War government in Australia

On 17 February 1917 the Prime Minister of Australia, Billy Hughes, announced the composition of a new government. Sitting side by side in it were men who only a year earlier had been bitter opponents: former members of the Australian Labor Party who had followed Hughes, and politicians of the Liberal opposition with their leader, the former prime minister Joseph Cook. The two groups merged into the Nationalist Party, also called the “Win-the-War” party. The British chronology of the war calls the new cabinet the Australian war government.

The split over conscription

The source of the transformation was the dispute over conscription. The Australian divisions in France had suffered heavy losses in 1916, among others at Pozières, and volunteers were dwindling. Hughes, who in the spring of 1916 had visited Britain and the Western Front, concluded that without conscription the ranks could not be filled. The Senate, in which opponents of conscription from his own party had a majority, would not have passed such a bill, so the prime minister put the matter to a popular vote. He lost the referendum of 28 October 1916 by a narrow margin: according to the official results, 1,087,557 people voted for conscription for service overseas and 1,160,033 against. The campaign deeply divided the country. Most trade unions and many Catholics came out against conscription, led by the coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix.

The Labor Party did not forgive the prime minister. On 14 November 1916, as the party’s parliamentary caucus met to remove him, Hughes walked out of the room with twenty-odd supporters. Those who remained elected Frank Tudor as leader. Hughes founded the National Labor Party and carried on as prime minister of a minority government. In the House of Representatives, by some counts, he had only 16 of the 75 members and survived thanks to the support of Cook’s Liberals. He himself later said: “I did not leave the Labor Party. The party left me.”

From talks to coalition

The idea of a joint party of all supporters of prosecuting the war was born in Melbourne, where the federal parliament then sat. According to Ernest Scott’s Australian official history, on 15 November 1916 a group of politicians and referendum campaigners led by the Liberal William Watt decided to form a new organisation. Its programme was reduced to three points: win the war, preserve Australian national life and maintain the unity of the Empire. Hughes at first would not hear of it. He preferred to build his own national labour party and said that he disliked coalitions because they fell apart easily. He was won over only by the state premiers, who came to Melbourne for a conference in December. According to Scott, on 12 December several of them assured him that their states warmly supported the policy of “winning the war” and a joining of forces. According to some sources, the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, also urged the merger of the two groups.

On 6 January 1917 Hughes sent confidential invitations to about 300 people for a meeting held on 9 January in the Melbourne Town Hall. Participants from all the states resolved that party matters must be subordinated to winning the war and set up the National Federation, the organisational framework of the new party. Hughes’s talks with Cook went on for several weeks. According to the prime minister’s biographer, Laurence Fitzhardinge, the terms were agreed at the end of January.

The new cabinet

The government announced on 17 February had eleven members. Hughes kept the posts of prime minister and attorney-general, Cook took the navy ministry, and the elderly Sir John Forrest, former premier of Western Australia, the treasury. The defence minister remained Senator George Pearce, who had followed Hughes out of the Labor Party. Six ministers left the previous cabinet to make room for the Liberals. The former Liberals had six portfolios, Hughes’s men five. Scott notes that this proportion reflected the real balance of forces: in the country it was the Liberals who formed the stronger part of the new party.

Hughes insisted that he would have preferred a government of all parties, but the Labor Party had rejected the invitation. He accused it of no longer being master of its own decisions and of taking orders from outside. On conscription he spoke cautiously: the result of the referendum meant that the voters did not want conscription, but not that Australia’s will to fight was weakening. The government would respect the verdict, and only the voters themselves could change it. The problem remained the Senate, in which, with full attendance, the new majority was four votes short.

What next

Hughes wanted to extend the life of parliament until the end of the war so that he could go to London for the meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet. The Senate thwarted this plan, and the affair of the resignation of the Tasmanian senator Rudolph Ready on 1 March, whose seat was immediately filled by a supporter of the government, gave rise to accusations of bribery. On 23 March the prime minister dissolved parliament. In the election of 5 May 1917 the Nationalists won a crushing victory in both houses, and Hughes, having abandoned the working-class seat of West Sydney, won the seat of Bendigo. He was too late for the first session of the Imperial War Cabinet. In the autumn he returned to the question of conscription, but lost the second referendum, on 20 December 1917, more clearly than the first.