1920s: boom and bust

The wartime leadership of Prime Minister Billy Hughes was replaced in 1923 by Stanley Melbourne Bruce, who retained power alongside Earle Page for the next six-and-a-half years. The Bruce-Page Coalition focused on what was called ‘the Imperial framework’, meaning that labour and capital would come from Britain for the Australian manufacturing sector to provide products for the British Empire. It was also driven by the quest to develop Canberra as the national capital. Bruce and Page’s Coalition presided over the first meeting of Federal Parliament in Canberra on 9 May 1927, after the Duke of York (later King George VI) conducted the opening ceremony.

Bruce faced mounting industrial pressure from the unions between 1927 and 1929, with major strikes called by sugar mill workers, dockers, transport workers, timber industry workers and coal miners. Bruce responded to the strikes by returning arbitration powers to each state. He introduced the Maritime Industries Bill, which was designed to abolish the federal arbitration system and transfer the Commonwealth’s arbitration powers to the states, except for maritime industries. The government fell on 10 September 1929, when it lost the vote on the Bill after six rebel members (including Billy Hughes) joined Labor to vote against it. Bruce earned a unique place in Australian electoral history at the next poll, becoming the first sitting prime minister to lose his seat in a general election. Joseph Scullin’s Labor Government was sworn in the week before the Wall Street crash.

Queensland’s population rose through the decade from about 750,000 to 900,000 with the decentralised bias still very much evident. The farming sector remained stable, comprising about 30 per cent of the state’s workforce, but mining fell to 2.3 per cent at the expense of the new industries of manufacturing, construction, finance, property and public administration, all of which increased throughout the decade. Queensland’s primary and secondary production throughout the 1920s increased to pre-depression levels of more than $120 million, with the biggest increase in the manufacturing sector.

For the department, the 1920s were a time of change, driven from the top by
Queensland’s Chief Secretary and Premier, Edward ‘Red Ted’ Theodore. In 1920, John Mullan was appointed as the first Attorney-General not legally qualified and, consequently, unable to appear in court as the department’s senior legal officer. Initially replacing Thomas McCawley as Crown Solicitor, William Flood Webb rose to become Solicitor-General in 1922, was elevated to the Supreme Court bench in 1925 and eventually became its Chief Justice (1940–46).

Theodore’s agenda of reform saw the abolition of Queensland’s Upper House, the Legislative Council, and pushed through the necessary legislation to abolish capital punishment. Focusing on the needs of his citizens, the introduction of the Fair Rents Act of 1920 created an independent body responsible for establishing ‘fair rents’ for housing through the Fair Rents Court. It was, as usual, administered in rural Queensland by the Magistrates Court. Its officers were empowered to assess fair rents based mostly on surface area, amenities and location, but also other criteria. These variable criteria, together with the measurements taken to determine a fair rent, led to the inspectors becoming known as ‘blokes with rules and rulers’.

The year 1926 also marked the emergence of the State Reporting Bureau. The bureau was an amalgamation of parliamentary reporting staff, court shorthand reporting staff and various clerical and stenographic staff from Parliament House and the courts. Shorthand writers had been used in the Supreme Court and Industrial Court since 1913 and had been paid ‘piece rates’ rather than as genuine public servants. The abolition of the Legislative Council meant that a number of Hansard reporters were freed up and many were offered places in the newly founded bureau. The Public Service Commissioner, JD Story, recommended and established that the chief officer of the bureau would be the Chief Reporter and that the incumbent would be an ‘officer of the Parliament rather than of the court’.

If the government of the day perceived an increase in legal and judicial activity, then the passing of the Supreme Court Act in 1921, which resulted in the abolition of the District Court, would seem a retrograde step. In 1922, the District Court was replaced by the Magistrates Court in the civil arena while the criminal jurisdiction was transferred to the Supreme Court. There are no extant statistics for the period, but since 1896 the rate of appearances before a criminal court for every 100,000 people had dropped from 9.7 in 1896 to 6.7 in 1916 and then to a low of 2.8 in the mid 1930s.

The stock market crash of October 1929 and the worldwide depression that followed brought the 1920s to an abrupt end. Social experiments gave way to subsistence economics. The young people who had fought so bravely on the battlefields some years before had to call upon that courage again to survive an enemy that they could not see, but was everywhere around them.