None of the above. There were and will always be rabble rousers... but when they get into the nice private little polling booth 90% of Aussies will vote Labour or Liberal.
Riain said:I thnik Australia is a lot like Britain, we might flirt with fringe parties but are very conservative when it comes to giving them power.
I agree with 'none of the above', but I have to disagree with the notion that the whole thing would/could have been driven by popular mandate.
What Australia did get federally in 1931, a Rightleaning parliamentary government under UAP leader and ex-Labor minister Joe Lyons, was the most plausible thing for a British dominion with a class based party system to get. The public endored it in the voting booth, but they didn't create the exact form of it.
Though at least the UAP entered office with a mandate--Ramsay McDonald's coalition government in the Imperial parliament was created by elite negotiations before going to the people.
Bookeater said:I can't really think of a single figure at the time that could have brought about either a Communist Revolution or a Facist Coup.
I honestly don't know why anyone thinks a totalitarian regime is anymore possible in nineteen-thirties Australia than the UK of the time, but there's always been some historical speculation that Sir John Monash was mentioned as a possible dictator if we'd ever turned into a dictatorship. I can't remember who pushed this idea, but I think it was some Returned gentleman at the time who at least wasn't involved in those cryptofascist secret armies such as the New Guard (possibly Keith Murdoch? Wilfed Kent Hughes?)
Bookeater said:The Ironic thing about Lang is that both extremes of the political specturum didn't like him. He was denounced as a facist by the CPA
Lang and the communists hadn't broken at the time of his dismissal, that's later. And I'm not certain the hard Left of the mid-twentieth century and after ever hated the Big Fella as much as the CPA did during the late thirties and forties.
Some of them tried to jump on board the Lang bandwagon when he was rehabilated by Australian historiography in the sixties, f'rinstance.