Beginnings
William Alexander Watt was born in the Victorian rural town of Barfold, the eleventh and last child of Scottish immigrant James Mitchie Watt and his Irish wife Jane Douglas. When James died five months after William’s birth, Jane concluded it would be easier to raise her children single-handed in the city rather than the bush, and took her children to Melbourne. Watt was educated at Errol Street State School in North Melbourne until his family’s precarious financial position drove him to leave school at the age of fourteen. Despite being the last-born child, he eventually became the only breadwinner for his mother and an unmarried sister, working as a clerk, then an accountant, and eventually as a director of a hay and corn store.2 Watt took evening classes at the Working Men’s College in accountancy, grammar, logic and philosophy, an endeavour that was complemented by a ferocious reading habit. As was fairly common for young men of a working-class or lower-middle-class background with budding political ambitions, he also took three years of elocution lessons.
Sometime before 1890, he joined the ANA, the federation-inclined body made up exclusively of Australian-born men that Samuel Lyons had helped to found. Watt was an enthusiastic participant in the organisation’s debates and lectures, using them to hone his public-speaking skills. It was through his involvement with the ANA that Watt came to meet the liberal orator and future prime minister Alfred Deakin, a man he would greatly admire (or, in his own words, ‘hero worship’). In 1894 he was elected to the executive of the Australasian Federation League of Victoria, and this lifted his profile as an advocate of federation.
Like other future treasurers (most notably Page and to a lesser degree Chifley), Watt’s economic policies were very much influenced by what he saw during a time of crisis, in this case the bank crashes and depression of the 1890s. The economic misery he observed drove him to embrace a fairly radical brand of liberalism. Watt concluded that the social discontent was ‘the natural result of a social order where the few sit on the shoulders of the many and pick the pockets of the beasts of burden’.3
Watt was not attracted to the Labor Party or to socialism, despite supporting many of their ideas, such as improved factory legislation and greater democratisation of the parliamentary processes. In late 1894 he conceded in a speech to the ANA that ‘socialism gains by comparison with the existing evil’, but he argued that socialism’s attraction to government ownership was misplaced. He thought society’s freedoms were too important to risk for a socialist system and that monopolies were the real evil, to be broken up by rigorous government action.4
Watt married Florence Carringham in the same year as his ANA speech. Tragically, his wife died in childbirth in 1896, along with the child. Almost a decade later he would marry Emily Seismann, with whom he would have five children.
In 1897, aged twenty-six, Watt was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly as the member for Melbourne North, defeating the leader of the Labor Party, George Prendergast. This was in the days before the development of hard and fast political parties, and Watt identified in ‘the Liberal interest’. After a short time in parliament, he joined a faction known as the Young Australia Group, which consisted of like-minded ANA members who were impatient with Victorian premier George Turner, feeling he should be even more radical in his liberalism and support for federation. In 1899, when the Turner government fell, largely as a result of agitation by Watt and the Young Australia Group, the new premier, Alan McLean, invited Watt to join the Cabinet as postmaster-general. Watt was an energetic minister but lost his seat at the next election as Prendergast fought his way back into the Victorian Parliament.
Watt started a real estate business, but his political ambitions were far from satiated. He unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in the first federal election in 1900 as a member of Deakin’s Protectionist Party, and was twice more defeated in his attempts to return to the Legislative Assembly in by-elections. He eventually returned to the Victorian Parliament as the member for Melbourne East in 1902, and successfully ran as the member for Deakin’s old seat of Essendon in 1904. His anti-Labor views had by this time developed further, and he was now a firm supporter of the unity of the conservative parties. In the Legislative Assembly, he voted in favour of giving the franchise to women and supported reforms to make the Legislative Council more democratic, as well as factory legislation that gave more protection to vulnerable workers.
When Watt’s friend and ally John Murray became Victorian premier in 1909, he asked Watt to join him as treasurer, a portfolio that Watt would retain until 1914, apart from one week out of office—more on that below. Murray was twenty years older than Watt and had a reputation for laziness, which was not challenged by his relaxed approach to the premiership. Watt’s approach to the Treasury, in contrast, was energetic. Watt was ‘the government’s driving force, even before acting as Premier for six months in 1911’.5 The Murray–Watt government would prove to be a reformist one, despite facing considerable obstacles courtesy of the Legislative Council.
Winning Respect
In 1912 Murray retired and handed the premiership to Watt, who hit the ground running: ‘The 1912 session saw Watt drive himself and the Parliament hard. More than 90 Acts were passed.’6 His government introduced a rudimentary workers’ compensation system, the first state endowments to hospitals, electrification of the railways, and an ambitious irrigation system. Watt was a city-based premier in a government reliant on the support of rural members, but this did not dissuade him from attempting to reform the voting system to reduce the country-region gerrymander and increase the value of
