First Among Equals Read online

  JOHN CHRISTIAN WATSON

  THE RISE OF THE LABOR PARTY

  TERM

  27 April 1904-17 August 1904

  John Christian Watson’s brief term in office left a lasting impression on Australia’s political landscape. Not only was he, at the age of 37, Australia’s youngest prime minister, but he also led the world’s first Labor government, paving the way for future Labor leaders.

  Watson was born in Valparaíso, Chile, on 9 April 1867 and was the only son of Martha and Johan Tanck. When Watson was two, his parents separated and his mother returned home to her native New Zealand and married British seaman George Watson. Watson adopted the surname of his stepfather, disguising the fact that he was not a British subject, which would have made him ineligible to stand for parliament. This, however, did not come to light until after Watson’s death.

  Watson went to school in Oamaru, New Zealand, leaving at the age of eleven to work on a railway construction site. At thirteen, he was apprenticed as a printer, eventually qualifying as a newspaper compositor. In 1886, at the age of nineteen, Watson migrated to New South Wales where he worked in Sydney for several newspapers including the Daily Telegraph, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Star.

  In 1889 he married Ada Jane Low, a Sydney seamstress. Three months later, at the age of 22, the Typographical Union appointed him a delegate to the New South Wales Trades and Labor Council. A founding member of the New South Wales Labor Party, Watson was also the vice-president of the Trades and Labor Council in 1892. In 1894 he was elected to the New South Wales seat of Young.

  Like most Labor leaders of his time, Watson was originally opposed to Federation, but once it was achieved he stood for federal election. He won the seat of Bland in March 1901 and was elected leader of the Australian Labor Party that same year. With the Labor Party the smallest of the three parties in parliament, they formed a coalition with the Protectionist Party in exchange for the promotion of their policies, in particular the White Australia policy. However, a dispute over extending the scope of the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill to include railway workers and public servants saw Watson join forces with Reid to drive out Deakin in 1904.

  Although Watson was only prime minister for a short time, his contributions were extensive. In particular, he appointed a Royal Commission into navigation and shipping which led to the drafting of the Navigation Act. But when Watson tried to push through his own version of the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill, Deakin and Reid united against him. When the governor-general, Lord Northcote, refused Watson’s call for the dissolution of parliament, he was forced to resign and Reid became prime minister.

  Watson remained opposition leader for three years, resigning from the post in 1907 to make way for Andrew Fisher. He then served as a private member of parliament, retiring in 1910. Watson was eventually expelled from the Labor Party in 1917 when he openly supported conscription in defiance of the party policy.

  He then devoted his energies to business, helping to establish the National Roads and Motorists’ Association (NRMA) and Australian Motorists Petroleum and Oil Company (AMPOL), which he became the chairman of in 1936. After the death of his first wife, Ada, Watson married Antonia Lane in 1925. He then lived quietly at his home in the Sydney suburb of Double Bay until his death, on 18 November 1941 at the age of 74.

  SIR GEORGE HOUSTOUN REID

  THE ‘YES-NO’ PRIME MINISTER

  TERM

  18 August 1904-5 July 1905

  Australia’s only Free Trade prime minister, Sir George Houstoun Reid holds the distinction of being the only politician to serve in all three parliaments — the colonial, commonwealth, and imperial. While he only held office for eleven months, he served in government for more than 30 years, losing only one of sixteen parliamentary elections.

  Reid was born in Scotland on 25 February 1845 at Johnstone, Renfrewshire, and was one of seven children to John and Marian Reid. With his father sick with bronchitis, the family migrated to Melbourne in 1852 on medical advice. Reid began his schooling at the Presbyterian Melbourne Academy (later Scotch College). When the family moved to Sydney in 1858, Reid left school and gained work as a clerk in a merchant’s office, at the age of thirteen. At the age of fifteen he joined the School of Arts Debating Society, recruiting, among others, Edmund Barton.

