Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, wish to make a few preliminary observations about the motion moved by the member for Moreton. My observations are preliminary for three reasons: firstly, that the research that I did over the weekend is necessarily incomplete; secondly, that research raises as many questions as it provides answers, so far as I am concerned; and, thirdly, a general reluctance on my part to revisit matters of a different age—this one now almost a century ago—and a preference to allow history to decide these matters as people see it in the future.

However, I want to place my remarks in context and that context is the role of Billy Hughes. Hughes was obviously a complex character. At best, he was a fierce nationalist and a defender of the British Empire. But he was also prepared, at the time, to fuel the fires of sectarianism in a way that few other people in this country have done. As I wrote in my recently published book on Joseph Lyons:

No issue since Federation has caused as much political turmoil in Australia as the conscription debates during the First World War. Neither the Vietnam War nor the Whitlam Government dismissal, two divisive events of more recent times, generated the bitter passions that erupted in 1916 and 1917 when Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes proposed to introduce military conscription … The Great War also exposed an undercurrent of ugly sectarianism in Australia which was exacerbated by the conflation of the troubles in Ireland and the war against Germany. In 1913, the Irish Home Rule Bill had passed the House of Commons three times, overcoming the constitutional block of the House of Lords, but it was effectively ignored by British military forces in Ireland and the Asquith government, leading to the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent execution of its leaders. To many Irish nationalists in Australia, respect for English constitutionality was shattered.

In 1917, Billy Hughes seized upon a statement made by the then Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, to establish a sectarian issue about which he could rally support for his second attempt to introduce conscription. Dr HV Evatt's book Australian labour leader: the story of W.A. Holman and the labour movement, a biography of the New South Wales Premier William Holman and a supporter of Hughes, sets out the strategy of the Little Digger—and it was clear:

Mr Hughes made his fight definitely an anti-Mannix fight, as a matter of tactics. Mannix, he said, is against the British Empire. Very well, then, we are against Mannix. At one time it looked as if the whole organisation of the campaign was very much less concerned with the defeat of the Hun than with that of the turbulent Catholic prelate.

Hughes, as I said, unleashed a torrent of sectarianism that swept the nation. Large rallies across Australia often erupted into chaos and violence. Speakers were targeted for physical attack.

My father, who was born into an Anglican family in 1911, recalled the bitter divisions and recriminations in a small Victorian country town during his childhood. Indeed, at that time in my electorate, a place where people of German heritage had immigrated, many were rounded up and detained. German place names were changed. Hence, in my electorate, Wilhelm and Bismarck streets and German Lane were renamed King, Victoria and George streets. The fact that these original street names had been chosen by Lutherans who had settled in Australia after escaping Prussia's rising militarism from the 1860s was lost in the fervour of the times.

We know this issue split the Labor Party nationally. In November 1916, two weeks after losing the first conscription vote, Billy Hughes walked out of the Labor Party caucus, taking 23 supporters with him. With support from the liberals, Hughes formed a new Nationalist government. The following May he won the 1917 election and subsequently introduced the second conscription referendum. So determined was Hughes to pass the proposal that he censored the no case. Despite this, the proposal was lost by a larger margin than the first referendum was, partly because the news of the horror of the great world war—a century ago on the Somme, at places like Fromelles and Pozieres, thousands of young Australians were killed in bombardments—was reaching home. Indeed, in that second referendum, a majority of Australians on active service voted against it, a reversal of the position in the 1916 referendum.

So these matters need to be taken in the context of the times. They were times which we hope are not repeated so far as the conduct of politics in Australia is concerned. That is why they are preliminary remarks about the issue.

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