The Annus Mirabilis of a Subdued Radical

I am going forward, but in a different direction.

—J.A. Lyons, in his final speech as a Labor MHR, Canberra, Friday March 13, 1931

The thirty-year political career (from 1909 to 1939) of Australia’s tenth prime minister, Joseph Lyons, is one of the more underestimated in that catalogue. The Liberals fail to regard him as one of their own, in their cultivated ignorance of conservative political leaders before Menzies, and Labor has its own pantheon—Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, and now, according to Rudd’s address to the 2009 ALP national conference, the long-neglected Fisher. This collection necessarily excludes heretics like Lyons, who to many on that side of politics remains the “Judas” that he was branded in March 1931 when he abandoned Labor.

If Norman Lindsay was right in his belief that the nourishment of prejudice was as good a reason as any to get up in the morning, then those hostile to Joe Lyons continue to spring from their beds. He continues to be portrayed in some circles as the quintessential petit bourgeois “little man”, who became the “marionette” of big business at the time of the great capitalist crisis in 1930–31, and was subsequently foisted upon a desperate electorate by media kingmakers such as Keith Murdoch.[1] This was the interpretation to which some in the labour movement clung in 1931 and their grasp on it has not weakened since. Like all such myths, it contains just enough of the truth to make it plausible, but the political trajectory of Joseph Lyons was not simply one of a “deeply moral and conservative” politician from the Tasmanian potato-plots being fixed upon by a shadowy circle of Melbourne businessmen in an attempt to find a saviour for their system during the crisis of Australian capitalism.[2]

Lyons the man and the politician was more complex than that. A broader examination suggests that he crossed the Rubicon in 1931 on his own terms, remaining there under the same conditions—on the right bank of politics, but not without a wistful glance backwards and not without the continued avowal, and retention, of his earlier sentiments. It was not a comfortable position, and Lyons suffered in consequence, but as prime minister (1932 to 1939) he remained a subdued radical, still searching for a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, that is, a path of consensus and moderation, drawing strength from all political quarters. This was an impossible dream, but one that he had followed since the 1920s and a preferable one in 1930–31 to the looming nightmare of national disintegration, when it seemed to the economist L.F. Giblin and others that Lyons was “our last hope of a peaceful solution”.[3]

Given the centenary last April of Lyons’s acceptance of the chance of politics, it seems an appropriate time to re-examine his most remarkable year, the annus mirabilis of 1931. On New Year’s Day, Lyons was acting Treasurer in the Scullin Labor government, but besieged from within his own party. Before the end of January he had resigned from cabinet; before the end of February he had absented himself from caucus, further distancing himself from his party comrades. Defection came before the Ides of March and Lyons now found himself the unofficial leader of a cross-bench rump of six former Labor members with nowhere to go. Yet by the end of that same month he was the privately-designated leader of the disparate non-Labor forces in the country, although no longer himself a member of any political party. This murky position persisted through the course of April, until he was elected Leader of the Opposition in May, now nominally at the head of a “United Australia Movement”, but still independent in character and by disposition. Before the year was out, he had extensively campaigned throughout the country both before and after the calling of an early poll in late November. Finally, on December 19, 1931, Lyons became prime minister-elect at the expense of the party in whose cabinet he had served only eleven months before.

It was a remarkable comeback, executed within the space of a calendar year; one that has never been equalled in Australian political history. The circumstances of this extraordinary odyssey are a testament to the personality of the man at the centre of the storm. Lyons would go on to leave his mark during his prime ministership—there would be notable accomplishments in many areas, including foreign affairs, where he was as eager to find a “third way” on the international stage as he had been on the domestic—but 1931 remained his annus mirabilis.[4]

Towards the end of his life, Lyons accepted that his achievements in 1931 were the most remarkable, in that he had, by his own estimation, “saved Australia from ruin”.[5] This myth too contains enough of the truth to be plausible and, exaggerated though it is, it captures the essence of 1931 better than the alternative drama of a Labor “rat” who denied party for personal ambition.

 

I

Lyons was not a born moderate, or “fence-sitter”, as Murdoch later branded him. As a child in north-western Tasmania in the 1880s, he was inspired by the radicalism of the old country through his Irish-Catholic mother, at the expense of the colonial drama of his native-born father. He told the London People in 1935: “From her I learned all my early radicalism. Her stories of the struggles in her native Ireland fired my boyish imagination.”[6]

Such principles, reinforced by the hero-worship of Gladstone, stood behind the young man’s first political stance—a characteristically unpopular one of conscience—when he opposed the imperialist adventure of the Boer War at the turn of the century. As late as 1935, Prime Minister Lyons unashamedly reminded those at the imperial centre of his view that the South African war had been an error.[7]

Soon after his political initiation, Lyons helped to form a branch of the Workers’ Political League at remote Smithton, where he was now teaching, and by 1908 he was associated with the ALP’s Wilmot division, the electorate which he subsequently served for thirty years and which now bears his name. This fuelled the ire of an authoritarian Education Department, as did the young teacher’s unauthorised correspondence with a local newspaper on the political issues of the day.[8] Such breaches of conduct brought about bureaucratic censure and even parliamentary excoriation, but his opponents soon found, as did many others in later times, that Joe Lyons was not a man who would easily abandon the dictates of his conscience.

By April 1909, the rebellious teacher had become a radical Labor MP in the parliament of Tasmania. Here he became a noted exponent of measures of social improvement, particularly on matters of education and the welfare of rural children from backgrounds such as his own, for the Lyons psyche had been deeply marked by the experience of childhood poverty. Decades later he also accounted for his early radicalism by reference to “the hard school of poverty in which I found myself, [which] established my sympathy with labouring folks”.[9] Although such sentimentalism was later dismissed by Labor critics as “sob-stuff”, it was genuine.[10]

Lyons even addressed the 1913 state ALP conference by calling for the overturning of the present social structure in favour of one more favourable to the workers. Soon after, in January 1914, he became the deputy leader of the party in time for Labor’s first taste of government in Tasmania, which came about in April. As Minister of Education, the poacher had now become gamekeeper and a progressive program of improvement for teachers and schoolchildren went forward under Lyons’s supervision, despite the great madness in France.[11]

The rising minister had no more of a taste for the imperial war of 1914 than the young activist had displayed for the last one in 1899. He was notably critical of the treatment of the Easter 1916 rebels in Ireland, and the prospect of conscription to feed the sausage-machines of European war mortified this gentle man. Accordingly, he played the leading role in the “No” campaigns of 1916 and 1917, now as the Leader of the Opposition, although both polls returned “Yes” results in Tasmania. Unsuccessful too as a federal candidate in 1919, Lyons, disillusioned with the parliamentary game, contemplated a career outside politics—not the first time he would consider withdrawal at a time of stress. This disillusionment also led to some interest in paths as diverse as Bolshevism and the One Big Union, in a search for alternatives to a system that Lyons was now convinced had failed: “New methods,” he said in March 1921, “must be devised for the new day.”[12] However, it was business as usual when the conservative Lee administration imploded in 1923 and Lyons had the Tasmanian premiership thrust upon him, at first in a minority government, later claiming it as his own electoral prize in 1925.

The years 1923 to 1928 were spent administering an indigent community, demanding practical solutions rather than any resort to grand, ideological proposals—it was in this environment that a now subdued radical evolved the “consensus” style which was to cost his reputation so dearly within the party. Consensus was to circumvent the political divisions that he thought were aggravated by a needlessly adversarial parliamentary system. It was a path that he would follow for the remaining years of his life and which he would later champion in international relations as “appeasement”. In November 1931, when preaching consensus on a federal level, he recalled the earlier Tasmanian model:

It is no new thing for me to advocate, as I did so with happy results in my own State, when we were up against it. I called into consultation from every part of the country and from every industry men who had made a success in their own callings.[13]

Consensus was above party politics. From these years onwards he displayed the sense of righteousness that so attracted many, whilst perplexing others. By June 1928, ex-Premier Lyons was committed to what he now called the “cheerful philosophy” that the welfare of state, not party, was foremost.[14]

Consensus did not, however, carry so much weight in Canberra from October 1929, although his reputation secured Lyons an immediate place in the new Scullin cabinet as Postmaster-General. The economy was the chief focus of public life during this period of financial crisis and it was here that Lyons, as acting Treasurer from August 1930, came out of provincial obscurity into full national prominence, especially following his stance in the last months of that year against suggestions from Jack Lang and others of the repudiation of overseas debt. Repudiation, Lyons insisted, must be resisted “in the National Interest” and “for what is believed to be right”—an early indication that he was following federally his former Tasmanian practice of putting the party second.[15]

With Scullin overseas, the man who had formerly eschewed confrontation now entered into the drama of party factional warfare. Lyons may have been reluctant to do so, but he was stiffened by the huge response that he had received in favour of his campaign for voluntary loan conversions, in order to lower interest rates, in the last months of 1930.[16] The acclaim of less selfish investors, of whom around 100,000 subscribed to the revised loan, was one thing, but it did not earn Lyons much support in caucus, which had already rejected his economic plan of October 30, 1930. This proposal, approved by economists like Giblin, had called for a 10 per cent cut in wages, a super-tax on incomes and the release of Commonwealth bank credit.[17]

Such supping-with-the-devil of consensus earned the acting Treasurer only a deeper enmity among the wilder men of the caucus. Following a stormy caucus meeting of November 6, 1930, that again rejected consensus, Lyons and the fifteen others who were outvoted by twenty-two of their colleagues resolved that “in view of the vote they would consider their position”.[18] Lyons did so in the parliament on December 4, reflecting: “I have thought for a long time that in this time of crisis we should put the interests of Australia before those of party.”[19] However, it was not until Scullin’s return from overseas that he resigned from cabinet, on January 29, 1931, over the reincarnation of the tainted “Red Ted” Theodore as Treasurer—a principled stand against a policy reversal for which Lyons received widespread praise, including from the later habitually hostile Age.[20]

Lyons, now a backbencher for the first time since 1914, was down but not out, and he remained resolute on the need of “every true Australian” to take “a national and not a sectional view of the situation”.[21] This further indicated the sense of righteousness and the dissatisfaction with his “sectional” party comrades, as he now called them. But the backbencher and his associates made one last attempt in caucus on February 18 and 19 to block the despised rival’s fiduciary proposals, which Lyons later described as “fantastic”, “dangerous”, “cranky”, “amazing”, “mad” and as “demented schemes of inflation”.[22] The Lyons bloc was again defeated; this time by twenty-nine votes for Theodore to seventeen against, as caucus had not altered its estimations since the bitterness of November 1930.

There now seemed nowhere for Lyons to go in the ALP, unless he were to remain in what he clearly thought of as a madhouse, and he accordingly absented himself from further caucus meetings, crossing the Rubicon in the parliament on Friday, March 13, as the culmination of a week-long debate on an opposition motion of “Want of Confidence” in the Scullin government.[23]

The speech that Lyons delivered on that day was a remarkable personal and political apologia, prepared in association with Ambrose Pratt, a Melbourne journalist formerly associated with Billy Hughes’s short-lived “Australian Party”.[24] Lyons was clearly pained in its delivery, referring to his “deep pain and sharp mental suffering” in breaking the “associations of a life time”. The speech came near to the twenty-second anniversary of his first campaign in Wilmot, which he had undertaken, he said, “to serve the workers”, whose interests he now believed were best served by his defection. He knew that there was no going back: “I have kept travelling along the road which I started, and I intend to keep to that road whatever the consequences may be.”

Lyons put forward an extensive critique of Scullin’s leadership, whilst characteristically denying any change in his warm personal estimation of the Prime Minister. This warmth was not extended to Theodore; Lyons resorted to Aesop in order to contrast further his rival’s “schemes” with his own “honest, straightforward methods” by citing the cautionary tale of “the Fox and the Cat”—hardly profound economic theory, but effective, homespun politics.

He closed this watershed speech with another characteristically folksy note by pleading for a change of economic course to ameliorate the suffering of starving “women and kiddies”, mindful of his own ever-growing brood: “I would not like to see them suffer as are thousands of other kiddies in Australia to-day, while we are talking about these visionary schemes.” The old spectre of childhood poverty had clearly not been exorcised and Lyons would often return to this theme in coming months.

This process of “automatically disassociating” himself from old allegiances was, he concluded, carried out with the “utmost regret and with very unpleasant feelings”—even a sentimentalist like Lyons, however, could not bring himself to employ Pratt’s suggested conclusion of “my heart is aching”. Nevertheless, the regret expressed on March 13 certainly lingered for the remainder of his life and some of his erstwhile Labor comrades would nourish “unpleasant feelings”, even though there was a widespread recognition that Lyons had been “driven out” of the party by Scullin’s behaviour towards him.[25]

Frank Brennan MHR provided the immediate Labor response by denouncing the “egotistical”, (false) “political apostle” as a “traitor” to his party, perceptively noting that Lyons seemed unwise to have joined “any political party” at all.[26] Eddie Ward, the newly elected (Lang) Labor member for East Sydney, added his own particular bile to the debate by dismissing Lyons’s exposition as “hysterical utterances”.[27] Brennan’s critique was the more accurate of the two, for he correctly noted that party loyalty necessarily demanded the sacrifice of personal interests, although Ward was closer to home than he realised, for Lyons was a man who suffered great internal stress in moments of crisis. Pratt would observe only a few days later that he seemed unduly sensitive to criticism; in fact Lyons had already endured a state of nervous exhaustion in 1916–17 and would exhibit the symptoms of another in late 1938. By his own admission, he had been in an agitated state of mind on March 13—his wife Enid still recalled the “agony” three decades later.[28]

The career of this “Judas” now seemed over. As the unofficial leader of a cross-bench rump of six former Labor members (in a House of seventy-five), Lyons’s often voiced desire to return to Tasmanian tranquillity seemed a likely outcome of the next federal poll, due by November 1932. He was downcast immediately following March 13, an understandable reaction by an especially sociable man following the severance of the ties of his political life. It will probably never be known what it was that drove Lyons over the precipice, but the assertive influence of the materfamilias, Enid, was regarded by some contemporaries, including Scullin, as the decisive factor.[29]

Lyons himself soon came privately to regret his actions. Once the Labor government abandoned Theodore’s financial adventurism and began to implement the more conservative “Premiers’ [or Economy] Plan” in July 1931, the defector thought his self-immolation unnecessary, but the ever-persuasive Enid soon “straightened him out”, to use her own revealing description.[30] The husband’s regret was not displayed publicly at any time in 1931, although the leaders of the business and conservative politics, who had lent their ears to Lyons’s political apologia in March, soon had cause privately to note an annoying level of ambivalence and procrastination.

