Prime Minister
At the 1913 elections Cook won a one-seat majority in the House of Representatives, while Labor retained a majority in the Senate, and in doing so became the sixth Prime Minister of Australia. Unable to govern effectively without control of the Senate, Cook decided to bring about a double dissolution election under section 57 of the Constitution of Australia. He introduced a bill abolishing preferential employment for trade union members in the public service, a bill he knew the Senate would repeatedly reject. When this rejection duly took place, he sought and obtained a double dissolution of the Parliament from the Governor-General.
Unfortunately for Cook, World War I broke out in the middle of the election campaign for the September 1914 election. Fisher was able to remind the voters that it was Labor that had favoured an independent Australian defence force, which the conservatives had opposed. Cook was defeated and Fisher resumed office.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Cook
Famous quotes related to prime minister:
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“Vanessa wanted to be a ballerina. Dad had such hopes for her.... Corin was the academically brilliant one, and a fencer of Olympic standard. Everything was expected of them, and they fulfilled all expectations. But I was the one of whom nothing was expected. I remember a game the three of us played. Vanessa was the President of the United States, Corin was the British Prime Minister—and I was the royal dog.”
—Lynn Redgrave (b. 1943)