William Morris Hughes, (born Sept. 25, 1862, London, Eng.—died Oct. 28, 1952, Sydney, Australia), prime minister of Australia from 1915 to 1923 and a mainstay of national politics for 50 years.
Hughes emigrated to Queensland in 1884. After working for the unionization of maritime workers in Sydney, he was elected to the New South Wales legislature in 1894 as a Labor Party member. He entered the first federal Parliament in 1901 and served as attorney general in the three ministries of Andrew Fisher between 1908 and 1915. He helped establish a national system of defense (1909) and judicial arbitration in labour disputes.
Hughes succeeded Fisher as prime minister in 1915, during World War I, and emerged as a charismatic wartime leader. When the electorate and the Labor Party rejected his conscription proposal of 1916, he helped form the Nationalist Party, remaining prime minister as the head of that party. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, he gained Australian control over German New Guinea and successfully opposed a racial-equality clause sponsored by Japan for inclusion in the League of Nations covenant. Following a rebuff in the elections of 1922 by Earle Page’s Country Party, he slipped from the centre of power.
Hughes contributed to Stanley Bruce’s defeat in 1929 and served in the cabinet (1934–41) under the United Australian Party administrations of Joseph Lyons and Sir Robert Menzies. When the Labor Party came back into power in 1941, Hughes sat on the Advisory War Council (1941–44) and maintained his seat in Parliament until his death. His memoirs were published in Crusts and Crusades (1947) and Policies and Potentates (1950).