Lord Mayor and Federal Politics
Coles became Lord Mayor of Melbourne in 1938, remaining in that position until 1940 when he resigned to stand for the federal seat of Henty as an independent candidate. Coles was one of the two independents (the other was Alexander Wilson) who held the balance of power through the early years of the Second World War, and crossed the floor in 1941 to remove the hapless UAP-Country Party government of Arthur Fadden and install John Curtin of the Australian Labor Party as Prime Minister of Australia.
In 1944, Coles retired from business and devoted himself to public works, becoming the chair of both the Commonwealth Rationing Commission and the War Damage Commission. With the end of the war he resigned from Parliament and became chair of British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines (BCPA) and the Australian National Airlines Commission (see Trans Australia Airlines). He was appointed chair of the Melbourne Olympic Games Committee in 1952, and a member of the CSIRO Advisory Council in 1956.
He was knighted in 1960, and retired in 1965. Sir Arthur Coles died in 1982, leaving three sons and three daughters.
Read more about this topic: Arthur Coles
Famous quotes containing the words lord, mayor, federal and/or politics:
“When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy...and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 7:1-4.
“The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth’s mayor addressed them
First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“If the federal government had been around when the Creator was putting His hand to this state, Indiana wouldn’t be here. It’d still be waiting for an environmental impact statement.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)