Peter Gordon awarded an AM for community to service in Australia Day honours

MOST Australians with an interest in footy identify Peter Gordon as the two-time president of the Western Bulldogs. However, his legacy will be to the law.

PETER Gordon was so driven as a young man to fight for his beliefs he would skip lectures at Melbourne University to help out at the Western Suburbs Legal Service.

It was at a time when for most children from Melbourne’s west, a law degree was a pipe dream.

The decision characterises the tenacity of Mr Gordon, who would become a trailblazer for right, and for justice.

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A fighter for the underclass, and the underdog.

Mr Gordon, 60, on Friday becomes a Member in the General Division of the Order of Australia (AM).

He has been honoured for service to the community through support of Australian rules football, health promotion, youth social welfare and to the law.

Peter Gordon has taken on some of the biggest corporations — and won. Picture: Michael Klein

He has been awarded the honour for significant service to the community through support of Australian rules football, health promotion and youth social welfare and to the law.

“I’m really grateful for and honoured by this award. I believe that being committed to an important cause is its own reward, and I feel lucky to have had the career and the opportunities to help out that have come my way,’’ he said.

During the 1980s and 90s, he was among the first to go to work sans tie and has never sought to publicise his own achievements.

Most Australians with an interest in footy identify Mr Gordon as the two-time president of the Western Bulldogs.

He grew up a few drop kicks away from the club’s home ground, the then Western Oval.

Western Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge and Peter Gordon embrace after the club’s drought-breaking premiership win. Picture: Jason Edwards

As a symbol of the west, Mr Gordon saved his beloved Bulldogs from a lopsided merger in 1989, and was integral to bringing the club’s second ever premiership cup to Whitten Oval 27 years later during his second stint at the helm.

Mr Gordon, however, is more than a man with a passion for football — his legacy will be to the law.

For a man with the sharpest of minds, he has always had the common touch.

During decades as a lawyer and partner at law firm Slater & Gordon, he took on the hardest cases, going to war with big corporations.

The landmark cases included suing for compensation for workers suffering from asbestosis and battling British American Tobacco for smokers dying from cancer.

They were costly cases.

Mr Gordon had to convince his own boardroom to appeal a case on behalf of Wittenoom asbestos victims — and went on to win.

Taking on a tobacco giant, however, would take him to the brink.

He was the key in instigating cancer sufferer Rolah McCabe’s compensation battle — the first person outside the US to successfully sue a tobacco company.

And he would help fund the McCabe Centre for Law and Cancer in Melbourne in her name.

Others cases he has championed include fighting for those who had contracted medically acquired HIV and sex abuse victims of the Catholic Church.

And, after starting up his own firm, he won $100 million in compensation for thalidomide victims.

Mr Gordon has also worked tirelessly for not-for-profit organisations.

The 60-year-old has made contributions to VicHealth, as a past chairman to the Health Inequalities Committee and Alcohol Advisory Committee and past member of the Tobacco Control Review Panel.

Apart from his role at the Western Bulldogs and his legal firm, he is currently a board member at Ladder, which targets youth homelessness.

Last year. he was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Victoria University.