Billy Hughes - Political Re-emergence

Political Re-emergence

Joseph Lyons' newly formed United Australia Party won office convincingly at the 1931 election. Lyons sent Hughes to represent Australia at the 1932 League of Nations Assembly in Geneva and in 1934 Hughes became Minister for Health and Repatriation in the Lyons government. Later Lyons appointed him Minister for External Affairs, but Hughes was forced to resign in 1935 after his book Australia and the War Today exposed a lack of preparation in Australia for what Hughes correctly supposed to be a coming war. Soon after, the Lyons government tripled the defence budget.

Hughes was brought back by Lyons as Minister for External Affairs in 1937. By the time of Lyons' death in 1939, Hughes was also serving as Attorney-General and Minister for Industry. He also served as Minister for the Navy, Minister for Industry and Attorney-General at various times under Lyons' successor, Robert Menzies.

Defence issues became increasingly dominant in public affairs with the rise of Fascism in Europe and militant Japan in Asia. From 1938, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons had Hughes head a recruitment drive for the Australian Defence Force. On 7 April 1939, Lyons died in office. The United Australia Party selected Robert Menzies as his successor to lead a minority government on the eve of World War Two. Australia entered the Second World War on 3 September 1939 and a special War Cabinet was created after war was declared – initially composed of Prime Minister Menzies and five senior ministers including Billy Hughes. Labor opposition leader John Curtin declined to join and Menzies lost his majority at the 1940 Election. With the Allies suffering a series of defeats and the threat of war growing in the Pacific, the Menzies Government (1939-1941) relied on two independents, Arthur Coles and Alex Wilson for its parliamentary majority. Unable to convince Curtin to join in a War Cabinet and facing growing pressure within his own party, Menzies resigned as Prime Minister and leader of the UAP on 29 August 1941. The UAP was so bereft of leadership that it was forced to elect the nearly 78-year-old Hughes as leader of the UAP. However, Hughes was deemed too old and too frail to be a wartime Prime Minister, and he was forced to yield the leadership of the UAP-Country Coalition--and the Prime Ministership--to Country Party leader Arthur Fadden. A month later, Coles and Wilson joined with the Labor opposition to defeat the budget and bring down the government. The independents, under prodding from Governor-General Lord Gowrie, then threw their support to Opposition Leader John Curtin, who was sworn in as Prime Minister on 7 October 1941. Eight weeks later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Hughes led the UAP into the 1943 election largely by refusing to hold any party meetings and by agreeing to let Fadden lead the Opposition as a whole. The Coalition was severely defeated, winning only 19 seats. After the election, Hughes yielded the leadership of the UAP to Menzies. In February 1944 the UAP withdrew its members from the Advisory War Council in protest against the Curtin government. Hughes, however, rejoined the council, and was expelled from the UAP.

In 1944 Menzies formed a new party, the Liberal Party, and Hughes became a member. His final change of seat was to the new division of Bradfield in 1949. He remained a member of Parliament until his death in October 1952, sparking a Bradfield by-election. He had been a member of the House of Representatives for 51 years and seven months. Including his service in the New South Wales colonial Parliament before that, Hughes had spent a total of 58 years as an elected official. His period of service remains a record in Australia. He was the last member of the original Australian Parliament elected in 1901 still in the Parliament when he died. He was not however, the last member of that first Parliament to die—this was King O'Malley, who outlived Hughes by fourteen months.

Aged 90, Hughes was the oldest person ever to have been a member of the Australian parliament.