EXTRACT
Most of the Australian soldiers were henceforth to serve in France the seat of the heaviest fighting. There the veterans from Gallipoli were joined by recruits. As the fighting became deadlocked and a Allied casualties on the French battlefields passed the million, the call for more Australian soldiers grew louder. Late in 1916 the Labor prime minister, W. M. 'Billy' Hughes, decided that the reliance on volunteers should be replaced by the compulsory calling up of young men for service in foreign lands. He might have persuaded his own party, the Labor Party, to adopt the policy of conscription in the first enthusiastic months of the war; but two years later enthusiasm for the war was slipping. The war, in lives and pounds, was far costlier than expected. Moreover the fighting was far from home, and Australia no longer seemed in danger after the capture of the nearby German colonies and the bottling up of the Germany navy in distant ports.

The trade unions which backed the Labor Party began to complain that workers more than employers were the economic victims of the war: real wages were falling in the face of wartime inflation. The punitive British policy towards Ireland also made many Irish-Australians lukewarm towards the war. Hughes himself had the knack of multiplying his enemies. He provoked fire-eating speeches from Coadjutor Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne, who had come from Ireland only four years previously. The swing of Catholic opinion virtually turned Victoria from a supporter to an opponent of Hughes's conscription plans.

Hughes, having alienated many supporters, tried to divert the heat by holding a national referendum on the question of whether young men should be forced to join the forces and fight overseas. Even before the referendum was narrowly defeated in 1916, Hughes facing defeat within his own party. The Labor Party was torn apart. In November 1916 Hughes and twenty-four of his colleagues left the party, began to form an alliance with the conservatives, and so were able to cling to power even while losing the fight over conscription. In federal politics Labor henceforth was to wander in the wilderness, holding office for only ten of the next fifty-six years. Labor's hostility towards the conscripting of soldiers for overseas campaigns was to remain vigorous even during World War II when Australia itself was in peril.

The four years of fighting reshaped the economic life of Australia to a degree that nobody had predicted, partly because the war was longer and more expensive than foreseen. Prices of food and rent went up faster than wages; and the wartime year of 1917 was the worst so far experienced for strikes and industrial disputes. The fight over wartime conscription was partly an extension of the fight between capital and labour in the workplace where the wage-earners’ standard of living was falling.