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<\/p>\n
Popularly known as the ‘little digger’, Hughes had cemented his position as a wartime leader.<\/p>\n
McIvor Times proprietors Edward Johnson and David Dobbin were strong anti-conscriptionists and they were unwavering in their contempt of Hughes and his views.<\/p>\n
While Heathcote itself was then part of the Echuca electorate, a nearby MP who also happened to be Prime Minister commanded many column inches.<\/p>\n
On the eve of the first conscription plebiscite in October 1916, Johnson and Dobbins penned an article that showed exactly where their allegiance lay.<\/p>\n
Under the heading ‘Think before you vote’, they said conscription would “damn the heritage of this free Australia.<\/p>\n
“For time immortal we, and the generations that follow, us will be bound in the shackles of militarism.”<\/p>\n
By April 2017, and with an election on the horizon, they were to describe a policy speech given by Hughes in Bendigo as “the customary tirade of abusive (sic) against the old friends from whom he has broken away” full of “long-winded phraseology wrapped around an inconsiderable quantity of facts”.<\/p>\n
Johnson and Dobbin wrote that supporters of the newly formed Nationalist coalition, led by Hughes, were making “rambling, reckless and often ridiculous statements”.<\/p>\n
They also claimed that the failed conscription plebiscite had cost an estimated \u00a3500,000. “If one twentieth of this colossal sum had been put into a voluntary recruiting campaign the result would have been different, and all the scandals and fuss of an early election avoided,” they wrote.<\/p>\n
“Hughes is at the bottom of every mistake.<\/p>\n
“He has led three Governments in a few months, and has brought disaster upon them all.”<\/p>\n
However, the landslide success of the Nationalists emboldened Hughes to launch another public vote on conscription in December 1917.<\/p>\n
The no vote again triumphed, but the war was drawing to an end and Hughes was now focusing his energies on representing Australia in the peace process.<\/p>\n
When asked by US President Woodrow Wilson about his right to take part in these discussions, given Australia’s small population, Hughes reportedly replied, “I speak for sixty thousand dead. For how many do you speak?”<\/p>\n
Physically small in stature, hard of hearing, notoriously cantankerous and mercurial, Billy Hughes managed to cast a long shadow over Australian politics for more than five decades.<\/p>\n
After his death in 1952, then Prime Minister Robert Menzies paid tribute.<\/p>\n
“I find it very difficult to believe that this is the first day in the history of this parliament that William Morris Hughes has not sat as a member,” Mr Menzies said.<\/p>\n
“It is the first day after half a century.<\/p>\n
“He was one of the original members of the first Commonwealth Parliament remaining in this house or in this parliament.<\/p>\n
“His I think, was, of all the lives that we have witnessed in Australia, the most astonishing.<\/p>\n
“A little man, a wisp of a man, must have tremendous personality to assert himself over vast multitudes of people and he did.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WILLIAM ‘Billy’ Morris Hughes was Australia’s longest serving politician, spending 58 years at a state, and then federal, level. He was the Member for Bendigo between 1917 and 1922, and Prime Minister from 1915 to 1923. A political maverick, he began his career with the Labor Party in NSW in 1894 and ended it as […]<\/p>\n