Second conscription referendum in Australia

On 20 December 1917 Australians voted on conscription for the second time in fourteen months. The question read: “Are you in favour of the proposal of the Commonwealth Government for reinforcing the Commonwealth Australian Imperial Force overseas?” The vote did not change the constitution and was not legally binding, which is why today it is usually called a plebiscite, but in the documents of the time it appears as a referendum. The government of Billy Hughes lost it more clearly than the first one, in October 1916. 1,015,159 people voted yes (46.2 per cent) and 1,181,747 no (53.8 per cent).

After the first defeat Hughes formed a war government with the Liberals and the Nationalist Party, and in May 1917 he won the election, promising not to return to the question of conscription unless the fortunes of war turned against the Allies. By the autumn there were fewer and fewer volunteers. In the whole of 1917 about 45,000 men enlisted, on average fewer than 4,000 a month, while the Australian divisions lost tens of thousands of soldiers at Bullecourt, at Messines and in the Third Battle of Ypres. In November, after the Bolshevik coup in Russia and the Italian defeat at Caporetto, Hughes, under strong pressure from supporters of conscription, decided that this condition had been met, and announced a new vote. The proposal was more modest than in 1916. The government wanted to send 7,000 men a month to the front, and a ballot of conscripts from among men up to the age of 44 was to take place only if there were fewer volunteers in a given month. Hughes declared that he would not govern without conscription.

The campaign was even more bitter than the year before. Conscription was opposed by the Australian Labor Party, most of the trade unions and the premier of Queensland, Thomas Ryan, the only head of a state government who openly opposed the federal authorities. On the night of 26 November Hughes, with a detachment of soldiers, entered the Government Printing Office in Brisbane and confiscated 3,300 copies of the state parliament’s Hansard containing speeches by opponents of conscription. On 29 November, at the railway station in Warwick, someone in the crowd hit him on the head with an egg. The local sergeant of the state police refused to arrest the culprit at the prime minister’s demand, saying that he had no authority there. Soon afterwards Hughes created a federal police force. The most prominent opponent of conscription was the Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, head of the archdiocese since May 1917, who after the first referendum had already called the war “a sordid trade war”. In November, according to his biographer, he addressed crowds of up to 100,000 people in Melbourne. Supporters of conscription accused him of disloyalty, although historians judge that his influence on the result was not decisive.

Only Western Australia, Tasmania by a tiny majority, and the federal territories voted for conscription. Victoria, which had voted “yes” in 1916, this time went over to the opponents by a narrow margin. The largest “no” vote was in New South Wales, where opponents of conscription won almost 59 per cent. The soldiers themselves were also divided. Of nearly 200,000 votes cast in the Australian Imperial Force, 103,789 were for conscription and 93,910 against.

Hughes kept his word only by half. At the beginning of January 1918 he resigned, but the Governor-General, seeing no one else who would have a majority in parliament, at once asked him again to form a government, with the same members. Until the end of the war Australia did not introduce conscription for overseas service, and its soldiers fought solely as volunteers.