Robert Lindsay (Bob) Collins AO (8 February 1946 – 21 September 2007) was an Australian Labor Party member of the Australian Senate from July 1987 to March 1998, representing the Northern Territory. Prior to entering the Senate, Collins was a member of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly from 1977 to 1987, and Leader of the Territory Opposition from 1981 to 1986. He was the first Northern Territorian to become a federal minister. He died ...
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Robert Lindsay (Bob) Collins AO (8 February 1946 – 21 September 2007) was an Australian Labor Party member of the Australian Senate from July 1987 to March 1998, representing the Northern Territory. Prior to entering the Senate, Collins was a member of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly from 1977 to 1987, and Leader of the Territory Opposition from 1981 to 1986. He was the first Northern Territorian to become a federal minister. He died by suicide aged 61 with multiple charges of child sex abuse pending in both the Northern Territory and ACT.
Born into a working-class family in Newcastle in 1946, Collins left school at the age of 15 and worked briefly on a cotton farm. In 1967 he moved to the Northern Territory, where he found work at the Department of Agriculture in the town of Katherine. By 1974 he was working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and St. John Ambulance when Cyclone Tracy struck the city of Darwin.
Collins first became...
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