Sir Henry Bolte | |
|---|---|
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| 38thPremier of Victoria | |
| In office 7 June 1955 – 23 August 1972 | |
| Monarch | Elizabeth II |
| Governor | Sir Dallas Brooks Sir Rohan Delacombe |
| Deputy | Sir Arthur Rylah Dick Hamer |
| Preceded by | John Cain (senior) |
| Succeeded by | Dick Hamer |
| Member of theVictorian Parliament forHampden | |
| In office 8 November 1947 – 24 August 1972 | |
| Preceded by | Raymond Hyatt |
| Succeeded by | Tom Austin |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 20 May 1908 |
| Died | 4 January 1990(1990-01-04) (aged 81) Bamganie, Victoria, Australia |
| Party | Liberal Party |
| Spouse | |
| Occupation | Farmer |
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Member of the Legislative Assembly forHampden (1947–1972)Premier of Victoria Elections Related | ||
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Sir Henry Edward BolteGCMG (/ˈbɒlti/BOL-tee; 20 May 1908 – 4 January 1990) was an Australian politician who served as the 38thpremier of Victoria from 1955 to 1972. He held office as the leader of theVictorian division of theLiberal Party of Australia (LPA) and was a member of theVictorian Legislative Assembly (MLA) for the division of Hampden from 1947 to 1972. He is the longest-serving premier inVictorian state history, having been in office for over 17 consecutive years.
Bolte was born on 20 May 1908 inBallarat East, Victoria. He was the son of Anna Jane (née Martin) and James Henry Bolte. His father, a miner, was the son of German immigrants and his mother was also half-German.[1]
Shortly after his birth, Bolte's parents moved the family toSkipton in theWestern District where they ran a localpub, the Ripon Hotel. His mother's stepfather William Warren was also a hotel proprietor, running the Skipton Hotel until 1921 when he sold it to the Boltes. During World War I the family facedanti-German sentiment.[1]
Bolte began his education at Skipton State School. He enteredBallarat Grammar School as a boarder in 1922 on a technical scholarship, attending alongside his future parliamentary colleaguesTom Hollway andEdward Montgomery. He left school in 1924 and returned to Skipton, where he had land dealings and ran a haberdashery shop established by his father. He was also active in community organisations, playing cricket and football for local teams, qualifying as a swimming instructor and serving as secretary of the local racing club. His store failed in 1929 and during theGreat Depression he worked as ashearer to support himself.[1]
In 1934, with money from his grandmother, Bolte purchasedKialla, a sheep farming property of 900 acres (360 ha) at Bamganie nearMeredith. In his early years on the land he facedrabbit plague and supplemented his income by trapping and hunting rabbits. In August 1940, Bolte enlisted in theMilitia as agunner. He was stationed atPuckapunyal for periods as an artillery instructor and pay clerk, but was rejected for overseas service and discharged in January 1943.[1]
Bolte was founding president of theLiberal Party's Meredith branch in 1945 and was a delegate to its inaugural state council. He first stood for parliament at the1945 state election, running unsuccessfully in the seat ofHampden, but reprised his candidacyin 1947 and defeated the incumbentAustralian Labor Party (ALP) memberRaymond Hyatt.[1]
Victorian politics was volatile at this time, with a succession of weak short-term governments. The electoral system wasmalapportioned in favour of rural areas, which gave the Liberals' junior partner, theCountry Party disproportionate power. As a rural Liberal, Bolte despised the Country Party nearly as much as theLabor Party.[2] In April 1935, Country Party leader and Deputy PremierAlbert Dunstan unexpectedly withdrew support for the Premier,Stanley Argyle, breaking the coalition agreement and forming a minority Country government, which Labor supported in return for some policy concessions.
