Labor Party agreed to swap preferences with Family First. But Fielding benefited from the larger-than-expected surplus of Liberal preferences, and stayed in the count long enough to receive Democrat and Labor preferences, defeating the Australian Greens' candidate David Risstrom for the last Senate place in Victoria. As a result, Fielding was elected although his party as a whole received just 56,376 votes (1.9%) for the Senate in Victoria.
When first elected, the Howard government held a slim majority in the Senate, sufficient that Fielding would only hold the balance of power if one of the government senators chose to cross the floor. This changed after the 2007 federal election (the changes of which took effect in 2008), when the balance of power in the Senate shifted to a combination of Fielding, the five Australian Greens senators and independent Nick Xenophon.
Federal politics
While Family First is generally regarded as a conservative party, Fielding stated he would not be an automatic supporter of the then Coalition opposition in the Senate. On some issues which he saw as affecting the wellbeing of families, such as the WorkChoices industrial relations policies, he indicated disagreement with government policies. In February 2009, he told a Senate hearing that he believed divorce added to the impact of global warming because it resulted in people switching to a "resource-inefficient lifestyle".