Australia’s only hung parliament* in the first century of Federation resulted from the wartime election of 1940. During the next three years successive minority governments led Australia and ran our war effort, transforming the economy and experimenting with innovations in how Australia was governed. The Sixteenth Commonwealth Parliament and the wartime governments of Menzies and Curtin were, in many respects, the most significant and creative in our history.

Robert Menzies had been Prime Minister for sixteen months when the election was held on 21 September 1940. His troubled United Australia Party/Country Party coalition won 37 seats in the House of Representatives and the Australian Labor and Non-Communist Labor opposition parties between them won 36. Unfortunately for Menzies, his 37th seat was that of the Member for the Northern Territory, who at that time did not have a vote. The coalition narrowly retained control of the Senate – but in the House of Representatives neither side had a majority and the balance of power was held by two independent Victorian MPs, Arthur Coles and Alexander Wilson.

Coles and Wilson agreed to support Menzies, but after he was forced to resign as Prime Minister in August 1941, in favour of Country Party Leader Arthur Fadden, they became disaffected. Coles had briefly joined the United Australia Party but left in disgust after Menzies fell, saying ‘it was nothing but a public lynching.’ Forty days later he and Wilson crossed the floor to support Labor in amending the budget. This brought down Fadden’s government: the only government in Australian history to fall because a Budget bill did not pass in the House of Representatives. The Governor-General then called on John Curtin to form a government. Coles and Wilson supported Curtin until his landslide victory in 1943 gave Labor a majority in its own right.

The absence of a clear majority for either side of politics led to a period of parliamentary innovation in order to make Parliament workable. This included the establishment of the Advisory War Council, which brought senior ministers and the Opposition leadership together in a unique body that had the full powers of Cabinet if agreement was reached on matters to do with the war; secret sessions of Parliament to brief all parliamentarians on crucial developments in the fighting of the war; and the establishment of new bipartisan parliamentary committees to advise on significant elements of the war effort such as military expenditure, social security, profits, broadcasting and rural industries. Menzies tried to persuade Labor to enter into a national government, with no success, but the Advisory War Council provided the mechanism to negotiate the 1941 Budget to the point where both sides could agree to support it.

Coles and Wilson were both remarkable men. Arthur Coles was one of the founders of the retail giant Coles. He had served at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, and when World War II broke out became increasingly critical of what he saw as the inefficiency of Australia’s war effort. He was elected to Parliament in 1940. In 1942 the Labor government he had helped to install gave him the job of establishing the rationing system for the entire country, which he achieved in six weeks. He did not stand again in 1943. You can read about him here.

Alexander Wilson had been active in rural politics before winning the seat of Wimmera in 1937 as the candidate of the Victorian United Country Party, when he defeated a sitting member who had been endorsed by the federal parliamentary Country Party. He agreed with Labor on matters such as wheat market stabilisation and public control of credit through the Commonwealth Bank, and stayed in parliament until 1945. You can read more about him here.

The 1940 Federal Election was conducted under the system of preferential voting in the House of Representatives which had been introduced by the Nationalist government in 1918, in response to the development of what became the Country Party. The government of the day was concerned that this new third party would split the anti-Labor vote, and amended the Commonwealth Electoral Act to remove the first-past-the-post system which had been used since 1901. This system remained in place at Senate elections until 1949, when proportional representation in the Senate began. Read our Prime Fact on Australian Elections here and more on the history of voting in Australia here. The combination of preferential voting in the House of Representatives and proportional representation in the Senate has created a thriving multi-party system in Australia, as similar voting systems have in Europe and elsewhere. As Professor John Warhurst, a Fellow at the Australian Prime Ministers Centre in 2009-10, comments, ‘a hung parliament can produce a stable government, and even improved government.’ The experience of the 1940-43 Parliament certainly bears this out.

*What is a hung Parliament?

When the Parliament is evenly divided and no one side of politics has the numbers to get its legislation through in its own right, it is referred to as a hung Parliament. The balance of power then devolves to independents and minor parties, if they can make up the numbers for one side or the other, and if they agree to do so. The term possibly has a nineteenth-century American origin, being used in relation to a jury that could not reach an agreement. Read more here.