A BIT ABOUT STEVE FIELDING
FAMILY FIRST’S FIRST SENATOR
Steve Fielding knows a lot about families – he grew up in a family of 16 children and
is a proud family man himself. He has been married to Susan for 22 years and they
have three children: James, 18, Campbell, 16 and Gabrielle, 13. Steve and Sue live in
Wantirna South, an outer suburb of Melbourne.
Steve, who is 46, was born in Reservoir in
Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
As a child growing up he thought his family was the
typical Aussie family –
however Steve now
realises that ‘typical’ is not the best way
to describe the Fielding family.
Steve’s parents, George and Shirley, were both only children. But they just loved kids– so much so they kept having them. They stopped when they got to 16!
Today, George is 79 and Shirley is 76. They still live in the family home at Reservoir,
where they care for one of Steve’s sisters, Sandra, who has an intellectual disability.
George worked at a hardware supplies company in the city called McPhersons. He
started there as an office boy when he was 16 and stayed there 40 years. He did a lot
of overtime and had a second job on Saturday mornings to bring in extra money.
Steve has seven sisters and eight brothers, aged from 55 to 34. No twins or triplets.
Steve is seven down from the top.
He and his siblings attended the local Keon Park Primary School and then Merrilands
High School.
Shirley’s parents lived nearby and Steve’s gran used to stay with the family from
Monday to Friday to help out. She slept in a fold out bed in the hallway which was
packed up during the daytime.
The Fielding family didn’t have much money or material things but what Shirley and
George did give their kids was plenty of love, time and an education. They taught
Steve values such as honesty and respect for others and gave him things he’ll have
with him forever; a sense of purpose, of who he is and what he could aspire to.
They also taught him that happiness comes from family, not money. And they
instilled in him the obligation to contribute to the community.
After finishing high school, Steve did a Bachelor of Engineering degree at RMIT
University which he completed in 1983. He then started work at Hewlett Packard
where he met Susan, who also worked there.
Steve later moved into management and executive roles with NEC and Siemens, and
completed a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) at Monash University in
1992.
Later that year Steve and his family moved to Wellington in New Zealand where he
took up an executive role with Telecom NZ. They returned to Australia in 1995.
Steve worked with United Energy and then Yellow Pages. For the last five years, he
has been with one of Victoria’s largest superannuation funds, Vision Super (formerly
Local Authority Super).
A passion for local issues saw Steve elected as a councillor to Knox City Council in
2003 and 2004. Steve stood as a Victorian Senate candidate for the FAMILY FIRST Party
in the 2004 election and took up his position in the Senate on July 1, 2005.
Steve thinks not enough time is spent discussing how economic pressures are
affecting families.
It is well known that parents would like to have more children than they do and an
Australian Institute of Family Studies report has found one-third of men and women
will have fewer children than they would like. However, it seems that nothing can be
done to change this situation. Many single incomes are no longer sufficient to support
a family, but nobody asks why. Our tax-free threshold is below the subsistence level,
but bringing the tax-free threshold up to this level is not the top priority for political
parties.
All the political parties talk about ‘family-friendly’ policies, but it seems they are
really market-friendly. You only have to read what employer organisations say about
the obligations of employers to be ‘family-friendly’ to work that out, and if we did not
get the message the managing partner of a leading national law firm removed any
doubts when he said of his employees “You don’t have a right to any free time”.
(Australian Financial Review, 22/3/2005)
Steve’s hope is that the presence of FAMILY FIRST will start to turn this situation around.
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