Charles Race Thorson Mathews (born 27 March 1935) is an Australian former politician, academic, author and reformer.

[3] From 1967 - 1972 he served as Principal Private Secretary to Gough Whitlam Leader of the Opposition in the Australian Parliament, where he helped develop Labor's policies on Education[4] and Medibank[5] (later Medicare).

From 1976 - 1979 Mathews was Principal Private Secretary for Clyde Holding and then Frank Wilkes as Leaders of the Opposition in the Parliament of Victoria.

His two portfolios of Police and Arts overlapped in 1986 with the theft of Picasso's Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria by the 'Australian Cultural Terrorists', who wanted more funding for young artists.

[7] As Minister for Community Services Mathews introduced a major expansion of child protection and oversaw de-institutionalisation of the intellectually disabled.

These include Building the Society of Equals: Worker Co-operatives and the A.L.P.,[8] Australia's First Fabians,[9] Whitlam Re-visited: Policy Development, Policies and Outcomes,[10] Labor's Troubled Times,[11] Turning the Tide: Towards a Mutualist Philosophy and Politics for Labor and the Left,[12] Jobs of Our Own[13] and Of Labour and Liberty: Distributism in Victoria, 1891-1966.

While in parliament from 1990 - 1992 Mathews was part-time Visiting Fellow in the Public Sector Management Institute (PSMI) at Monash University.

Mathews then turned his attention to the history of the co-operative movement in Australia and its link to Catholic Social Teaching in the 1930s to 1950s.

From the 1990s on, Mathews campaigned again for reform of the Labor Party, so that the factions would be "on tap , but not on top" and local members would have more say.

In 1971 Mathews became close to Ainsley Gotto, personal private secretary to Liberal Party leader John Gorton (prime minister from 1968 to 1971).

Iola Mathews co-founded the Women's Electoral Lobby and later worked within the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) to achieve workplace gender equality in the 1980s and 1990s, for which she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM).