First Among Equals (5 page)

In 1907, at the age of 31, Scullin married Sarah McNamara, the Ballarat-born daughter of Irish immigrants. Three years later he won the federal seat of Corangamite at the general election, but lost it in 1913. After his defeat, Scullin became the editor
of the
Ballarat Evening Echo,
a position he held for eight years.

A strong opponent of conscription, Scullin actively campaigned against Hughes' 1916 and 1917 referendums. At the December 1916 Labor Party conference, Scullin moved a motion to expel party members who had supported conscription. The motion was carried, but the issue split the party and Hughes broke away to form the National Labor Party.

After unsuccessfully contesting a seat in the Victorian parliament in 1920, Scullin eventually reentered federal parliament as the Labor candidate for Yarra at a by-election on 18 February 1922. He retained the seat for 27 years. In 1928 he was elected as Labor leader following the resignation of Matthew Charlton. One year later, after the fall of the Bruce-Page coalition, Scullin and Labor swept into power in a landslide win. However, one week after he was officially sworn in as prime minister, the Wall Street stock market crashed, triggering the Great Depression.

Scullin reacted quickly to the economic emergency, implementing various measures such as abandoning the gold standard, ending assisted immigration and increasing import tariffs. But with unemployment spiralling and expenses rising, the government was unable to repay foreign loans. By mid-1930, when parliament resumed, unemployment had more than
doubled to 21 per cent. The Labor government was beset by internal conflict over how to respond to the crisis — then treasurer Ted Theodore favoured slow economic reflation, while other ministers, like Joseph Lyons, advocated traditional deflationary economic policies.

In July 1930, the government suffered a heavy loss when Theodore was forced to resign to face fraud charges in Queensland dating back to his time as premier of the state. Scullin subsequently took over the treasury portfolio. With alarm growing over Australia's over-borrowing, the Bank of England sent senior official Sir Otto Niemeyer to Australia to pull the country into line. Niemeyer met federal and state ministers in Melbourne in August 1930 and proposed severe cuts in wages, spending and living standards.

Scullin then went to the Imperial Conference in London, leaving the conservative Lyons as acting treasurer. However, unemployment continued to climb and his government began to disintegrate. In a dramatic meeting in October 1930, Lyons unsuccessfully tried to win caucus approval of the Niemeyer plan. Defeated, Lyons and his supporters resigned from cabinet in protest and formed the United Australia Party (UAP).

On returning home Scullin convinced caucus to reinstate Theodore as treasurer. However, problems soon arose when the Labor premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, and his followers made allegations
of corruption against Theodore. When Scullin refused their demand for an inquiry, the ‘Lang Labor' group aligned with the opposition, now led by Lyons, in passing a ‘no confidence' motion against the government, forcing an early election.

At the election on 19 December 1931, Scullin's government was defeated by a landslide, losing all but fourteen seats and the UAP, led by Lyons, came to power. After losing another election in 1934, Scullin resigned from the Labor leadership but remained in parliament, becoming an advisor to later Labor prime ministers John Curtin and Ben Chifley. Suffering from ill health, he retired in 1949. Scullin died at his home in Melbourne on 28 January 1953 at the age of 77.

JOSEPH ALOYSIUS LYONS

FROM DISSIDENT TO PRIME MINISTER

TERM

6 January 1932-7 April 1939

O
ne of the country's most genuinely likeable leaders, Joseph Aloysius Lyons notched up a number of firsts during his seven years as prime minister: he was the first and only Tasmanian to take office, and he was the first prime minister to win three consecutive elections. He was also the first prime minister to die in office, passing away just sixteen days short of breaking William Hughes' then-record term in office.

The fourth of eight children of Irish immigrants Ellen and Michael Lyons, Joseph Aloysius Lyons was born at Stanley in north-western Tasmania on 15 September 1879. At the age of nine Lyons was forced to work while he studied, after his father lost the family's savings on the 1887 Melbourne Cup and suffered a nervous breakdown. But with the financial assistance of his aunts he became a student teacher, completing his training in 1901.

In 1907 Lyons was offered a studentship at the newly opened Teachers' College in Hobart. While at the college Lyons began campaigning for improved working conditions for teachers and joined the Workers' Political League. Criticised by the Education Department for his activism, Lyons responded by resigning and standing for state parliament. In 1909, at the age of 30, Lyons entered state parliament, winning the seat of Wilmot. In 1914 he became deputy leader in John Earle's Labor government and was given
the treasury, education and railway portfolios.

On 28 April 1915 Lyons created a sensation when he married Enid Burnell, a seventeen-year-old Methodist. Despite an almost twenty-year age gap, they went on to become one the country's greatest political ‘powerhouse' couples, with Enid becoming the first woman elected to the House of Representatives in 1943.

When the Labor Party split over conscription in November 1916, Earle resigned and Lyons was elected to replace him. He then spent seven years as opposition leader before winning the premiership in 1923 when Walter Lee's Nationalists fell after several members deserted the party. Lyons served as the premier of Tasmania until 1928 when the Nationalists were returned to government by a narrow margin.

In 1929 Lyons quit state politics and contested the federal seat of Wilmot at the next general election. Winning comfortably, he joined Scullin's cabinet as postmaster-general and minister for works and railways. Lyons also served as treasurer while Scullin was overseas from August 1930 to January 1931. However, following a bitter battle with caucus over the implementation of severe cuts in salaries and government spending to aid economic recovery, and the reinstatement of Theodore as treasurer, Lyons resigned from cabinet on 26 January 1931 in protest.

