Hong Lim

Hong Lim (born 11 November 1950), Australian politician, has been a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly since 1996, representing the seat of Clayton for the Australian Labor Party. Lim was born in Kandal Province, Cambodia, and is of Chinese Cambodian origins. He was educated at schools in Phnom Penh before coming to Australia in 1970, and then at the University of Tasmania and Monash University, Melbourne, where he graduated in arts. He was Chairman of the Victorian Indo-Chinese Communities Council 1984-92 and President of the Cambodian Association of Victoria 1992-96. He was a commissioner of the Victorian Ethnic Affairs Commission 1985-92, and a member of the Monash University Council 1996-98.

Lim was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1996, and was an appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Victorian Communities, John Thwaites, in 2002. Since his election Lim has built up a strong local "machine" by recruiting Cambodian and Vietnamese migrants into branches of the Labor Party in his Clayton electorate in south-eastern Melbourne: as a result he is frequently accused of branch stacking in favour of the right-wing Labor Unity faction of the Victorian Labor Party. He denies these charges.

These charges were highlighted in early 2006 when Lim came out in support of the Labor Unity-backed preselection challenge to former federal Labor leader Simon Crean, whose electorate of Hotham takes in the Clayton area. It was frequently claimed in the press that Lim controlled a block of several hundred Indo-Chinese Labor Party members who would vote against Crean and in favour of Crean's challenger Martin Pakula on Lim's orders. In the event, however, Crean was able to mobilise his own supporters in the Indo-Chinese community and defeated the challenge by a comfortable margin.

External links

* [http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/19/1066502077090.html Mr Lim's select guest list]
* [http://www.australianet.net/chinese7.htm 林美丰]