Meanwhile, it is worth noting that Fairfax staff have been on strike over enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) negotiations. The irony is of course (for anyone born yesterday) that Fairfax has been leading the media charge (such as it is) against such radical IR reforms. Here in SE QLD my beloved mum remains disturbed that she is "being forced to buy" The Murdochian alternative.
The only way to kill this beast, evidently, is to drive a wooden stake right through it's still-beating heart:
By 1939, serious leadership ructions had begun to emerge in the UAP. The ambitious Deputy Leader Robert Menzies sought to keep Lyons to his promise to resign in his favour. Menzies did not have widespread support, and was particularly disliked by the Country Party and its leader Earle Page. Various plots were made to advance former Prime Ministers Billy Hughes or Stanley Bruce to the leadership of the UAP. Menzies resigned as Deputy Leader, and less than a month later, in April, Lyons died.Bear in mind that Menzies is still hugely respected as Australia's greatest leader, the man who won WWII, and a visionary who emulated John Howard's eyeborws before they even existed.
When Menzies narrowly defeated Hughes to be elected as UAP leader following Lyons' death in April 1939, Page withdrew the Country Party from the Coalition, and Menzies became Prime Minister of a UAP minority government. The coalition was re-established when Archie Cameron replaced Earle Page as Country Party leader in March 1940. However, the Government had lost much of its popularity, and many thought Menzies' leadership in the first year of World War II had been mediocre. At the general election in September 1940, there was a large swing to Labor and the UAP-Country Party coalition lost its majority, continuing in office only because of the support of two independent MPs.
Continuing problems with the administration of the war effort and the undermining of his leadership by a group that were described by Arthur Coles, one of the independent MPs, as "the UAP lynch-mob", led Menzies to resign as Prime Minister in August 1941.
Maybe one day, hopefully in my lifetime, Australian history will be rewritten from the true perspective of ordinary soldiers who returned, sorely disillusioned, from wars in Europe, Vietnam and Iraq, only to realize how cynically they had been played for fools. Or from the perspective of ordinary people like me who watched the tragedy unfold again and again.