In March 1931 he, along with other Labor Party
defectors, merged with the Nationalist Party to form the United Australia Party (UAP). When Scullin was forced to call an election following the move against him by dissident ‘Lang Labor' members, the UAP won a decisive victory and Lyons became the third former Labor minister to become a non-Labor prime minister.

Once in office, Lyons, who for the first three years of his tenure served as prime minister and treasurer, began cutting government spending and reducing debt. However, New South Wales premier, Jack Lang, defied the federal government and withheld interest payments on British loans. Forced to pay the state's massive debt, Lyons then passed the
Financial Agreement Enforcement Act
to recoup the money. When Lang persisted in his opposition, the stalemate was resolved when Lang was dismissed from office by the governor of New South Wales, Philip Game.

With the crisis now behind him, Lyons began campaigning for the 1934 election, becoming the first prime minister to take advantage of new technologies such as radio and airline travel. While Lyons was successful in securing power, he was forced to form a coalition with Page's Country Party.

Lyons then won a third term in 1937. However, with a new world war imminent, an ambitious Robert Menzies, who had been elected to parliament in 1934, began to manoeuvre against him. On 22 March 1939,
when cabinet decided to defer the implementation of its national insurance scheme, Menzies, who was now Lyons' deputy, resigned from cabinet. A few days later, on 7 April 1939, Lyons suffered a heart attack and died in a Sydney hospital, becoming the country's first prime minister to die while in office. Lyons was buried in Devonport, Tasmania, following a state funeral in Sydney.

O
n 3 September 1939, after German troops invaded Poland, Australia entered World War II. The war and its after-effects had a significant impact on the policies and tenures of the prime ministers — Page, Menzies (Menzies is covered in
Chapter 4
), Fadden, Curtin, Forde and Chifley — who served from 1939 to 1949.

With the onset of war the economy soon revived as wartime production increased the country's prosperity. However, after Joseph Lyons' death in April 1939, the coalition government began to show signs of internal strains, going through a quick succession of prime ministers: Page, Menzies and Fadden. At the same time the Labor Party, still reeling from the ‘Lang Labor' split, took some time to recover before securing power again in May 1940 with Curtin, followed by Forde and Chifley.

Overseas, Australian troops saw action in the Middle East and North Africa. In January 1941, they helped capture Tobruk in Cyrenaica (now Libya), which led to a siege that lasted more than 240 days. With the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the war spread to the Pacific. Four days after the fall of Singapore, it then arrived on Australia's shore with the bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942.

Much of the wartime period was dominated by Curtin's Labor government. In a remarkable turn, he declared that Australia, which had been traditionally tied to Britain, should now look to the United States for support. Thus, while he worked closely with US General Douglas MacArthur, Curtin angered British prime minister Winston Churchill by demanding the return of Australian troops. Sadly, however, the strains of war grew heavy and just two months after the war
in Europe ended on 8 May 1945 he became Australia's second prime minister to die in office.

In the remaining years to 1949, both Forde and Chifley's Labor governments worked to continue Curtin's legacy of social reform, introducing the national social security system and implementing a reduced 40-hour working week.

SIR EARLE CHRISTMAS GRAFTON PAGE

THE COUNTRY PARTY MAN

TERM

7 April 1939-26 April 1939

W
hile Earle Page's tenure as prime minister may have lasted only twenty days, his impact on the country's political development was far reaching. A shrewd politician, Page was the main architect of the coalition between conservative parties.

The fifth of eleven children of Charles and Annie Page, Earle Christmas Grafton Page was born in Grafton on the northern coast of New South Wales, on 8 August 1880. Page began his education at Grafton Public School before winning a scholarship to attend Sydney Boys High School. At the age of fifteen he began studying arts at the University of Sydney, transferring to medicine one year later after winning another scholarship. He graduated in 1901.

Page then spent two years working as a surgeon at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital before returning to Grafton in 1903 where he opened a small private hospital. Page appointed Ethel Blunt, whom he met at Prince Alfred, as matron of his new hospital and married her on 18 September 1906. By 1908 Page had begun to pursue other business interests, investing in land for a dairy farm and sawmill, near Kandanga in central Queensland.

Page was elected to the South Grafton Council in 1913 and became an active member of the Farmers and Settlers' Association. In 1915 he launched what became the Northern New South Wales Separation League, in
Grafton. Page also expanded his business interests further, becoming a part owner of the Grafton
Daily Examiner.
In 1916 Page joined the Army Medical Corps and served in military hospitals in Egypt, England and France. After being discharged in 1917, he resumed his political career and successfully contested the seat of Cowper in the 1919 federal election as a representative of the Farmers and Settlers' Association, which in 1920 became the Country Party.

After gaining the Country Party leadership in April 1921, Page campaigned for the abolition of tariffs, the protection of secondary industry and more government spending on rural development. Increasingly critical of the rural policies of Nationalist Party prime minister, William Morris Hughes, he campaigned for and succeeded in replacing Hughes with Stanley Bruce as prime minister in return for their support of the Nationalists when the Country Party won the balance of power in the 1922 election. Page then served as deputy prime minister and treasurer under Bruce until the Nationalists lost power in 1929.