When Bolte was elected to Parliament in 1947 the Liberal leader wasThomas Hollway, who also came from Ballarat but was somewhat less conservative than Bolte. In 1951 Hollway tried to reform the electoral system, which caused a split in the Liberal Party and his replacement byLes Norman, with Bolte as Deputy Leader. Norman would lose his seat to Hollway in 1952, and be replaced as leader byTrevor Oldham. When Oldham was killed onBOAC Flight 783 in May 1953, Bolte succeeded him.
The Labor Party underJohn Cain Sr. had come to power at the 1952 elections, but in 1955 the party suffered a split over the issue ofcommunist influence in the trade unions. With Cain's government reeling, Bolte tabled a no-confidence motion on 19 April. The anti-communist Catholic MPs, who had organised as theAustralian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), crossed the floor to support the no-confidence motion, bringing Cain down.
Due in large part to Labor (A-C) directing itssecond preferences to the Liberals, Bolte won theensuing election with a huge majority, routing both Labor and the Country Party. There was little hint at the time that he would reverse the pattern of unstable government in Victoria; he headed the state's 11th government in 12 years. However, he was able to form the first stable non-Labor government in Victoria for many years.
Bolte was a rough-hewn politician who liked to be seen as a simple farmer, but he had a shrewd political mind. With the help of the expelled faction of the Labor Party, which became theDemocratic Labor Party, Bolte was able to consolidate his position. Due in part to the DLP continuing to direct its preferences to the Liberals at elections, Bolte was reelected six times. Hispopulist attacks on the trade unions, intellectuals, protesters and the press won him a large following. It peaked at the1967 election, which saw the opposition reduced to just 28 seats (16 Labor and 12 Country) in total.
Bolte used state debt to provide a wide range of state infrastructure and he was very successful at winning overseas investment for the state. Some of the large projects undertaken during his time in government were increased coal production and power generation in theLatrobe Valley, new offshore oil and gas fields inGippsland, theWest Gate Bridge over the lowerYarra River, a new international airport for Melbourne atTullamarine and two new universities (Monash University andLa Trobe University). The majority of these projects were facilitated, rather than funded, by the State government. Bolte was easily re-elected at the 1958, 1961 and 1964 state elections.
Bolte was a proponent of usingcapital punishment as a deterrent against violent crime. Many believed he was foiled when Robert Peter Tait who had murdered Ada Hall, an elderly widow, at theHawthornvicarage where she lived with her son, and who subsequently had been sentenced to hang for the crime, was granted an eleventh-hour reprieve in 1962 after the High Court had found him insane.[3][4]
Justice Starke subscribed to the substitute Tait theory, Starke had defended Tait but later on was the sentencing judge in theR v Ryan & Walker 1966. Starke said "After Bolte was denied with Tait he simply waited for the next cab off the ranks, and poor Ryan happened to be the next cab!"[3]
In 1965, two prisoners,Ronald Ryan and Peter Walker, had escaped from Melbourne'sPentridge Prison, allegedly killing a prison guard in the process. They were recaptured, and Ryan was sentenced to death for murder.Bolte had the power to recommendclemency, but declined to exercise it, arguing that the death penalty was a necessary deterrent for crime against government officials and law enforcement officers.
All calls for clemency, petitions and protests were to no avail.[5] Bolte was determined that the law be upheld. Ryan was hanged in February 1967. Bolte had said "If I thought the law was wrong I would change it".[6]
A reporter at his daily press conference on the day of the hanging asked what he was doing at the time it took place. Bolte, replied: "One of the three Ss, I suppose." The reporter asked him what he meant. Bolte responded: "A shit, a shave or a shower."[7] Peter Blazey later wrote 'For a man practically devoid of political or social idealism, the hanging had proved a way of tightening his control over cabinet, the party and the press.' Blazey also adds, however, that the Ryan hanging meant Bolte 'had become brutalized politically, even if he didn't know it...'[8]
Bolte's insistence on having Ryan hanged earned him the opposition of the Melbourne press, particularlyThe Age, the churches, the universities and most of the legal profession. It also alienated sections of the Liberal Party and some members of his own Cabinet, including his eventual successor,Dick Hamer. But Bolte had correctly interpreted the populist appeal of his putative law-and-order stand, and at the 1967 elections the Liberals went from 38 of 66 seats in 1964 to 44 of 73 in 1967.
