 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
A by-election was held for the Australian House of Representatives seat of Kalgoorlie on 18 December 1920. It was triggered by the expulsion from the House of Labor Party MP Hugh Mahon.
The subsequent by-election was won by Nationalist Party candidate George Foley. It was the only federal by-election at which the government had won a seat from the opposition until the 2023 Aston by-election over 102 years later. Voting was not compulsory in 1920.
After the death of the Irish nationalist Terence McSwiney, as the result of a hunger strike in October 1920, Mahon attacked British policy in Ireland, and the British Empire as a whole, at an open-air meeting in Melbourne on 7 November, referring to it as "this bloody and accursed despotism". Subsequently, Prime Minister Billy Hughes moved to expel him from the House of Representatives. [1] On 12 November, the House passed a resolution stating that Mahon had made "seditious and disloyal utterances at a public meeting" and was "guilty of conduct unfitting him to remain a member of this House and inconsistent with the oath of allegiance which he has taken as a member of this House". Mahon thereby became the only MP to be expelled from the Federal Parliament.
Under Section 8 of the Parliamentary Privileges Act 1987, [2] neither house of the Australian Parliament now has the power to expel someone from membership of the Parliament.
| Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ±% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nationalist | George Foley | 8,382 | 51.4 | +3.5 | |
| Labor | Hugh Mahon | 7,939 | 48.6 | -3.5 | |
| Total formal votes | 16,321 | 99.3 | +0.6 | ||
| Informal votes | 113 | 0.7 | −0.6 | ||
| Turnout | 16,434 | 79.1 | −0.2 | ||
| Nationalist gain from Labor | Swing | +3.5 | |||
The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, and may also legislate for the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster in London. Parliament possesses legislative supremacy and thereby holds ultimate power over all other political bodies in the United Kingdom and the Overseas Territories. While Parliament is bicameral, it has three parts: the sovereign, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. The three parts acting together to legislate may be described as the King-in-Parliament. The Crown normally acts on the advice of the prime minister, and the powers of the House of Lords are limited to only delaying legislation.
The Nationalist Party, also known as the National Party, was an Australian political party. It was formed in February 1917 from a merger between the Liberal Party and the National Labor Party, the latter formed by Prime Minister Billy Hughes and his supporters after the 1916 Labor Party split over World War I conscription. The Nationalist Party was established as a 'united' non-Labor opposition that had remained a political trend once the Labor party established itself in federal politics. The party was in government until electoral defeat in 1929. From that time it was the main opposition to the Labor Party until it merged with pro-Joseph Lyons Labor defectors to form the United Australia Party (UAP) in 1931. The party is a direct ancestor of the Liberal Party of Australia, the main centre-right party in Australia.
The AustralianHouse of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Parliament of Australia, the upper house being the Senate. Its composition and powers are set down in Chapter I of the Constitution of Australia.
The Government of Ireland Act 1920 was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The Act's long title was "An Act to provide for the better government of Ireland"; it is also known as the Fourth Home Rule Bill or (inaccurately) as the Fourth Home Rule Act and informally known as the Partition Act. The Act was intended to partition Ireland into two self-governing polities: the six north-eastern counties were to form "Northern Ireland", while the larger part of the country was to form "Southern Ireland". Both territories were to remain part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and provision was made for their future reunification through a Council of Ireland. The Act was passed by the British Parliament in November 1920, received royal assent in December and came into force on 3 May 1921.
The Parliament of Northern Ireland was the home rule legislature of Northern Ireland, created under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which sat from 7 June 1921 to 30 March 1972, when it was suspended because of its inability to restore order during The Troubles, resulting in the introduction of direct rule. It was abolished under the Northern Ireland Constitution Act 1973.
A whip is an official of a political party whose task is to ensure party discipline in a legislature.
The Parliament of Australia is the legislative body of the federal level of government of Australia. It consists of three elements: the monarch, the Senate and the House of Representatives. It combines elements from the UK Parliament and the US Congress.
The speaker of the Australian House of Representatives is the presiding officer of the Australian House of Representatives, the lower house of the Parliament of Australia. The counterpart in the upper house is the president of the Senate. The office of the speakership was established in 1901 by section 35 of the Constitution of Australia. The primary responsibilities of the office is to oversee house debates, determine which members may speak, maintain order and the parliamentary and ministerial codes of conduct during sessions and uphold all rules and standing orders. The current speaker of the House of Representatives is Milton Dick, who was elected on 26 July 2022.
