Ralph Clarke
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ralph Clarke is a former Australian politician. He was an Australian Labor Party member of the South Australian House of Assembly between 1993 and 2002, representing the electorate of Ross Smith.
Despite a secret ballot showing 60 of the 74 of the members of de-stacked local branches threw their support behind Clarke for 2002 preselection, but the state executive intervened to install John Rau, a former colleague of Clarke's in the Centre Left faction who had made the switch to the Right. Clarke ran as an independent and did very well on 23.1%, however with the ALP vote of 39.5% and Liberal vote of 24.1%, he did not get in to the two party preferred race for election.
Clarke contested an upper house seat under a banner of "Buy back ETSA" at the 2006 election but failed with only 0.1% of the vote, only 1115 votes.