senator James Patersone Contact information

Australian Senator James William Paterson, born on November 21, 1987, represents the Liberal Party in Victoria and has been a Senator since 2016. Following the Coalition’s defeat at the 2022 federal election, he was appointed to Peter Dutton’s shadow ministry.

Paterson attended an elementary school in Washington, D.C. while his mother was on an academic exchange, and then completed high school at McKinnon Secondary College in Melbourne. He obtained Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Commerce degrees from the University of Melbourne and briefly worked as a special adviser to Senator Mitch Fifield and as an intern for U.S. congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart. He then worked as a writer for the Victorian Employers’ Chamber of Commerce and Industry and later joined the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), where he became the editor of the IPA Review publication. He was subsequently promoted to director of communications and development, and then to deputy executive director in September 2014.

Despite coming from a Labor or Greens-voting family of long-time trade union members, Paterson joined the Liberal Party at 17 and was heavily involved in student politics. In March 2016, he was appointed by the Victorian division of the Liberal Party of Australia to fill the casual vacancy in the Senate caused by the resignation of Michael Ronaldson.

Paterson has been associated with the Libertarian elements of the Liberal Party and has sought reform to section 18C of the Racial Vilification Act 1996 to remove elements that may restrict free speech. He has been an advocate for human rights of religious and ethnic minority groups and a strong critic of Communist China. In 2022, Paterson was appointed the Shadow Minister for Cyber Security and the Shadow Minister for Countering Foreign Interference by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

Paterson met his wife Lydia at a Liberal student function, and the couple has two children as of 2021. He is an agnostic and has described himself as “not religious at all,” although his wife is Catholic and their children were baptized as Catholics.