Clearly, any decision made by Lyons in March 1931 had not been without some domestic duress, for Enid Lyons later admitted: “If he had done anything else I should have been ashamed of him.”[31] She was always a hard woman to disappoint. But before “Honest Joe” could wallow in regret, he had been thrown a lifeline from the other side of the parliamentary chamber and he grasped it, though not with the eagerness that might have been expected by some who had already offered their counsel.

 

II

The speech of March 13 offered no indication of future direction and had seemed like a conclusion—but it proved to be a beginning. Lyons had already been introduced to a circle of Melbourne businessmen towards the end of 1930, the so-called “Group”—Ambrose Pratt; Staniforth Ricketson, stockbroker and former Tasmanian journalist; C. Norris; Sir John Higgins; Kingsley Henderson of the Argus; and Robert Menzies KC, the young Victorian politician. Some members of this circle had indicated a desire for political reform before Lyons’s defection by forming the so-called “Were committee” in February 1931, establishing an “All for Australia League” which called for “setting aside personal and sectional interests in a spirit of patriotism” and for “a unity of purpose amongst citizens and organisations to meet the economic and social crisis”.[32] This was an early example of what has been termed “anti-political political thought”, the belief that the “sectional” divisions promoted by the adversarial party system could be set aside by the construction of a “movement”, not a party, that could then draw the nation together in some unspecified manner. Lyons was to prove a master in the exploitation of such vague sentiment.[33]

The League had been looking for a leader and, by the time of the national conference at Adelaide in mid-April, thought it had found one.[34] Keith Murdoch thought he had found a leader even before the defection of March 13, and “Honest Joe” had already been portrayed by the Herald’s cartoonist as a rock of honesty, shattering the waves of repudiation.[35] However, any designs that these “non-political” groups and Murdoch may have had for the future leadership of the anti-Labor forces faced two main obstacles. John Latham, the capable Leader of the Opposition and leader of the Nationalists, would be reluctant to step down at a time when his prime ministerial prospects were enhanced by a split in the governing party; more importantly, Lyons was playing hard-to-get. The second obstacle was the more pressing; there could be no anointment of Lyons against his will. The weeks between March 13 and May 7 marked the smoothing out, behind closed doors, of these obstacles.

On March 18, Latham had secured a written assurance from the man of the moment that he would serve under Latham in some unspecified capacity. It seems clear that Lyons did not yet envisage himself as the alternative prime minister, whatever his wife may have thought about his “duty” to lead the opposition.[36] As so often, his position was lacking in detail, and thus fluid, and by March 26 the executive of the Nationalist Party sought its own resolution. Accordingly, meetings were held on the following day at the National Union headquarters in Melbourne and at Latham’s Malvern home to clarify Lyons’s views on tariffs and arbitration, as well as to discuss the leadership. There were frequent visitors at Malvern that day, including the MPs Lyons, Pearce and Fenton at 2.30 p.m. Here, Latham insisted that he “held the leadership in trust for party” and met no opposition to that view. His position was undermined, however, once Knox and Willis, power-brokers of the “National Council” organisational wing, arrived in the evening, accompanied by Paterson of the Country Party and again by the veteran West Australian senator, Pearce. Three members of the Group, Menzies, Pratt and Ricketson, soon arrived in reinforcement.[37] Once Lyons too returned, an outgunned Latham agreed to “co-operation”.

When the others had left, Lyons remained in conversation with Latham into the night, and it seems that some sort of leadership deal was stitched up.[38] That deal involved Latham falling on his sword. Pratt, perhaps the most fervent champion of Lyons’s elevation, sent Latham a private note on the following day: “Long after current happenings—memorable & disciplined as they are—have been forgotten, the splendid patriotism of your action & example to your countrymen will be remembered and honoured in Australia.”[39] It proved a false prophecy.

Nevertheless, Latham faced disappointment with determination and he replied that he had come to accept the need for personal sacrifice out of a sense of “national emergency”.[40] Lyons issued his own “Seven Points” statement of principles, dated March 27 and certainly discussed at Malvern that day, which called for measures that were studiously “fair” to all elements of the community. This document was vintage Lyons in its citation of the need, for example, of the “protection of the worker by industrial tribunals” alongside the “protection of the employer against undue interference with business management”.[41] Unlike his father, who had squandered the family fortune in the late 1880s by an all-or-nothing Melbourne Cup wager, the son was having a bet both ways. A reflective Latham, who saw the Points only after they had been composed, rightly thought them “vague” and happily accepted Lyons’s wish that they be issued under Lyons’s name alone in order to distinguish himself from the Nationalists.[42] More revealing than these principles, however, was the accompanying personal statement by Lyons:

