John Paul Newman, born John Naumenko, (December 8, 1946 - September 5, 1994) was a member of the New South Wales state parliament and Member for the seat of Cabramatta. He is the first politician to be assassinated in Australia since the 1977 murder of Griffith councillor Donald McKay.
John Newman was the son of Austrian and Yugoslav parents, who settled in Cabramatta when he was a small child. He was educated at Cabramatta Primary School and Liverpool High School. He went on to work at Borg Warner in Fairfield. In March 1972 he changed his surname by deed poll to Newman. He had a long history of involvement with the labour movement and with the Australian Labor Party, spending much of his working life as a union official. He was a State union organiser with the Federated Clerks Union from 1970 to 1986. Newman completed post-graduate studies in industrial law at the University of Sydney, and undertook a variety of Trade Union Training Authority education programs.
Newman was elected an alderman on Fairfield Council in 1977 and remained on the council for 10 years. He was Deputy Mayor in 1985-86 and also served as Acting Mayor in 1986. In December 1979 Newman's pregnant wife, Mary, and five-year-old son, David, were killed in a automobile accident at Bossley Park.
Following a by-election in the seat of Cabramatta, Newman was elected to Legislative Assembly of New South Wales on February 1, 1986. Since the 1970s, Cabramatta has been a centre for immigrants and refugees from Asian backgrounds, particularly Vietnam, China, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Korea. For many years Newman had been waging a campaign to break up the Asian crime gangs and corruption that had plagued the area.
He had been the target of numerous death threats from such gangs but did not seek police protection. During the night of September 5, 1994 while outside his Woods Avenue home, he was shot and killed. His fiancee, Lucy Wong, was with him at the time but saw little of what happened because of the swiftness of the murder.
A local nightclub owner, Phuong Ngo, who had previously attempted to secure Labor Party pre-selection for the seat, was convicted of the killing in 2001. Two of Ngo's associates escaped convictions. In 2003, an appeal by Ngo against the conviction failed.
Newman's death has made him a martyr. This helped the Labor Party to win back the seat in the Cabramatta by-election that followed in a landslide. A local swimming pool has been named after him by the Fairfield City Council.
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801-1890), English Cardinal, was born in London on the 21st of February 1801, the eldest son of JohnNewman, banker, of the firm of Ramsbottom, Newman and Co. The family was understood to be of Dutch extraction, and the name itself, spelt "Newmann" in an earlier generation, further suggests Hebrew origin.
At the age of seven Newman was sent to a private school conducted by Dr Nicholas at Ealing, where he was distinguished by diligence and good conduct, as also by a certain shyness and aloofness, taking no part in the school games.
But all this time (since 1841) Newman had been under a cloud, so far as concerned the great mass of cultivated Englishmen, and he was now awaiting an opportunity to vindicate his career; and in 1862 he began to prepare autobiographical and other memoranda for the purpose.
Newman's first volume, "The Arians of the Fourth Century", is an undigested, but valuable and characteristic, treatise, wholly Alexandrian in tone, dealing with creeds and sects on the lines of the "Economy." As a history it fails; the manner is confused, the style a contrast to his later intensity and directness of expression.
Newman demanded proof; a correspondence ensued in which Kingsley referred to one of the Oxford Anglican sermons generally; he withdrew his charge in terms that left its injustice unreproved; and thus he brought on himself, in the pamphlet which his adversary published, one of the most cutting replies, ironical and pitiless, known to literature.
Newman's elevation, hailed by the English nation and by Catholics everywhere with unexampled enthusiasm, was rightly compared to that of Bessarion after the Council of Florence.
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