Tim Anderson (political economist)

Tim Anderson (born 30 April 1953) is an Australian political economist and author. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. In 1979, he was convicted and imprisoned for an alleged Ananda Marga bomb plot, but was pardoned in 1985 after an inquiry. In 1990 he was convicted for ordering the 1978 Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing and sentenced to 14 years imprisonment, but was acquitted on appeal in 1991. He subsequently became active in prisoners' rights and civil liberties groups, and has been involved with international solidarity and civil rights campaigns. He has worked as an academic since the early 1990s.

Anderson obtained a BA in economics from Murdoch University in 1983, a BA (Hons) from Macquarie University in 1986, and a PhD from Macquarie University in 1997. He was a lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney from 1994 to 1999 and has been a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney since 1998. Twenty-five of his published academic works have 10 or more citations, according to Google Scholar. The most highly cited are to do with deregulation, Melanesian land and livelihoods, method in political economy, Timor Leste and Cuban health cooperation.

Anderson has a history of supporting civil liberties and prisoners’ rights in Australia. He was a founding member of Sydney-based group ‘Justice Action’ in the 1990s and Secretary of the NSW Council Civil Liberties over 1997-1999. Prisoners rights were a theme of his writing in the 1980s and 1990s, as reflected in his book 1989 book Inside Outlaws and part of his 1992 book Take Two, along with a number of published papers and interviews.

He has campaigned in support of Cuba and Syria. Between 2008 and 2014 Anderson made a series of short documentaries on the Cuban training of Timorese doctors, and the work of Cuban doctors in the Pacific. In February 2017 Cuba awarded him their Friendship Medal "as an acknowledgement of his unconditional solidarity towards Cuba and its revolution".

He has been a critic of foreign intervention in Syria, including the use of foreign funded groups, like the ‘White Helmets’, to call for humanitarian intervention in Syria. He attracted criticism for visiting Syria in late 2013, during the US-led war. In April he co-hosted a two-day conference on Syria at the University of Sydney.

In 1979, Anderson was convicted along with Ross Dunn and Paul Alister to 16 years imprisonment for a supposed Ananda Marga plot to bomb the house of Robert Cameron. They were pardoned and paid a sum in compensation following an inquiry into the convictions in 1985. However, in a linked case, he was re-arrested in 1989. In 1990, Anderson was convicted for three counts of murder for supposedly planning the Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing, for which Evan Pederick had been jailed the previous year. Anderson was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment, but was acquitted on appeal in 1991. In directing an acquittal NSW Chief Justice Murray Gleeson said: "The trial of the appellant miscarried principally because of an error which resulted in large part from the failure of the prosecuting authorities adequately to check aspects of the Jayewardene theory. This was compounded by what I regard as an inappropriate and unfair attempt by the Crown to persuade the jury to draw inferences of fact, and accept argumentative suggestions, that were not properly open on the evidence. I do not consider that in those circumstances the Crown should be given a further opportunity to patch up its case against the appellant. It has already made one attempt too many to do that, and I believe that, if that attempt had never been made, there is a strong likelihood that the appellant would have been acquitted.".

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