Our supreme need is for a truly Commonwealth Government that will be free from the crippling fetters of the party system—that will know no class or creed—that will confess special allegiance to no section of the community—that will set the welfare of the nation high above all partisan considerations—that will equally protect and promote the just and real interests of all members of the body politic … My mates and I have been Labor men all our lives. We have no party today. Conscience has compelled us to transfer our allegiance from a party we long served to the people of Australia because so many of the people of Australia are in dire and dreadful need … Earnestly, humbly, sincerely, I invite the members of all existing political parties and all private citizens who think as I am thinking to sink their differences and unite in one great Commonwealth movement to restore the integrity and prosperity of Australia and to banish the curse of unemployment from our beloved country. I have but to add that I am prepared to serve such a movement gladly, with all my energy and in any capacity.[43]

           

In Lyons’s mind, the old party system was dead. By April 10 he admitted to the press that he was now prepared to lead a “united” opposition.[44] The Australian public, however, was not informed until April 17 that the incumbent Leader of the Opposition intended to step down in Lyons’s favour, a “self-sacrifice” for which his party now thanked him.[45] Clearly the decision to go had been a painful and protracted one for Latham, but the man who had done much to bring Lyons’s virtues to a wider audience, Keith Murdoch, offered the deposed leader further consolation:

I should have been delighted to see you Prime Minister & maybe will still do so, but I felt forced to the conclusion that Lyons meant an addition of great strength in the electorate just now. He will be able to do little without you and “your firm men.”[46]

Whatever Murdoch thought, it was not “firm men” of whom Lyons was in need, but a firm political base. He was now a putative leader, but the leader of what? Despite Latham’s best efforts at negotiation, there was still no agreement on a “united party”, until the (still vague) “Melbourne Resolution” of April 19 in favour of a “United Australia Movement”.[47] It remained unlikely that Lyons would ever join the Nationalists, given his residual, professed Labor sentiments.

There also remained an element in the Nationalist organisations that did not want him as leader. One such opponent was G. Pullen, the organisational chief of the Tasmanian National Federation, who thought in May that only a “temporary agreement” should have been reached with Lyons, to whom he felt “a very great opposition”.[48] More dangerous was the hostility of the embittered Nationalist campaign director Archdale Parkhill in New South Wales, who thought the new prophet no more than a “useful platform speaker”.[49]

It was not therefore surprising that Lyons remained convinced that his best prospects against Scullin were as the head of some “independent campaign” outside of the old Nationalists, perhaps outside of any party. On March 29, even after the Malvern leadership deal, a still-procrastinating Lyons had expressed his opposition to any “new party”.[50] Most probably Joseph Lyons had had his fill of parties, but clearly he needed to ride some sort of parliamentary vehicle if he was to pursue the studiously even-handed policies of the “Seven Points”.[51] Latham the political clinician had wanted a clear structure to take on the new demands; Lyons characteristically preferred vagueness. The new, hastily concocted vehicle that evolved in the course of 1931 was to suit Lyons in style and structure.

The resulting “United Australia Party” (sometimes “Movement”) was an ad hoc association that centred on the cult of Lyons’s political persona, attempting to combine disparate political forces until the Scullin government could be removed and the economy restored. It was to be the political realisation of the third way—consensus—that Lyons had advocated for the best part of a decade. He was most insistent for the remainder of his life that it was not a “party” in the traditional sense, but a “national movement”, which thereby eradicated the need for any subservience to sectional interests. This utopian claim also freed him from the obligations incumbent on those lesser parliamentarians who did lead such older parties, for Lyons now saw himself as a man with a mission, above party and endorsed by God to save his country. An important element of Lyons’s concept of national unity was his insistence that any united movement would not be a transformed, rebranded conservative or “Tory” party, but one that could accommodate adherents from all of the old parties, including Labor defectors.

 

III

 

It was not until May 5, following an all-party conference in Melbourne, that such aspirations could begin to be realised. The Argus of that day was optimistic: “It is not expected that any insuperable difficulties will arise to prevent an alliance, and there is every prospect of a suitable working arrangement being reached.” It was, with only the Country Party proving obdurate. A “United Australia Movement” central council was established with Henderson, an Argus director, as president and Ricketson as secretary. Lyons himself was acknowledged as the “Leader”, outside of this administrative structure. [52] The “suitable working arrangement” was soon translated into the parliament when Lyons was anointed as parliamentary leader of a merged, or “fused”, opposition in Canberra on May 7 following a party room vote by the parliamentary wing of the Nationalists.

One of the more extraordinary features of this annus mirabilis was the fact that it had been necessary to issue a formal invitation to a non-member to attend the very party meeting that then anointed him as leader of a new, loosely rebranded party, the UAP; Joseph Lyons was thus never a member of the Nationalist Party. It would, however, be some time before this political “work in progress” became a unified national party worthy of its name, if it ever did so. Its subsequent cohesion owed more to Lyons’s personality and reputation than to any firm organisational structure.

