Talk:Liberal Party (1922)

No such thing

Based on some of the contemporary sources I'm reading, the entity described in the article did not exist. There seems to be a confusion between the pre-existing Liberal Union of South Australia and a separate Liberal Union established in Melbourne. In South Australia, the Liberal Union and National Party refused to cooperate in 1922 as they had done previously, standing separate tickets. The two Liberal Union MPs immediately joined the parliamentary Nationalist Party after the election. The Victorian organisation supported what were effectively "independent Liberal" candidates, who also joined the parliamentary Nationalist Party though not immediately. There was no link between the two organisations and they did not form a parliamentary party as our articles imply. I reckon probably the simplest thing to do would be to list all those MPs as "independent Liberals" on election articles and rewrite this article to be about the Victorian organisation. Ivar the Boneful (talk) 14:51, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

This is a great catch. I'm torn between being deeply embarrassed that it lasted this long, and being a bit amazed that there were two basically unrelated splits of the same party at the same election involving splitter groups of the same name, something that basically goes unmentioned in contemporaneous sources. It seems to stem from a series of sloppy errors in other sources: the cited Parliamentary Handbook says "LIB; NAT from 1925" for the SA members which is only true in the sense that those labels did basically describe their party affiliations at the 1922 and 1925 elections respectively; Psephos is (unusually) similarly sloppy, and the UWA database is perennially wrong about just about everything and I dunno why we haven't gotten around to formally blacklisting it yet. I guess it reflects the quality of sources we had to deal with back when we first rolled out content on federal politics compared to the wealth of easily-available sources we have today.

So, the SA situation (which is where I know a lot of the background) seems to have been much as you said - the existing Liberals and the 1916 Hughes Labor splitters never united into the same party at state level in South Australia, and after a bitter 1921 state campaign where they ran against each other and the Liberals smashed the Nationals, the state Liberals seem to have taken a "kill them all" approach to the remaining SA federal Hughes splitters at the 1922 federal election unless they joined the Liberal organisation (and sometimes even if they did). There was a bunch of tensions associated with the push (with some state Liberal figures getting a bit sour on the non-SA 1916 splitters), Hughes took the position of campaigning for his incumbents on both sides, but at no point were the elected federal MPs ever really anti-Hughes and there doesn't seem to have been any real doubt that they would sit as Nationalists given that, as always, the Liberal Union was the main SA affiliate of the Nationalist Party. None of the SA people seem to belong in the scope of this article/label - the MPs articles need correcting and it's a situation that needs to be mentioned in Liberal Union (South Australia) not here.

The challenge for working out what to do with this article is that I've always found Victorian politics of this era completely impenetrable to understand and so have almost no background to work with on the Victorian split. (This is probably why I didn't catch the issue earlier given the work I've done in SA.) I'll have a see what I can find (I think I've got some Hughes books around the place somewhere) but I'm not sure I'll be able to contribute as much. The Drover's Wife (talk) 01:07, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Someone is going to need to fix Results of the 1922 Australian federal election (House of Representatives), which due to its tables is a bit beyond my editing capabilities. The Drover's Wife (talk) 01:27, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Early non-ALP politics is very murky and it's easy to see why things have been oversimplified. The whole situation of having separate electoral organisations and parliamentary parties is pretty foreign to us and I think the natural reaction is to try and fit them together. Also, I'd imagine a lot of the people compiling the secondary sources for election results are psephology specialists and not as interested in anything that happens in between elections. Ivar the Boneful (talk) 03:52, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

I will put my hand up to fix the Results of the 1922 Australian federal election (House of Representatives) once we have reliable sources for where to place them - it's easy to replace "Liberal (1922)" with "Independent Liberal", but will take more work if we then agree on a different solution. I am also unfamiliar with Victorian politics of this but will do some research & see what I can come up with. --Find bruce (talk) 05:06, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

@Find bruce: - would you be able to change any South Australian links in the election table so that any links to this page go to Liberal Union (South Australia) instead, and any links to the Nationalists in South Australia go to National Party (South Australia) instead? It might take a bit longer to sort out what to do with Vic, but SA seems pretty clear-cut. I presume both parties have colours, etc, for the tables from the state results. The Drover's Wife (talk) 05:11, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

I have changed the 1922 results for SA to Liberal Union (South Australia) & National Party (South Australia) & added colours & links for national sa to the party name and colour templates. I have not changed the results table at the top right, 1922 Australian federal election, the election candidates, the various division pages, nor individual member pages, nor previous elections. --Find bruce (talk) 08:54, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

From what I have been able to gather, it would seem that there was a liberal union in Victoria who endorsed candidates for the 1922 election, eg Ad Liberal Union electors! and a separate Liberal Union in South Australia. If this is corrects, as there is already a page for the SA party, I am leaning towards limiting this page to the Victorian party. --Find bruce (talk) 08:54, 31 July 2021 (UTC)