Faith in Lyons

By car, bus, tram and dray Australia's citizens flocked to Australia's polls last week to elect a new Parliament. The large turnout did not mean an equally large interest in the election, but merely an effort to avoid the $10 fine imposed on Australians entitled to vote who fail to do so.

When returns came in Conservatives breathed with relief. After a campaign in which tousle-haired Joseph Aloysius Lyons, "the Honest Man from Tasmania," had flown over 7,000 miles in a plane branded FAITH IN AUSTRALIA, he found himself still Premier with his Cabinet intact. His United Australia Party, with the help of the Country Party, retains a shrunken but safe majority in both Houses. Enticing schemes of government inflation advocated by both the Dominion's former Laborite Premier J. H. Scullin and the irrepressible J. S. Lang of New South Wales seemed safely shelved. Langites took comfort in the fact that though defeated, their leader polled three times as many votes as he did at the time of his great defeat in 1931.

If public opinion has reduced cautious Joe Lyons' majority in Parliament, private industry has increased his progeny at home. When the penny-pinching Tasmanian became Premier of Australia three years ago he boasted nine children. Now he has eleven.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.