The birthday of the new parliamentary grouping was also marked by another unprecedented feature, when the leader spoke immediately to members about the need to subordinate party loyalties that were only hours old. In a repeat of the sentiments expressed in his March 27 statement, Lyons pointed out the unique nature of his custodianship: “In my work as leader of the United Opposition I shall have constantly in mind the earnest conviction that personal and party ends must be entirely subordinated to the national welfare.” [53] His first public statement as Leader of the Opposition, issued on the same day, pursued the same theme.[54] This truly was extraordinary “anti-political political thought”; a stance that would have seemed ridiculous if assumed by any leading political figure at the time other than by the champion of consensus.

Now that the position of “Honest Joe” had at last been stabilised, a period of phony war against Labor began with an immediate Motion of Want of Confidence in the parliament on May 8, where Lyons made it clear that he continued to occupy the moral high ground. Despite interjections suggesting that his first speech as opposition leader was written for him by Murdoch, he immediately boasted of his Tasmanian record of economic recovery and, turning to the future, referred to the “call to me … from Australia … the call of duty”.[55] The messianic streak was also further unveiled: “I shall go on with my mission, if God vouchsafes to me health and strength, and shall play my part in restoring prosperity and progress to Australia.” Yet Lyons was still able to refer to himself as “a staunch Labour man” and was prepared to demonstrate it by further advocating the reduction of interest rates, contrary to the policy of the old Nationalist Party and to the wishes of Ricketson, secretary of the new UAM. [56] The honourable gentlemen opposite were, not surprisingly, unimpressed by this advocacy of equality of sacrifice or by any other claim from this “Heaven-sent saviour”, as Scullin described his new opponent in the same debate. The electorate was to prove more responsive, even if the party structure of the new opposition remained opaque.

Whatever the organisational vagaries, the popular reception accorded to “Honest Joe” throughout the country in the coming months proved stupendous by any method of evaluation devised by political scientists. The Argus had referred on April 11 to a “Triumphal Tour”, a tag that could be applied to the unofficial and official campaign tours that occupied the new leader for the remainder of the year. In the meantime, the “Movement” succeeded in forging some measure of unity in Victoria and South Australia, where the “All for Australia League” and the “Citizens’ League”, for example, had invited Lyons to become “our Leader” at the head of “one great non-partisan organization under a common name”.[57]

But the call for unity failed to strike home in some states even on the issue of nomenclature, let alone on policy. In New South Wales, for example, the League supported Lyons’s leadership, but it remained determined at its May conference to maintain a separate identity by refusing a merger with a united federal “Movement”. The best its leader, A. Gibson, could offer any UAP aspirant was “electoral support”, and even then the League considered running its own parliamentary candidates. As it was, the electors of New South Wales were presented in the December poll with the compromise of “UAP” candidates who remained members of the Nationalists under Bavin.[58] No fewer than nine separate conferences between the Nationalists, the Country Party and the “Sane Democracy League” in New South Wales failed to secure the united opposition sought by the obviously misnamed “Unity Council”; negotiations continued until January 1933.[59]

In the end, this disunity did not seem to matter to the electors, even to those in Wilmot who enjoyed the luxury of a Nationalist candidate (the irreconcilable Pullen) standing against their own distinguished UAP aspirant. Most seemed satisfied with the explanation given in Murdoch’s Herald editorial of December 3, 1931, that “Mr. Lyons is the leader of a movement rather than of a political party organisation.” Although this was an accurate enough observation, it also seemed to be making a virtue of necessity.

 

IV

 

The Melbourne Resolution of April 19 gave an early indication that the new movement was a broad church that could encompass the likes of Lyons and his former Labor “mates”. It was, said Gibson, not anti-Labor, but against “inflation, repudiation & communism”.[60] Lyons himself had similarly welcomed the “All for Australia League” earlier in the month as “a refuge for large numbers of moderate Labor people. They will not identify themselves with any of the older parties.”[61]

These perspectives provided an elegant summary of the electoral marketing of the new organisation and of what today would be called its “target audience”. Traditional conservative voters would never support a Lang or a Theodore. Labor defectors were thus the key to electoral success for the new movement. Once Lyons had been elected Leader of the Opposition, Captain E. Bagot of the South Australian Citizens’ League, an adherent and pioneer of anti-party sentiment since October 1930, immediately expressed his concern lest the new fused grouping of Nationalists and others be seen as a “consolidation of anti-Labor forces”.[62] Rather, Bagot preferred Lyons to be seen as a convenor of moderates from both sides of the party system and from those outside it: “I do think that you could do what no other person could do.” Lyons agreed and had told the parliament about his non-partisan “mission” on May 8. Other Australians were to hear a lot about that mission over the next few months, with particular intensity following Labor’s parliamentary implosion at the hands of the Langites on November 25.