  By the age of nineteen, Reid was made assistant accountant at the Colonial Treasury. He remained with the treasury for fourteen years, eventually being promoted to attorney-general at the Crown Law office in 1878. With a burgeoning interest in politics, Reid began to pursue a legal career and was admitted to the Bar in 1879. The following year he resigned so as to be eligible to nominate as a candidate for East Sydney. In November 1880, Reid thus entered the New South Wales parliament, taking a seat in the Legislative Assembly. With the exception of a brief period from 1884 to 1885, when he was unseated in a by-election, Reid held this seat for the next twenty years.

  Although Reid was a strong supporter of the Free Traders, when Sir Henry Parkes came into power in 1887, he twice declined a seat in his ministry. In 1891 when Parkes resigned, Reid, at the age of 46, took over the leadership of the Free Trade Party. Later that year Reid married 21-year-old Flora Brumby.

  In 1894, Reid’s Free Traders defeated Barton’s Protectionists, winning the majority in the New South Wales State Parliament, and Reid became premier and treasurer. During his five-year term as premier, Reid reduced tariffs, introduced land and income tax and reformed the public system. In 1899, however, Labor shifted their support and brought down Reid’s government.

  While in principle Reid supported the movement towards Federation, because of his ambivalence he earned the nickname of ‘yes-no Reid’. With the interests of New South Wales his primary concern, he continually pressed for changes to the proposed Constitution. But once Federation was a certainty, he stood for a seat in the first election and in 1901 became the first federal opposition leader.

  In 1905 Reid became prime minister after breaking his alliance with John Watson’s Labor Party. However, he did not have a secure majority and so was unable to hold power for long. His government’s only substantial achievement was in industrial relations with the passage of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act in 1904. Reid was eventually defeated when the Labor Party and the Protectionists joined forces in 1905. In 1906 he gained the seats once more, but failed to win a majority.

  When Deakin proposed the ‘fusion’ of the two non-Labor parties in 1908, Reid resigned from the leadership of the Free Trade Party, handing over to his deputy Joseph Cook. After retiring from federal politics, Reid accepted a posting offered by Deakin, as the first high commissioner of Australia in London in 1910. He stayed in the post for six years, before taking up a position in the British House of Commons on 15 January 1916. He remained a member of the British Parliament until his death on 12 September 1918.

  ANDREW FISHER

  THE WORKING-CLASS PRIME MINISTER

  TERMS

  13 November 1908-2 June 1909

  29 April 1910-24 June 1913

  17 September 1914-27 October 1915

  Australia’s fifth prime minister, Andrew Fisher, was the most successful of the early Labor Party leaders, taking out the country’s top position three times in six years. A former Scottish miner and union leader, his rise from pit boy to prime minister was nothing short of remarkable.

  Born on the coalfields of Ayrshire, Scotland, on 29 August 1862, Fisher had neither an elite academic record nor the upper-class upbringing of many of his political contemporaries. The second son of Robert and Jane Fisher, he began working in the coalmines at the age of ten. With limited formal schooling, Fisher educated himself by reading the books in the library of the co-operative his father helped establish, and attending night school. At the age of seventeen he was elected secretary of the local branch of the Ayrshire Miners’ Union.

  In 1885, he and his brother James migrated to Queensland where he soon became a mine manager with the Queensland
Colliery Company on the Burrum coalfields at Torbanlea. Following a move to Gympie in 1888, Fisher became president of the local branches of the Amalgamated Miners’ Union and the Workers’ Political Organisation, the forerunner to Queensland’s Labor Party.

  In 1893 Fisher was elected to the Queensland Legislative Assembly, winning the seat of Gympie. However, he lost the seat in 1896. Convinced the antisocialist Gympie Times had prejudiced the electorate against him, Fisher, along with journalist Henry Boote, founded a rival newspaper, the Gympie Truth, as a voice for Labor.

  Despite the Labor Party’s opposition to Federation, Fisher was a strong proponent of the movement. Thus, he stood for Australia’s first national parliament, winning the seat of Wide Bay in Queensland in 1901. Later that year he married Margaret Irvine, the daughter of his landlady.

