Vern Hughes

Vern Hughes is an Australian perennial minor party candidate for election and advocate for civil society. He is the Director of Civil Society Australia and the Convenor of The Sensible Centre.
Life and career
Hughes was at the first meeting of the Socialist Forum in 1984 and later served in its leadership until the forum dissolved in the early 1990s; the forum provided a space for people on the left to discuss issues outside of existing political parties.
He supported Mark Latham's articulation of the Third Way in Australia which advocated community engagement and social regeneration rather than market based or top down State interventions.
In 2006, he founded, and was president of, the People Power Party. In January 2007 he was defeated for the party presidency after in-fighting with fellow member Stephen Mayne, and resigned from the party. By August he was running as the Democratic Labor Party candidate in a by-election for the state seat of Williamstown, and in Gorton in the 2007 federal election. In 2010 he led a group of Legislative Council candidates for the unregistered Parents Families and Carers Party. In the 2014 Victorian state election, he convened a team of candidates in Melbourne's western suburbs as Voice for the West.
From 2007 he was Director of the Centre for Civil Society, which became Civil Society Australia in 2016.Director Hughes unsuccessfully ran for a Victorian seat in the Senate at the 2022 Australian federal election for the newly formed Federation Party, achieving 0.3% of the statewide vote.
Publications
Hughes has written on many social, political and theological topics for publications and organisations that span the political spectrum. He made several contributions to the right-wing think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) including Reconciliation: Where to now? in 2000, and The Empowerment Agenda. Civil Society and Markets in Disability and Mental Health in 2006. Earlier contributions to IPA publications dealt with the importance of community self-reliance and mutualism in the 1995 article Between Individual and State and on the history of gambling regulation in Australia in Gambling and the State in 1996. He also contributed to the Health Care reform debate in 2004 emphasising the role and potential of mutualism in an article published by the libertarian think-tank Centre for Independent Studies.

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