The subsequent early election campaign leading to the poll of December 19 was a brief one, but the “phony” election campaign had been long under way. Lyons had already been cheered throughout the country at stupendous public meetings in all capitals and most major regional centres for months on end. His themes were consistent throughout. There were repeated calls for the unity of moderates in the new “United Australia Movement”, the name which he consistently preferred to “party” and which he hoped, as he said at Toowoomba on November 3, would “never become a Tory party”. This was the unity of “every section” of the community in the national, not sectional, interest.[63] Lyons now also commended to a wider audience his old Tasmanian practices of consultation and consensus:

We have to get together because the problems ahead of us are difficult, and we can only solve them by getting together … I hope that policy [of consultation] will be applied to Australia. We are all Australians and the problem is ours. When we get together those sharp divisions which have taken place in the past will exist no longer.[64]

He also sought to stress his proletarian origins and associations in regional electorates, reminding Queenslanders, for example, that he had been part of the fight against injustices, “fighting for a fair deal for the workers”:

Any party that fails to take cognisance of the interests of the workers may be in office for a year or two, but it must eventually fail, for the workers are in the majority in this country. If we only prove to them we are their friends then we need have no fear about the future.

In Ipswich on November 6, a capacity audience was told that “he owed to the followers of the Labor party every position he had ever held in the public life of this country, and if he thought he was doing anything to the detriment of the working class he would get out of politics immediately”.[65] The nasal, proletarian tones of Joe Lyons (of which Enid disapproved) lent such sentiments an authenticity that would have been absent from the patrician voice of John Latham (despite his own humble origins). The more recent past also featured prominently in these speeches, and Lyons indulged in a great deal of retrospective justification, perhaps in an exercise of self-persuasion. Labor, he said at Colac on October 2, had put party first, the ultimate sin in his estimation, and had only been pushed into a more moderate position by his own defection, which, he disingenuously added, was a course that he did not regret.[66]

There were additional whiffs of historical revisionism. During his Colac address, largely repeated at Warrnambool on October 5, Lyons referred to his “support” “about twelve months ago” for Latham’s proposal for a “national government” and the subsequent “sectional” abuse he had received from his fellow Labor MPs.[67] This claim lent an air of martyrdom to his cause that was not entirely justified. Latham had proposed the formation of a “Non-Party Council” on December 9, 1930, to consist of government and opposition members, in order to draw up an economic program for the coming three to five years. To some in caucus this smacked of the heresy of national government, and although the proposal was mentioned in that forum on December 10, there was no recorded discussion of the matter.[68] Yet rumour abounded and a statement of rejection was subsequently prepared for Fenton, as acting Prime Minister, to read immediately in the parliament, in accordance with a caucus motion. However, the Labor Daily of the following day targeted one particular member of caucus around whom it detected a whiff of sulphur, headlining: “Lyons Wants to Jettison Federal Labour. Proposes Coalition Government. Caucus Howls Lyons Down. Angry Party Meeting. Sinister Move.” Lyons was said to have likened the present political emergency to that of 1916, thereby proposing the inclusion of Latham and Page in a “composite government”. The accused responded with a “complete denial”, branding the press report a “downright lie” and denying “any [alleged] foreknowledge” of the Latham proposal.[69] Latham supported his account by also denying any “pre-arrangement”.

Now, however, ten months later and on the phony campaign trail, Lyons was free to confess his earlier attraction to the proposal, thereby turning a former party handicap into a present, “non-party” virtue. Yet, it seemed difficult to reconcile the two contradictory accounts given of his response to this proposal—either his December 1930 “complete denial” had been insincere or his October 1931 claim of “support” was false. Accordingly, on October 9 he made a further, parliamentary attempt to clarify the situation and to sustain his reputation for honesty, recalling “that I had recommended the acceptance of the offer of co-operation … but that I had never advocated a coalition”.[70] The distinction between co-operation and coalition was not one that he had cared to draw in his recent public meetings, but it does perhaps explain the strength of Lyons’s initial denials—it seems that he had been prepared to “co-operate” with Latham at that time, but not to participate in the formation of a coalition government. This would have accorded with his earlier practice in Tasmania, where the Premier had declined the offer of a coalition government in June 1928, as he had declined the earlier press suggestion that he defect from Labor.[71]

It is not surprising that the Latham proposal of 1930 exercised some attraction to a man of Lyons’s proven consensual disposition, and such concepts remained in his mind. When another, greater emergency loomed in March 1939, Prime Minister Lyons was prepared to cross the line from co-operation to coalition, proposing to opposition leader Curtin the formation of a national government—which Curtin dismissed as a “kite”.[72]

The Lyons modus operandi proved a winning style throughout the period from May to December 1931, with one cautious Brisbane observer noting in early November that Lyons’s meetings were marked by “reasonableness and moderation” and by the statement of “plain, honest truth” rather than by any grand oratory, concluding: “Here is a man to be trustfully followed. He will not scale peaks of glory, but on the other hand, he will not lead his followers into the ditch.”[73]

Once the campaign proper commenced in the last week of November, the band-wagon looked increasingly like a juggernaut. Two themes that had been stressed since March were prominent, including that of the man who had sacrificed all and placed “the safety of his country before selfish party demands”, as an associated candidate, J.L. Price of the South Australian Emergency Committee, described it in an attempt to draw reflected glory. [74] Alongside this ran the portrayal of Lyons as a true “Labor” man for whom ALP supporters could vote in good conscience.

