Michael Tate

Michael Carter Tate AO (born 6 July 1945) is a legal academic and former Australian Labor Party politician who later became an ambassador and then a Catholic priest.

[1] He attributed his achievement to the long hours he spent in libraries, rather than in sporting or social activities, while recovering from a serious road accident in 1963, which hospitalised him in neck-to-knee plaster for five months and required further operations for the next eight years.

[1] He served as legal adviser to the Tasmanian Parliamentary Delegation to the Constitutional Conventions from 1973 to 1977, and was a member of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace from 1972 to 1978.

In 1986 he chaired two Senate enquiries into the conduct of his former Labor colleague and now High Court justice Lionel Murphy.

[1] After leaving politics he was appointed Australian ambassador to the Netherlands and the Holy See, before retiring to enter the priesthood.

Guests included former Governor-General Bill Hayden, former Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, and former Attorneys-General Lionel Bowen and Michael Duffy.

[3] That night, he told the ABC's 7.30 Report that during his last audience with the Pope as Ambassador to the Holy See, John Paul II asked him what his next posting would be.