as fraudulent as any other." However, in spite of being a Minister in the Cain Government's Chairman of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Co-operatives, and being a supporter of Workers Co-operatives, Mathews was a critic of the Cain Government's Co-operative Development Program, telling one magazine at the time that they were: "... 'in most instances wretchedly managed, chronically under-performing and expressive of the attitude that the world owes their members a living.' He said that we should 'wipe what has already happened in this state in the field of co-operation.' It was 'an historical aberration,' and it 'would have been better if it had never been.'" Personal life Mathews has been a member of science fiction fandom since the early 1950s. He attended his first science fiction convention in 1952, and was instrumental in the founding of the Melbourne Science Fiction Group. He mostly abandoned fannish activities, as political matters began to occupy more of his time around 1956. Since his retirement from active politics, he has returned to fannish circles. Mathews was in a relationship with Ainsley Gotto, personal private secretary to Liberal Party leader John Gorton (prime minister from 1968 to 1971). Most of the media were aware of the relationship with Gotto but did not report on it. Mathews also told Whitlam, who tolerated the relationship on the proviso there was no "pillow talk". Mathews later married Iola Hack, a journalist who co-founded the Women's Electoral Lobby and worked within the Australian Council of Trade Unions to achieve workplace gender equity in the 1980s and 1990s. References External links 1935 births Living people Australian socialists Members of the Victorian Legislative Assembly Australian Labor Party members of the Parliament of Victoria Australian Labor Party members of the Parliament of Australia Politicians from Melbourne Members of the Australian House of Representatives for Casey Monash University faculty Australian economists 20th-century Australian politicians Distributism People from Hawthorn, Victoria