Patrick Lynch (Australian politician)

Patrick Joseph Lynch (24 May 1867 – 15 January 1944) was an Australian politician.

Lynch was born in Skeark, County Meath, Ireland and educated at Cormeen National School and Bailieborough Model School, County Cavan. He migrated to Queensland in 1886 and cut railway sleepers near Charleville and then travelled to the Croydon goldfields. In 1888 he started to work on ships operating along the Australian coast and in the South Pacific, eventually qualifying as a marine engineer. He worked as an engineer on a sugar plantation in Fiji and then on the Kalgoorlie goldfields in Western Australia. He helped found and Goldfields and Engine-drivers' Association and was its general secretary from 1897 to 1904. He married Annie Cleary in 1901.

Political career

Lynch was a member of the Boulder Municipal District council from 1901 to 1904. He was elected unopposed for the Western Australian Legislative Assembly seat of Mount Leonora in 1904, representing the Australian Labor Party and became Minister for Works in the first Western Australian Labor government, led by Henry Daglish in June 1905, but it fell in August.

Lynch was elected to the Australian Senate in the 1906 elections. In 1916, he became the first chairman of the River Murray Commission. During World War I, he was the first Federal Labor parliamentarian to advocate conscription and along with Billy Hughes, stopped attending the parliamentary caucus of the party...
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