Alan McDonald lives in Victoria, Melbourne where he is the founder of McDonald Murholme, a law firm specializing in employment law.

Alan’s career began when he was working as a residential tutor at St. Hilda’s College at the University of Melbourne. Here, he began gaining experience as a solicitor in general practice.

While gaining experience as a legal professional, Alan McDonald also became involved with several community associations and projects. He founded Plenty Valley Planning Reform Association, an organization created to address the planning melee in Plenty Valley where unemployment – especially among tradespersons – was quickly rising. He led a march to highlight the gravity of the situation along Church Street Whittlesea.

Throughout his career, Alan McDonald has distinguished himself as a legal professional by pioneering a whole layer of legal practice in Australia. In 1990, a new law was passed in Australia that says that people cannot be dismissed unfairly from their employment. Alan quickly stepped into action and opened the largest legal practice in Australia focusing on workers rights. In 1991, Australia was in the middle of a severe recession. Alan saw the inaccessibility of legal aid for low income individuals and families, making it often impossible to hire a lawyer. To offer the services so desperately needed, Alan set up a small practice in Hampton Park to offer low-cost and pro-bono work. Soon, the demand was so high that – to cover the thousands of files that were opened – they had six people working out of a house in Hampton Park.
Within three years of creating the firm, he was undertaking a lion’s share of the work in that field. By the turn of the millennium, Alan was a leading name in the subject of workers rights and employment law.

Currently in his life, Alan McDonald is doing volunteer work to help protect a rural farming community from poorly placed wind turbines. In Victoria, there are many rural farmers whose livelihoods are being put at risk by a German company who wants to build wind turbines on top of these fields in such a way that farming cannot be completed properly. For the past two years, Alan has been working with these farmers and leading the campaign as a community activist to put a stop to these turbines and protect his community.

Learn more about Alan McDonald and the work he’s doing to help local Victorian farmers by visiting his blog page!