Jim Balfour
Australian politician (1914-1990)
James Charles Murray Balfour, (30 September 1914 – 19 May 1990) was a long-serving Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) and Cabinet Minister in the Legislative Assembly, in the state Parliament of Victoria, Australia.
Born in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor to James Miller Balfour and his wife Katrine Elizabeth Alice (née Murray), Balfour was educated at Geelong College. He went on to become a dairy farmer, settling at Willow Grove near Trafalgar in the Latrobe Valley of Gippsland, Victoria.
On 6 February 1937 he married Mary Emma Savige, with whom he had five sons.
From 1946 to 1967, Balfour served on Narracan Shire Council, and served as President from 1946 to 1947, 1950–1951, and 1960–1961.
In 1955, he was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly for Morwell, representing the Liberal Party.
From 1958 to 1961 he was Government Whip, and from 1961 to 1964 Cabinet Secretary. In 1964, he entered Cabinet as Minister of Water Supply and Mines, a portfolio that was reorganised to become Lands, Soldier Settlement and Conservation a few months later. In 1967, he moved to the new seat of Narracan and became Minister of Fuel and Power and of Mines. In 1977 he became Minister for Minerals and Energy, a position from which he resigned on 3 February 1981, in readiness for his retirement at the 1982 election.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jim Balfour” as australian politician (1914-1990). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20983223. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914, 1990, 1937 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jim Balfour” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.