Early Years and Background
Stanhope was born in Gundagai, New South Wales. One of nine children of schoolteacher parents, much of his junior education was spent at one-teacher schools in country NSW. He attended Mullumbimby Public School and Bega High School before coming to Canberra to undertake studies at the Australian National University, graduating as a Bachelor of Laws.
Between 1979 and 1987, Stanhope held a range of community roles including:
- President ACT Council for Civil Liberties
- Original co-convener of Racial Respect in the ACT
- President ACT Hospice and Palliative Care Society
- ACT convener of the National Coalition for Gun Control
Between 1987 and 1991, Stanhope was Secretary of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs; and between 1991 and 1993, Deputy administrator and official secretary of Norfolk Island. From 1993 to 1996, Stanhope worked as Senior Adviser and Chief of Staff for the Federal Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, and between 1996 and 1998, advised the then Federal Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley on native title.
Read more about this topic: Jon Stanhope
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early, years and/or background:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)