  In 1904 Fisher served for four months as minister for trade and customs in Watson’s Labor government. He was then elected deputy leader of Labor’s opposition party in 1905, retaining this position until October 1907 when Watson resigned as leader. When Deakin’s Protectionist government was forced to resign in 1908, following Labor’s move to amend the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill, Fisher became prime minister. Lack of support, however, allowed Deakin to again seize power just seven months into Fisher’s term. But in 1910 Labor’s first secure national government came after an electoral landslide and Fisher once again became prime minister.

  During Fisher’s second term he focused on improving infrastructure and social services. His government introduced maternity allowances, workers’ compensation and invalid pensions and proposed stricter regulations for wages, working hours and employment conditions. Fisher also passed the Defence Act in 1910, which established the Royal Australian Navy, set up the Commonwealth Bank in 1912 and commenced building the nation’s capital, Canberra, in 1913.

  Fisher’s final term, from 1914 to 1915, was served against the backdrop of World War I, during which time Fisher famously vowed to defend the ‘Mother Country’ to the last shilling. Fisher, however, found the strain of leadership in wartime taxing. While he passed a number of precautionary wartime acts, including the Trading with the Enemy Act, he actively opposed the introduction of conscription which was fervently promoted by an ambitious William Morris Hughes. The most significant and devastating event, however, was Britain’s bungled command of Australian troops at Gallipoli, Turkey, which saw more than 8000 of the country’s young men killed and a further 18,000 wounded in action. While forging the legend of the ANZACs, it not only took its toll on Australian men, but also on Fisher as the country’s leader.

  Amid rumours of ill health, Fisher resigned as prime minister on 27 October 1915. Three days later Hughes was elected leader of the Labor Party and became prime minister. Fisher went on to replace Reid as high commissioner of Australia in London, remaining in the post until 1921. Despite calls for him to re-enter politics in Australia, he stayed in London, eventually dying on 22 October 1928 in South Hill Park in Hampstead.

  CHAPTER 2

  WORLD WAR I AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1913-39)

  The years from 1913 to 1939 marked an era of great hardship and change for Australia. The five prime ministers who presided during this time — Cook, Hughes, Bruce, Scullin and Lyons — faced many challenges including World War I and the Great Depression.

  The creation of the Fusion Party at the end of the first decade of Federation, while strategically important, created a swing to Labor bringing Cook to power in 1913. However, with only a slim majority, he was eventually forced to call for the country’s first double dissolution in 1914. Just one month before Fisher succeeded him on 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany, and Australia thus found itself at war.

  With so many young Australian lives lost at the landing at Anzac Cove in Gallipoli, and the country struggling to fulfil its commitment to the war effort, Hughes called two referendums on conscription, in 1916 and 1917. Both failed, causing Labor to split. Hughes then defected from the Labor Party in 1916, joining the newly created National Party and marking the rise of the conservatives which culminated with the formation of the Country Party in 1920.

  After thirteen years out in the political wilderness, Labor again came to power under Scullin in 1929. Labor’s victory, however, was short-lived with Wall Street collapsing on 24 October 1929, a few days after Scullin was sworn in, and the country sank into the depths of the Great Depression.

  Despite the upheaval there were a number of major achievements: on 12 March 1913 the city of Canberra was founded as the nation’s capital; Australia’s first airline, the Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service (QANTAS), began regular services in 1922; voting was made compulsory in 1925; and on 9 May 1927, Parliament House was officially opened. Moreover, during this period campaigning techniques changed significantly when radio became widely available in the 1930s.

  SIR JOSEPH COOK

  CROSSING THE GREAT DIVIDE

  TERM

  24 June 1913-17 September 1914

  Sir Joseph Cook was Australia’s first prime minister to begin his political career in the socialist Labor Party and then defect to the anti-socialist conservatives. Dubbed ‘the most humourless’ of Australia’s prime ministers, Cook, like Andrew Fisher, made the extraordinary transition from pit boy in a coalmine to prime minister of Australia.

