Researching John Coulter

Coulter was born in Perth, Western Australia. He gained a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery degree at the University of Adelaide. He became a medical practitioner and researcher, and was also a university lecturer.

He was a member of Campbelltown Council in Adelaide during 1973–74. In 1980 he joined the Democrats.

He first took office in the Senate in 1987, representing South Australia, and resigned from the Senate on 20 November 1995, due to ill health. Natasha Stott Despoja was appointed as his replacement three days later, having earlier been employed by him as a researcher.

In 1999, he was publicly critical of Meg Lees's leadership of the Democrats, especially of her handling of the Goods and Services Tax legislation. He believed Stott Despoja would make a better leader, and was working towards that goal, which she in fact attained in April 2001.

However, a week before the November 2001 federal election, Coulter resigned from the party because he believed Stott Despoja had reduced internal party democracy. He said she had taken the party further away from the grassroots, that it had become pragmatic, and that he could not recommend that people vote for the party.

Coulter was born in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, on April 16, 1881, and attended the University of North Dakota before earning his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1908. He began teaching at the University of Minnesota later that year. Coulter started working for the federal government in 1910, leading the U. S. Census of Agriculture. He helped establish the system of banks and credit unions for rural use under the provisions of the Federal Farm Loan Act. Coulter was designated an inaugural fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1914, and returned to academia in 1915, as dean of the agricultural college at West Virginia University, and led the school's experimental station. When the United States joined World War I, Coulter was named a member of the War Industries Board. He was later appointed president of the North Dakota Agriculture College, serving from October 1921 to July 1929, when Herbert Hoover named Coulter the chief economist of the United States Tariff Commission. Coulter became the expert assistant to George Peek in July 1934.

He and Phoebe Frost married in Washington, D. C. in 1911. The couple had three sons. He died in Washington, D. C. on April 16, 1959, aged 78.