The Money Men by Chris Bowen (superbooks4u .txt) 📕

When Fadden felt ready, he left Mackay Shire Council to start his own accountancy business. Fadden judged that his enterprise would benefit from a relocation to the bigger regional city of Townsville, and hence the Fadden family moved there. He was then approached by Arthur ‘Boy’ Moore’s Country and Progressive National Party to contest the local seat at the 1929 state election, but Fadden declined because he was still focused on building his small business. He did, however, make himself available for the 1930 local council elections, leading a team of independents known as the ‘Serviceable Six’, of which four were elected.

His breakthrough at the local council election, combined with the success of his business, led the Country Party to again ask Fadden to be a candidate for the state seat of Kennedy at the 1932 election. This time Fadden made himself available, and it was a good move. In an election that saw the Moore government thrown out, Kennedy was the only seat won by the Country Party from the Labor opposition.

By 1934, Fadden had been appointed the opposition’s lead speaker in financial debates in the Legislative Assembly, effectively making him the shadow treasurer in the days before the formal establishment of such portfolios. That year’s budget debate saw Fadden’s skills tested. Queensland premier and treasurer William Forgan-Smith, at the conclusion of the budget presentation, moved that the debate be adjourned to ‘tomorrow’, giving Fadden only one day to respond on behalf of the opposition, instead of the traditional three days. This was a political tactic designed to put Fadden on the defensive. In those days, budget speeches at both the state and federal level lasted about an hour, double their contemporary length, and oppositions were expected to reply in kind. Fadden did not sleep that night as he pored over the budget tables, but in the end he would be pleased with his performance:

I am proud to say that I completed my task just one hour before Parliament met. I rose in the House a few minutes before 11.00am—or rather dragged myself to my feet—and spoke until six minutes after midday. I covered the budget’s major points and many of its details, making criticisms which I hoped were pertinent. The Premier was plainly annoyed, but my colleagues gave me hearty hear hears, which I appreciated greatly.2

Fadden’s good performance may have sown the seeds of the destruction of his state political career, however. The redistribution that was held before the next election saw his seat of Kennedy made unwinnable for a conservative candidate, due to the addition of heavily Labor-favouring voting areas. Fadden alleges in his autobiography that this was the result of a deliberate intervention by the premier to remove him from the parliament. By modern standards of political accountability and transparency, this is unthinkable. But in the context of 1930s Queensland, Fadden was probably right. (Queensland premiers could, and did, engage in such hardball political tactics right up the 1980s.)3 Fadden could have taken it as a compliment that the government would go to such lengths to remove him from the state parliament, but this was small consolation for the likely end of his career.

All was not lost, however, as a colleague in the neighbouring seat of Mirani offered to stand aside as a candidate to make way for Fadden. EB Swayne had been a member of parliament for twenty-seven years, and it was a sign of his respect for Fadden that he was prepared to end his career to enable Fadden’s survival. But on beginning his fight for the seat, Fadden observed what he believed were dirty tricks. A number of state public works had been scheduled for the towns in the Mirani electorate. These were not only popular with voters, but also resulted in a large migration of formerly unemployed people into the seat, grateful that the Forgan-Smith Labor government had given them jobs. The that which housed the workers were then turned into polling booths. This did not bode well for Fadden, and in fact, in some of the booths he ended up getting no votes at all. Conspiracy or not, it was enough to see Fadden defeated and out of parliament.

Federal Parliament Calls

Fadden returned to his accountancy practice, but he was not out of politics for long. He was soon approached by the Country Party to be its candidate for the federal seat of Darling Downs, based on Toowoomba, which was vacant due to the death of the former speaker and minister for external affairs, Sir Lyttleton Groom. The seat had been held by both Groom and his father William and had never been won by the Labor Party (the seat of Darling Downs would be replaced by the seat of Groom in a later redistribution). The by-election was a contest between the Country Party and the major conservative party, the UAP. The Country Party had not contested the electorate while Groom was the sitting member, but his death opened up the seat for a three-cornered contest, in line with the coalition agreement. It was a risk for Fadden, but it paid off as he won 33 per cent of the primary vote, beating into third place UAP candidate James Annand, who was also the long-term mayor of Toowoomba.

Fadden’s first three years in parliament were fairly uneventful, but 1939 saw him involved in a dramatic federal controversy. When long-serving UAP prime minister Sir Joseph Lyons died of a heart attack in April of that year, Country Party leader Earle Page assumed the prime ministership in a caretaker capacity while the UAP elected a new leader, who would then take over as prime minister. Page, however, informed his party room that while he would hand over the prime ministership to the new UAP leader, he would not serve in the Cabinet if the frontrunner, Robert Menzies, was elected. Page had played this game before, using his power as leader of the Country Party to veto Billy