Quick questions on Interwar Australia 1918 to 1939: post-war settlement, the Great Depression and the Premiers' Plan (QCE Modern History Unit 3)

About 264,000 men returned to Australia between 1918 and 1920. The Commonwealth's repatriation program included pensions for the disabled, a soldier settlement scheme that placed about 37,000 ex-servicemen on rural blocks (many of which were marginal and failed within a decade), and preferential employment policies. The Returned Sailors' and Soldiers' Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA, later the RSL) became a significant political force.

Australia was acutely exposed to the global Depression for three reasons.

The Scullin Labor government was divided. Its Treasurer Edward Theodore proposed a moderately expansionary program (a degree of currency depreciation, controlled deficits) influenced by the British economist J.M. Keynes. The Commonwealth Bank Board, the Sir Otto Niemeyer mission from the Bank of England (1930) and most Australian Treasury officials urged deflation: cut wages, cut government spending, restore confidence with British creditors.

The NSW Premier Jack Lang refused the Premiers' Plan. His government suspended interest payments on debts owed to British bondholders, imposed emergency taxes on Commonwealth bondholders and disputed the legitimacy of London creditors. The federal government (initially Scullin, then Lyons) sued in the High Court and won. Lang refused to pay.

The Depression and the Lang crisis brought new political movements into the open.

By 1935 Australia was recovering, though unemployment remained around 10 percent through the late 1930s. Recovery was driven by:

Rural Australia was already in trouble in the late 1920s. Wool and wheat prices had been falling before 1929. Soldier settlement schemes were failing across the decade.

Lang rejected the Premiers' Plan; he did not implement it. The Plan was a compromise drafted by the conservative governments and accepted reluctantly by Scullin federally and several Labor premiers.

The New Guard had paramilitary, anti-communist and authoritarian features but did not have an integrated fascist ideology or aim to overthrow the constitution. Some historians use "para-fascist" carefully.

The interwar period saw the consolidation of state policies of removal, mission control and rations. The 1937 federal-state conference on Aboriginal affairs began to articulate a national assimilation policy. Reference where relevant.

The Lyons period (1932 to 1939) is examinable. Recovery, rearmament and the political settlement that produced the wartime Menzies and Curtin governments belong in this dot point.