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After 1968, when Bolte turned 60, his appeal to younger urban voters declined, and he showed little sympathy with new issues such as the environment and civil liberties. His standing was also reduced by a crisis in the state education system, with teacher shortages and overcrowded schools as the children of thebaby boom passed through the education system. The government recruited large numbers ofAmerican schoolteachers to deal with the shortage. At the same time the Labor Party began to revive under a new leader,Clyde Holding.
At the 1970 state elections the Liberals seemed in serious danger of losing office, or at least being forced into a coalition with the Country Party, but Bolte was saved by Holding's left-wing enemies in the Labor Party, who sabotaged his campaign by publicly opposing government funding for non-government schools (which Holding andGough Whitlam had made Labor policy). Nevertheless, the Liberals lost six seats.
Bolte was promoted to Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG) in the1972 New Year Honours.[9]Bolte on various occasions asked the prime minister,William McMahon, to approach the British authorities to have Bolte made alife peer of the UK Parliament. McMahon needed Bolte's political support, so he wrote to 10 Downing Street with a proposal, but it was declined.[10]
As 1972 dawned, the Liberals lost further ground among younger voters in Melbourne. Bolte was shrewd enough to see that the Liberals had a year at most to broaden their appeal before a statutory general election, and concluded that they needed a new leader and a new image for the 1970s. In August 1972, he resigned, apparently with no regrets. He arranged for Deputy PremierDick Hamer, a somewhat more progressive Melbourne-based Liberal, to succeed him. Despite misgivings from the more conservative wing of the party, Hamer became Liberal leader and premier. This proved a sound judgement, since Hamer went on to win three more elections for the Liberals.
After his resignation and retirement from Parliament, Bolte retired to his farm, 'Kialla', at Bamganie, near Meredith.[1] When the Liberals lost government in Victoria toJohn Cain, Jr. Liberals in the Opposition would visit Bolte at his farm, "whisky bottle in hand, seeking consolation and advice."[1] Bolte was deeply affected by the sudden death of his wife, Dame Edith, in 1986.[1]
On 24 March 1984, Bolte was involved in a serious head-on accident when he was driving home after an evening in the local hotel near his property at Bamganie. Bolte and the occupants of the other car were taken to the Ballarat Base Hospital, where blood samples were taken to test for alcohol levels. Whilst there was no evidence of alcohol in the blood of the other driver involved, there were indications of an alcohol content in excess of 0.05%, the legal limit in Victoria, in Bolte's blood. Further samples were subsequently collected from the hospital by the police, but these were found to have been substituted, and the sample box containing them had been unlocked by an unknown person. An enquiry found that it would have been unfair to proceed with prosecution because of interference with the evidence.[11][12] Bolte later told author Tom Prior "Of course I know nothing, I was unconscious".[2]
Bolte died at his home on 4 January 1990.[1]
Bolte was appointed aKnight Commander of theOrder of St. Michael and St. George (KCMG) in the New Year's Day honours list of 1966.[13] In the1972 New Year Honours he was advanced to the rank ofKnight Grand Cross (GCMG).[14] Despite "his intense lobbying", Bolte failed to secure apeerage.[1]
His wife, Lady Edith Lilian Bolte, known as Jill Bolte, was appointed aDame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the1973 New Year Honours for "outstanding public service to Victoria".[15]
A portrait of Bolte byWilliam Dargie hangs in Queens Hall at Parliament House Victoria.[16]
TheBolte Bridge that spansMelbourne'sDocklands is named after him.
| Political offices | ||
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| Preceded by | Premier of Victoria 1955–1972 | Succeeded by |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by | Leader of theLiberal Party inVictoria 1953–1972 | Succeeded by Rupert Hamer |
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