Andrew Ronald Brideson (born October 19, 1944) is an Australian politician. He has been a Liberal member of the Victorian Legislative Council since October 1992, representing Waverley Province.

Brideson was born in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton, and studied at Bentleigh and McKinnon High Schools. He studied teaching at Frankston Teachers College and the Hawthorn Institute of Education, and occupied teaching positions at various rural schools in the West Gippsland and Wimmera regions between 1964 and 1975. In 1976, he was promoted to the position of deputy principal, and worked in this position in a number of schools.

While teaching, Brideson had been a member of the Teachers Association of Australia and the Victorian Affiliated Teachers Federation , and at the end of the 1983 school year, he left full-time teaching to take up positions as Chief Executive Officer and President of both organisations. During this period, he also acted as an adviser to successive Liberal shadow education ministers. Brideson left the position with the national body in 1990, after several years at the helm, but continued on with the Victorian organisation until his move into politics in 1992.

In the leadup to the 1992 state election, Brideson succeeded in obtaining Liberal preselection for the then safe Liberal seat, which effectively ensured that he would be elected. In his first six-year term, he served on the Public Bodies Review Committee (1992-1996) and then as the Chairman of the Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee (1996-1999). He also served as the parliamentary representative on the Monash University Council from 1997. However, he was overlooked for a ministerial position in Jeff Kennett's Liberal government.

He was re-elected at the 1999 election, which saw the Liberal Party lose power to the Australian Labor Party under Steve Bracks, but was subsequently appointed Chairman of the Road Safety Committee regardless. In this way, he headed an inquiry that aimed to bring down the amount of road deaths, after it had reached its highest number for several years. Though his term was for the most part relatively uneventful, Brideson was involved in a minor scandal in 2001 when it was revealed that he had plagiarised parts of a parliamentary speech, taking slabs of material directly from the internet.

Brideson did not face election in 2002, which saw the Liberal opposition defeated in a landslide, with numerous shadow ministers losing their seats. However, in an ominous sign for Brideson, his seat of Waverley Province was converted into a nominally Labor seat by a redistribution, and the Liberal candidate was resoundingly defeated even before the distribution of preferences. This will make it difficult for him to hold his seat when he next faces re-election in 2006.

The party's devastating defeat opened up numerous shadow ministerial positions, and Brideson was given the portfolios of scrutiny of government, waste watch and appointed as the Secretary to Shadow Cabinet. Though he lost the first two positions to fellow Legislative Council member Richard Dalla-Riva in a January 2004 reshuffle, he has continued in the third to the present day.