The most important address of these three weeks was the official UAP “Policy Speech” delivered in the Sydney Town Hall on December 2.[75] Here, Lyons surveyed the failure of Scullin to pose any workable method of recovery, questioning Labor’s recent commitment to the “Economy Plan”, and expressed pride in his defection, claiming that he was “more convinced” day by day that he had taken the right course. He repeated associated elements of the apologia of March 13 in an attempt to assuage those still concerned about this change of direction: “It was not easy for us to break an association which had endured for the whole of our political lives.”

The main thrust of the speech was about that future direction. As an advocate of balanced budgets, Lyons contrasted the moderation and simplicity of his own economic proposals with the dormant, but extant, “dangerous currency proposals” of the “still determined” bogeyman, Theodore. The new UAP, which Lyons suggested now “included” the Nationalist Party, pledged “to avoid the imposition of hardship on any one section of the community”, a thematic recall of the old “Seven Points” and more.

Themes of national unity and consensus were stressed throughout the remaining two weeks of the campaign, with Latham and Lyons issuing a unique, joint final appeal to voters on December 18:

The United Australia Party believes that what Australia wants is not a policy for the country only—or for the city only—or for employers only—or for workers only. A TRULY AUSTRALIAN POLICY will seek to co-ordinate and to harmonise all these equally essential interests. That is the policy of the United Australia Party—A FAIR DEAL FOR ALL.[76]

This echo of the “Seven Points” elegantly rounded off an annus mirabilis. On the following day Joseph Lyons, the man who had contemplated a hasty and undignified retirement from politics only ten months before, was elected prime minister with a significant majority in a seventy-five member House—the UAP as the largest single party secured thirty-four seats and with its six South Australian allies could govern in its own right, although Lyons characteristically offered the Country Party a coalition, which Page declined. Labor was reduced to a rump of only fourteen seats, a staggering loss of thirty-two, even though its primary vote (when combined with that of the dissident Lang Labor group in New South Wales) exceeded that of the UAP.

A former Labor minister and Premier was now the head of an administration that was the next best thing to the British model of “national government”, to which Lyons and his ministers would commonly liken themselves in future years.[77] The year 1932 dawned with Lyons appropriately portrayed in the Bulletin as the infant “Welcome Little Stranger”, cosseted by his smiling uncles Latham, Bruce and Hughes, whilst Scullin and Theodore skulked through the back door.[78]

 

Ω

The welcome stranger adhered to the concept of the UAP as a party-above-party throughout the following six years of his life, including two further successful electoral campaigns in 1934 and 1937. Although an economic recovery of sorts had eventuated before his final electoral win of October 1937, other dangers were looming in foreign affairs and defence.[79] Lyons’s last appeal to the voters scarcely mentioned the party organisation formed to combat a specific national economic emergency that he now asserted had been largely replaced by “sound government” and “prosperity”.[80]

It was hardly surprising that the collapse of the United Australia Party was not far behind the death of its inaugural leader in April 1939. The party could not even hold Wilmot in the subsequent May by-election. By August 1943, it had shrunk to a rump of twelve members under the unlikely leadership of Billy Hughes, making his last hurrah. Significantly, it was only one of five non-Labor parties in the House of Representatives. The poet Mary Gilmore had apparently not been alone in thinking that by voting for Lyons throughout the 1930s, she had continued to vote “Labor”.[81]

Lyons’s reputation has since fallen unenviably between two stools in a two-party system, overlooked by his Liberal successors and still viewed as a “rat” by some Labor “true believers”. [82] In only one quarter has he been offered some recent recognition, when the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry inaugurated an annual “Joseph Lyons Memorial Lecture” last August. The lecture was delivered by an “internet visionary” and dealt with Tasmania’s prospective broadband roll-out, a curious but appropriate choice given that Treasurer Lyons had allowed for the initial connection of his native island to the mainland by submarine telephone cable in the 1933–34 budget. The TCCI has thus revived the Tasmanian consensus of the 1920s, but this should only be the beginning of a broader commemoration.

Ambrose Pratt was mistaken in May 1931 when he predicted to Lyons that “Australia already begins to appreciate the sacrifices you have made and are making in her service. History will prove her grateful; prove her, also, capable of deep enduring gratitude.”[83] This was another false prophecy, for the annus mirabilis of 1931 failed to cement Lyons’s reputation beyond the memory of the generation that endured the Great Depression. This failure was a cause of enduring regret to the irrepressible widow at Home Hill in Devonport and also to many others who had worked closely with “Honest Joe”.

David Bird is an independent historian based in Melbourne. He is the author of J.A. Lyons, The “Tame Tasmanian”: Appeasement and Rearmament in Australia, 1932–39 (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008) and conducted further research into the political thinking and practice of Joseph Lyons as a Research Fellow at the Australian Prime Ministers” Centre, Canberra, in 2009. He is currently researching aspects of the radical Right in Australia during the 1930s.