William Morris Billy Hughes.

Hughes and his followers, called themselves Nationalists and began laying the groundwork for forming a party that they felt would be both avowedly nationalist as well as socially radical.

A few months later, Hughes decided to turn their wartime coalition into a new party, the Nationalist Party of Australia. Hughes emerged as the new party's leader. At the 1917 federalon Hughes and the Nationalists won a huge electoral victory. At this election Hughes gave up his working-class seat and was elected for Bendigo, Victoria. Hughes had promised to resign if his Government did not win the power to conscript. A second plebiscite on conscription was held in December 1917, this time by a wider margin. Hughes, after receiving a vote of confidence in his leadership by his party, but, as there were no alternative candidates, the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, immediately re-commissioned him, thus allowing him to remain as Prime Minister while keeping his promise to resign. Hughes and his followers, which included many of Labor's early leaders.

The government replaced the first-past-the-post electoral system applying to both houses of the Federal Parliament under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1903 with a preferential system for the House of Representatives in 1918. That preferential system has essentially applied ever since. A multiple majority-preferential system was introduced at the 1919 federal election for the Senate, and that remained in force until it was changed to a quota-preferential system of proportional representation in 1948. Those changes were considered to be a response to the emergence of the Country Party, so that the non-Labor vote would not be split, as it would have been under the previous first-past-the-post system.

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[SKOTP69]

The "Little Digger"!

[Oswulf1]

Hughes stood up to Woodrow Wilson at the Paris peace conference in 1919. He also wanted to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1921. If Britain and Canada had listened to him then, we'd probably never have had to fight the Pacific War.

[PITUPEY]

EXCELENTE VIDEO.