Forgotten Billy Hughes: Vilified patriot or opportunist politician?
Australians have quickly moved on from the national hype and commemoration of Centenary of ANZAC following the zenith reached six months ago on the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.
The ambitious aspiration of government to sustain commemoration and engagement in honour of the ANZAC spirit has been proven devoid of a framework to guide today’s Australians in fully analysing the influence of those events in the journey of the nation at home and on the world stage.
Heroics of the original ANZACS were rightly front and centre in April but since then, scant focus has been given to those who moulded attitudes at home, encouraging young men to enlist for King and Empire and galvanising the support of families that would equally contribute to the spirit now recalled each ANZAC Day.
Last week’s anniversary of Billy Hughes becoming Australia’s seventh prime minister in 1915 passed without a mention, adding to apparent apathy among modern Australians in grasping all aspects of the nation’s history.
Hughes stirred a nation with firebrand patriotism in dark days of war, was cheered by the ANZACs and despised by the political party he left divided and shattered by his push for conscription in World War One.
William Morris Hughes, the one-time umbrella salesman and Socialist bookstore owner from Sydney, was a veteran of Federal Parliament a century ago, serving as deputy in Andrew Fisher’s Labor Government that came to power in the 1914 – the first double dissolution election held just weeks after war had been declared.
In under a year, the ambitious Hughes was prime minister. An ailing Fisher was forced to resign on 27 October 1915 as grim details from the Gallipoli debacle finally filtered back to Australia.
More than 150,000 Australians had already enlisted in World War One and 8000 had been killed or died in the Gallipoli conflict.
Centenary of ANZAC commemorations are focussing on those who served in foreign lands - young men like Lance-Corporal Henry Symmons, the 24-year-old shearer from Mulwala killed on the day Hughes became prime minister.
Symmons and his comrades have been respectfully acknowledged for shaping a spirit and national identity for the world to see.
But what of Hughes and the course he charted for Australia in World War One and the decades that followed? Victim of a vicious historical narrative from political enemies for a century? Victim of his own irascible personality that endeared and distanced him on a journey through numerous political parties before arriving at a political epiphany that sat opposed to Labor?
When Hughes ascended the Labor leadership, Australia’s political party system was embryonic. For much of the first decade of federation, debate at the temporary seat of government in Melbourne was mostly decided by MPs representing the interests of free traders and protectionists.
War would cement the party system and be the platform for Australia’s first political patriot in Hughes. His support for the war and determination to send reinforcements from Australia was to increasingly alienate the Catholic Church and its adherents within the Labor Party.
Hughes’ push for conscription polarised the nation and split his party but did not bring down the government. Hughes simply led 23 other MPs and senators of the Labor caucus in 1916 and formed a new political party with George Pearce’s Liberals.
The haters of Hughes have since suggested he fled his West Sydney seat to country Victoria to avoid defeat in the next election.
But it was the foolish taunts of Labor’s MP from Bendigo that brought Hughes to the rich goldfields region when Alfred Hampson challenged the prime minister to stand against him on the issue of conscription. Hughes may have twice failed in conscription referenda but he consigned Hampson to the political dustbin with a 12.5 per cent swing.
Those same haters would say that Hughes abandoned Bendigo five years later when he returned to Sydney, fearing a loss in the regional seat following a redistribution. Whether through genuine affection or engineered by the prime minister, electors in the seat of North Sydney, where today’s constituency is about to choose replacement for Joe Hockey , petitioned him to return to the Harbour City.
All Hughes lost following that 1922 election was the prime ministership in a pique with the Country Party. His old seat of Bendigo would be retained by the party Hughes had founded, the Nationalists, for another seven years.
It is the influence and inspiration to a nation, families at home and men fighting abroad, that should define Hughes in modern viewing of history. Hughes was to be a dogged champion of the Aussie Diggers throughout the war and the remainder of his record 51 years in the Parliament, being anointed with the sobriquet The Little Digger.
It was Hughes who took Australia at the world table when the leaders gathered for the 1919 Peace Conference, where he said: "I speak for 60 000 [Australian] dead".
Hughes was a masterful orator, skills of persuasive eloquence cformed at rowdy street corner meetings in 19th century Sydney and refined at town hall meetings.
His 1917 election speech “Win the War” was simply themed but compelling against the backdrop of sniping from his former Labor Party and Catholic leaders.
Two years later he successfully harnessed emotions war and the desire for new hope in an election speech that talked up the new Aussie spirit: “I appeal to you to be guided by that spirit of Australian nationalism which animated our soldiers through the long hours of terrible trial and led them at length to victory. On the welfare of Australia depends the welfare of every citizen, producer and consumer, employer and employee. Let our watchword be Australia, and as our splendid boys have fought for it and saved it let us all live and work for it. In this spirit the war was won; in this spirit and in this spirit only can we win the peace.”
Billy Hughes would never again lead a party to electoral success after 1919. But he remained in the Parliament serving as a minister, party leader or mere backbencher a further 33 years.
He had spats and quarrels with every successor to his centre-right Nationalist Party. He voted to bring down Stanley Bruce’s government in 1929 and was expelled from the party, suffered a similar fate similar fate in 1944 when Hughes remained a member of Curtin’s Advisory War Council after the UAP withdrew support. The man once trusted by the nation now struggled for trust among his colleagues.
After a century, residual distrust and entrenched hatred of a one-time prime minister Labor still calls “the rat” should not shroud mature understanding for the war-time influence and legacy of Billy Hughes that lives in the ANZAC Spirit.
