Billy Hughes

This article is about the Australian Prime Minister. For other individuals by the name, see Billy Hughes (disambiguation) .

William Morris Hughes (1908)

William Morris Hughes , better known as Billy Hughes (born September 25, 1862 in Pimlico , London , England , † October 28, 1952 in Double Bay , Sydney , New South Wales ) was Prime Minister from October 27, 1915 to February 9, 1923 from australia .

Hughes was born in England but immigrated to Australia in 1884. At first he wandered the country in search of work and was briefly employed in several places. During this phase he worked intensively on building up the Australian trade unions .

His first political office was that of MP for the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in the New South Wales Parliament . When the individual colonies merged to form the new Australian state in 1901, Hughes became an important figure in politics on this new level. In 1904 he became Foreign Minister of the first Australian Labor government under George Reid and held the post under Andrew Fisher until 1915.

William Morris Hughes circa 1920. Portrait study by James Guthrie for Statesmen of World War I .

After Fisher, Hughes himself assumed the office of prime minister. Even as foreign minister, Hughes had clearly positioned himself as an advocate of the British empire . Accordingly, he was a staunch supporter of Australian participation in the First World War . In 1916 Hughes first enforced an Australian boycott of German goods, later that year he tried to enforce general conscription in Australia and the deployment of Australian soldiers overseas through a referendum. This failed. In addition, he advocated a rigid, state-controlled war economy . The latter two decisions sparked large-scale strikes. He did not have a majority for his politics within the Labor Party, which eventually even excluded the prime minister. He then became leader of the Nationalist Party of Australia and tried again in 1917 to set up another Australian division to enforce general conscription. The vote ended with an even clearer vote against general conscription. Hughes was able to stay in office until 1923.

At the 1916 Reich Conference, Hughes spoke out in favor of closer cooperation between the parts of the British Empire (especially on economic issues) and thus became a pioneer of the Commonwealth of Nations .

After his resignation in 1923, William Hughes' influence on Australian politics initially waned. When Australia was back on the side of Great Britain in a situation of international tension before the Second World War , Hughes again held the office of Foreign Minister from 1937 to 1940 and that of the Navy Minister.

Web links

Commons : Billy Hughes  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• LF Fitzhardinge: Billy Hughes . In: Douglas Pike (Ed.): Australian Dictionary of Biography . Melbourne University Press, Carlton (Victoria) 1966–2012 (English).
• Newspaper article about Billy Hughes in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .