Billy Hughes, the "Labor rat"

1862 Billy Hughes (William Morris Hughes), seventh Prime Minister of Australia (d. 1952); wartime leader (WW I) and Australia's longest-serving federal parliamentarian (51 years, 7 months continuous service).

Hughes was born in London of Welsh parents: his father was a carpenter at the House of Lords. Before entering politics he was variously "a drover, boundary rider, tally-clerk, navvy, grape picker, blacksmith's striker, factory worker, farm worker, saddler, cook, and deckhand on a coastal vessel" (source). He was influenced by the book Progress and Poverty, by the then famous progressive American political economist, Henry George (who toured widely in Australia in 1890), but he forced a WWI anti-conscription struggle. Hughes was the leader of the pro-conscription side and gradually as his politics moved rightward he split the Labor movement and became a pariah to Australian progressives.

In the early-1890s, before he became a "rat", as his political opponents with the labor movement called him during WWI, he had been associated with the establishment of a paper called The New Order, which was the brainchild of the anarchist Active Service Brigade leader, Arthur Desmond. (William Holman and Jack Lang, both later Premiers of New South Wales, were also involved in Desmond's anarchist newspapers in Sydney.) ...

Tagged: australia, australian, labor, progressive, history, anarchism