Born in Pakenham, Victoria, he was a dairy and potato farmer and an agricultural contractor before entering politics.
In 1980, he was elected to the Australian House of Representatives as the Labor member for McMillan, defeating Barry Simon of the Liberal Party, who had been deprived of Democratic Labor Party preferences due to his views on abortion.
[1] In 2015, Cunningham and three other former MPs brought a case before the High Court of Australia, purporting that reductions to their retirement allowances and limitations on the number of "domestic return trips per year" under the Members of Parliament (Life Gold Pass) Act 2002[2] was unconstitutional under S51(xxxi) of the Constitution of Australia.
They lost the case in 2016, with the court finding that Parliament was entitled to vary the terms of allowances.
This article about an Australian Labor Party member of the House of Representatives is a stub.