The Victorian Legislative Assembly is the state lower house of the bicameral Parliament of Victoria in Australia; the state upper house being the Victorian Legislative Council. Both houses sit at Parliament House in Spring Street, Melbourne. The main colour used for the upholstery and carpets furnishing the Chamber of the Legislative Assembly is green.
The deputy prime minister of Australia is the deputy chief executive and the second highest ranking officer of the Australian Government. The office of deputy prime minister was officially created as a ministerial portfolio in 1968, although the title had been used informally for many years previously. The deputy prime minister is appointed by the governor-general on the advice of the prime minister. When Australia has a Labor government, the deputy leader of the parliamentary party holds the position of deputy prime minister. When Australia has a Coalition government, the Coalition Agreement mandates that all Coalition members support the leader of the Liberal Party becoming prime minister and the leader of the National Party becoming the deputy prime minister.
Hugh Mahon was an Australian politician. He was a member of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and held ministerial office in the party's earliest governments. He served terms as Postmaster-General (1904), Minister for Home Affairs (1908–1909), and Minister for External Affairs (1914–1916). However, Mahon is chiefly known as the only person to be expelled from the Parliament of Australia, for making "seditious and disloyal utterances" about the British Empire. He failed to win his seat back at the by-election.
The Division of Kalgoorlie was an Australian electoral division in the state of Western Australia, named after the city of Kalgoorlie. The Division was proclaimed in 1900 as one of the original 65 divisions to be contested at the first federal election in 1901. In its final form, it covered most of the land area of Western Australia, with a size of 2,295,354 square kilometres (886,241 sq mi)—over 90 percent of the state's landmass. It included the Goldfields-Esperance, Gascoyne, Pilbara and Kimberley regions of Western Australia, in addition to the eastern and far northern parts of the Mid West region, and the town of Merredin. It was the largest single-member electorate by area in the world—almost a third of the continent.
Abstentionism is the political practice of standing for election to a deliberative assembly while refusing to take up any seats won or otherwise participate in the assembly's business. Abstentionism differs from an election boycott in that abstentionists participate in the election itself. Abstentionism has been used by Irish republican political movements in the United Kingdom and Ireland since the early 19th century. It was also used by Hungarian and Czech nationalists in the Austrian Imperial Council in the 1860s.
Joseph Devlin was an Irish journalist and influential nationalist politician. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. Later Devlin was an MP and leader of the Nationalist Party in the Parliament of Northern Ireland. He was referred to as "the duodecimo Demosthenes" by the Irish politician Tim Healy which Devlin took as a compliment.
William Archer Redmond DSO was an Irish nationalist politician. He served as an MP in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as well as a Teachta Dála (TD) of Dáil Éireann. He was one of the few people to have served in both the House of Commons and in the Oireachtas.
The 1919 Australian federal election was held on 13 December 1919 to elect members to the Parliament of Australia. All 75 seats in the House of Representatives and 19 of the 36 seats in the Senate were up for election. The incumbent Nationalist Party government won re-election, with Prime Minister Billy Hughes continuing in office.
The Victorian Farmers' Union (VFU) was an association of farmers and primary producers formed in 1914 in the Australian state of Victoria. Although initially formed as an "absolutely non-political" entity, the VFU became a political party in 1916, and nominated candidates for the 1917 state election and subsequent elections. In later years it used the names Victorian Country Party, then United Country Party and is now the National Party of Australia – Victoria. At the 1917 election, because the support for the VFU was concentrated in rural seats, it won four of the 11 seats in the Victorian Legislative Assembly it contested, gaining about 6% of the vote state-wide. In 1918 it also won its first seat in the federal parliament, after preferential voting was introduced. At the 1920 state election the VFU vote increased to 8% and the number of seats to 13, giving the VFU the balance of power in the state Legislative Assembly.
George James Foley was an Australian politician from Western Australia. He was the member for the Western Australian seat of Mount Leonora from 1911 until 1920, initially for the Labor Party until 1917 when he joined the National Labor Party. He then entered the Federal House of Representatives as the Nationalist member for the seat of Kalgoorlie, which he held until 1922.
Henry Gregory was an Australian politician. He was a Ministerialist member of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly from 1897 to 1911, representing the electorates of North Coolgardie (1897-1901) and Menzies (1901-1911). He was state Minister for Mines from 1901 to 1904 under George Leake and Walter James and Minister for Mines and Railways from 1905 to 1911 under Hector Rason, Newton Moore and Frank Wilson. He rose to become Treasurer from 1910 to 1911, a role that also entailed him acting as Premier if Wilson was absent, but lost his seat at the 1911 state election.
The Home Rule movement was a movement that campaigned for self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was the dominant political movement of Irish nationalism from 1870 to the end of World War I.