  Cook was born on 7 December 1860 at Silverdale in Staffordshire, England. The eldest of five children, he left school at the age of nine to work in the coalmines. When his father, William, died three years later, Cook became the family’s sole wage earner. With no formal schooling, he joined the local church and began educating himself through reading and public speaking. At the age of sixteen he became a lay preacher and became involved in trade union affairs.

  In 1885 Cook married local schoolteacher Mary Turner. Later that year he emigrated to Lithgow in New South Wales where Mary’s brother had already settled. Mary joined him in January 1887. Cook worked as a miner, learning shorthand, typing and bookkeeping part-time and eventually becoming the general-secretary of the union in 1888. He also joined the Land Nationalisation League and served on the Labor Defence Committee during the 1890 maritime strike.

  In 1891 Cook was elected president of the Lithgow branch of the Labor Electoral League and won the seat of Hartley in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales. He was subsequently elected leader of the parliamentary Labor Party in 1893. In 1894 Cook left the Labor Party after refusing to sign their ‘solidarity’ pledge. He then joined George Reid’s Free Trade Party, serving as postmaster-general from 1894 to 1899.

  Cook originally opposed the Constitution Bill for Federation, however, he campaigned for a ‘yes’ vote in the second referendum after concessions were made. When Federation was inaugurated in 1901, Cook was elected to the first parliament as the member for Parramatta. He then moved his family to Marrickville and joined Reid on the opposition bench in the newly convened House of Representatives.

  Re-elected in 1903, Cook was not included in the cabinet of Reid’s short-lived coalition government of 1904-05. However, in July 1905 he was elected deputy leader of the Free Trade Party. When Reid retired from the party leadership in 1908, Cook took over and agreed to a merger with Deakin’s Protectionists to form the Fusion Party.

  During Deakin’s third prime-ministership, Cook served as the minister of defence, helping to establish the Duntroon Military College and laying the foundations for the Royal Australian Navy. Following Deakin’s resounding electoral defeat to Labor in 1910, the Fusion Party eventually transformed into the Liberal Party. After Deakin resigned from the leadership in January 1913, Cook succeeded as leader. He then led the Liberal Party to victory in the May election and became Australia’s sixth prime minister.

  With only a one-seat majority, Cook’s government lasted only fifteen months. Unable to govern effectively, Cook engineered a double dissolution by introducing a bill abolishing preferential employment for trade union members in the public service, knowing
it would be rejected by the Senate. The parliament’s first-ever double dissolution was thus granted by the governorgeneral on 4 June 1914. In the subsequent September poll, Labor easily regained control of both Houses and Andrew Fisher became prime minister.

  During the election campaign, however, war broke out in Europe. In one of his last acts as prime minister, Cook pledged his government’s full support to the British Empire and immediately launched a recruiting campaign for the first Australian Imperial Force.

  Cook remained as opposition leader until William Morris Hughes’ push for conscription split the Labor Party in 1917. Hughes then formed a coalition with Cook’s Liberal Party to become the Nationalist Party. Under Hughes, Cook served as navy minister from 1917 to 1920 and as treasurer from 1920 to 1921. He also joined Hughes as one of Australia’s delegates at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

  In 1921 Cook retired from politics and replaced Fisher as Australia’s high commissioner in London and served as an Australian delegate to the League of Nations in the 1920s. On retirement in 1927, Cook returned to Australia where he died in Sydney some twenty years later on 30 July 1947.

  WILLIAM MORRIS HUGHES

  THE LITTLE DIGGER

  TERM

  27 October 1915-9 February 1923

  The longest-serving Australian parliamentarian, William ‘Billy’ Morris Hughes was one of the most memorable, colourful and controversial leaders this country has seen. He was the only prime minister to have led both the Labor and conservative parties and be expelled from both.

  Hughes was born in London on 25 September 1862 to Welsh parents Jane and William Hughes. After his mother’s death, when he was six years old, Hughes was raised by his aunt in Llandudno, Wales, where he attended school. In 1874 he returned to London to complete his schooling at St Stephen’s School, Westminster, becoming a student teacher there in 1879.