The Country Party Prime Ministers

Paul Davey

Earle Page Arthur Fadden John McEwen

Objectives This study looks at the lead up to, and the terms of, the three Country Party prime ministers, Earle Page, Arthur Fadden, and John McEwen. Each has generally been regarded as only a stop-gap or caretaker leader. But each took over a government in crisis, so what did he do other than try to keep the ship afloat?

Earle Page – Prime Minister 7 April to 26 April 1939 Earle Page inherited the leadership of the Lyons Coalition government between the United Australia Party (UAP) and Australian Country Party (ACP) when Joseph Lyons became Australia’s first Prime Minister to die in office, on 7 April 1939.

Page determined that if the UAP elected Robert Menzies as its new leader, and therefore Prime Minister-elect, his Country Party would no longer serve in the government.

Menzies was elected to the UAP leadership and Page, in taking the Country Party out of the Coalition, made an extraordinary personal attack on Menzies, questioning whether he had the ‘essential qualities of courage, loyalty and judgment’ to lead the country. The speech split the Country Party and paved the way for Page’s demise as its leader. Why was he so determined to say what he did, against all advice? The answer is perhaps best given by his granddaughter, Helen Snyders, the contemporary Page family historian, who puts forward her views for the first time publicly in this documentation.

Page’s main concentration as Prime Minister was on trying to forge an all-party government of national unity for the impending world war, a concept subsequently pursued without success by Menzies.

Cabinet made decisions expected of an administration acting with full authority – for instance appointing a new commissioner of taxation. The attack on Menzies, however, overshadowed these activities and arguably marked the low point of Page’s otherwise long and impressive parliamentary career.

Arthur Fadden – Prime Minister 29 August to 7 October 1941 Arthur Fadden was the first, and thus far only, Country Party/Nationals leader to be elected leader of the government (and then of the Opposition until August 1943) by a joint meeting of the Coalition parties. He succeeded Menzies, who resigned on 29 August 1941 because of dissatisfaction with his leadership in the UAP.

Fadden was handed a poisoned chalice. The Coalition and Labor Opposition each had 36 seats in the House of Representatives, and there were two Victorian Independents, Arthur Coles and Alex Wilson. Coles had been elected in 1940, unopposed by the UAP. He had joined the UAP in June 1941, but had left in disgust over the way he believed Menzies had been forced to resign.

Wilson was a member of the Victorian United Country Party, which at the time was opposed to coalitions. Part of the strategy behind installing Fadden as Prime Minister was the hope that he would be more likely to gain Wilson’s support, at least on crucial votes. Yet when the vote on Fadden’s budget came on 3 October, Coles and Wilson both supported a Labor amendment, bringing down the government and installing John Curtin’s Labor Party.

Beyond his ill-fated budget, Fadden maintained the recently formed all-party Australian Advisory War Council and appointed Earle Page as Australia’s ministerial envoy to London.

An interesting aside is what Wilson did after voting against the Fadden budget. A little known fact is that he accepted a position in the Curtin government as an ‘honorary assistant’ to the Minister for Commerce, effectively placing himself in Coalition with Labor!

John McEwen – Prime Minister 19 December 1967 to 10 January 1968 John McEwen found himself in a similar situation to that of Page. The incumbent Prime Minister, in this case Harold Holt, had disappeared in the surf on 17 December 1967, and McEwen would take the Country Party out of the Coalition if the then Liberal Party elected Bill McMahon to succeed him, just as Page had done with regard to Menzies.

There were other parallels. McEwen, like Page, insisted on being sworn as Prime Minister with full authority, even though he undertook to hold the job only until the Liberals elected a new leader.

McEwen’s government made several decisions on domestic policy, but concentrated more on foreign policy. He and his cabinet met with many foreign leaders, not the least being the US president, Lyndon B Johnson, who visited for Holt’s memorial service in Melbourne on 22 December. The Vietnam War, imminent US economic policy changes, and Britain’s intended withdrawal from east of Suez, were major issues for the Australian government. McEwen managed these as well as successfully thwarting McMahon’s chances of becoming Prime Minister. John Gorton assumed the office.

Conclusions In the history of Coalition governments since 1923, only the first was formally known by the names of its two leaders, the Bruce‒Page government. All others have been recorded in the name of the Prime Minister only. But in all coalitions in which the leader of the majority party was the Prime Minister, the leader of the junior, Country Party, was always the effective Deputy Prime Minister, even though the title was not formalised, at McEwen’s insistence, until the advent of the Gorton Coalition in January 1968.

Herein lies an important difference between the ‘normal’ coalitions and those led by Country Party leaders: each was emphatically the Page government, the Fadden government and the McEwen government. None had a nominal Deputy Prime Minister. They were governments with full authority and the prime ministers exercised that authority in making decisions and implementing policy. They were not caretaker administrations. Moreover, all three leaders had considerable experience as acting Prime Minister, making them well qualified for the job. The terms of these men, while brief, deserve more than a passing mention in the history of Australia’s prime ministers.

The author Paul Davey has an intimate knowledge of the Country Party, known today as The Nationals. A former journalist, he was the party’s federal director in Canberra for nearly ten years and the New South Wales party’s general secretary for more than three. He also worked as a senior staffer to party ministers in Canberra and Sydney. He is the author of three books on the National Party.

June 2011