Alexander Michael Somlyay (born 18 January 1946) is an Australian former politician. He was a member of the House of Representatives from 1990 to 2013, representing the Queensland seat of Fairfax for the Liberal Party. He briefly held ministerial office in the Howard government as Minister for Regional Development, Territories and Local Government from 1997 to 1998.
Early life
Somlyay was born on 18 January 1946 in Budapest, Hungary. He is of Hungarian-Jewish descent; he and his parents arrived in Australia in 1949 as stateless persons, with his parents having been stripped of their Hungarian citizenship during World War II. In the early 1990s he renounced any claim to Hungarian citizenship in accordance with section 44(i) of the Australian constitution, in advance of a new Hungarian law that would have granted citizenship retrospectively.
Somlyay joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1963 and worked for several different departments. He completed the degree of Bachelor of Economics in 1975 at the Australian National University (ANU). He later joined the Liberal Party and was chair of its Maroochydore branch.
Somlyay was a member of the informal conservative faction the Lyons Forum when it was active in the 1990s. He held junior portfolios in John Hewson's shadow ministry from 1992 to 1994, as secretary to the shadow cabinet and shadow parliamentary secretary to the leader of the opposition. He was not retained in the ministry after the 1998 federal election. However, Somlyay subsequently withdrew his candidacy for the position.
In September 2010 Somlyay announced that he would not stand for re-election at the next federal election. In his valedictory speech to parliament in June 2013 he stated that his political career had been affected by a range of health issues including "a stroke in 1993 followed by two lots of heart bypass surgeries, seven angioplasties, a pacemaker, diabetes and cancer".
Expenses investigation
An investigation by a Fairfax Media reporter published in the Sydney Morning Herald in January 2014 alleged that Somlyay had used his parliamentary office to pay his wife almost seventy thousand dollars for the year 2012–13 "for non-existent work in his electorate office." The report also alleged that Somlyay had obscured his wife's identity in his list of employed staff. On February of the same year, the Herald again reported that the Australian Federal Police had found nothing that "would constitute a criminal offence" related to the employment of his wife and closed the investigation.