Australia's Nuclear Option, First Used Over a Hiring Rule

On June 8, 1914, Prime Minister Joseph Cook asked Governor-General Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson to dissolve both chambers of the Australian Parliament. Munro Ferguson agreed. It was the first double dissolution in Commonwealth history, and the mechanism behind it, Section 57, had never been tested.

Section 57 was the framers' answer to a structural problem. Both houses are popularly elected; either can effectively veto the other. If the Senate twice rejects a House bill, three months apart, the Governor-General may dissolve both houses and send every seat to a fresh election. It was meant for genuine deadlock.

The bill Cook chose to fight over was the Government Preference Prohibition Bill. Its substance was modest: it would end hiring preference for trade union members in the Commonwealth public service. The Labor-controlled Senate, whose voting base sat inside the union movement, killed it twice on schedule. Cook's House passed it by his single-seat majority both times.

The pretext was thin. Cook had won the 1913 election with 38 seats to Labor's 37 in a 75-seat House, and he was outnumbered roughly two to one in the Senate. The double dissolution was less about the bill than about hoping a fresh election would hand him a workable parliament. Section 57's emergency mechanism was being used as a political reset button on its very first outing.

The September 1914 vote, held against the backdrop of the European war that had broken out a month earlier, was a rout. Labor under Andrew Fisher took 42 House seats and a clear Senate majority. Cook lost his job, the bill never returned, and Section 57 stayed dormant for another 37 years. The framers had built a deadlock-breaker. The first prime minister to use it discovered, expensively, that voters can break a deadlock the other way.