Editing Andrew Fisher (section)

=== Queensland politics ===
[[Image:Andrewfisher.JPG|thumb|left|upright|Fisher as a Queensland MP, {{circa|1899}}]]
In 1891, Fisher was elected as the first president of the Gympie branch of the [[Australian Labor Party|Labour Party]]. In 1893, he was elected to the [[Legislative Assembly of Queensland]] as Labour member for the [[Electoral district of Gympie]] and by the following year had become Labour's deputy leader in the Legislative Assembly. In his maiden speech, he pushed for a 50% decrease in military spending and declared support for a federation.{{sfn|Day|2008}} He was also active in the Amalgamated Miners Union, becoming President of the Gympie branch by 1891.<ref name = "Fisher16">Fisher, Kathleen (2006) "From pit boy to prime minister: Andrew Fisher", in ''National Library of Australia News'', XVI (9), June 2006, p. 16</ref> Another policy area that captured his attention during this term, was the employment of workers from the Pacific Islands in sugar plantations, a practice that Fisher and Labour both strongly opposed. He lost his seat in 1896 following a campaign in which he was charged by his opponent [[Jacob Stumm]] with being a dangerous revolutionary and an anti-Catholic, accusations that were propagated by the newspaper ''Gympie Times''.{{sfn|Day|2008}}

The 1896 establishment of the ''Gympie Truth'', a newspaper that he was to partly own,<ref name=adb>{{Australian Dictionary of Biography  |first=D. J. |last=Murphy |author-link=Denis Murphy (Australian politician) |title=Fisher, Andrew (1862–1928) |id2=fisher-andrew-378 |year=1981 |access-date=14 August 2022}}</ref> was part of his response. Intended as a medium to broadcast Labour's message, the newspaper played a vital role in Fisher's return to parliament in 1899. This time, he was the beneficiary of a scare campaign, in which conservative candidate Francis Power was consistently painted by the ''Gympie Truth'' as being a supporter of black labour and the alleged economic and social ills that accompanied it.{{sfn|Day|2008}} In that year he was Secretary for Railways and Public Works in the seven-day government of [[Anderson Dawson]], the first parliamentary Labour government in the world.<ref name=adb/>