Page decided to resign the leadership of the Country Party at this point. It was clear that his continuing presence in that role made reconciliation between the two parties impossible. Page’s antipathy to Menzies had been reciprocated, with Menzies making it clear he did not want Page in his Cabinet, even if he agreed to serve. Page was succeeded by Archie Cameron, but he was unsuited to the role and did not last long. When the position was declared vacant, Page again nominated, as did the young Country Party MP John McEwen. The vote was tied, and Arthur Fadden became leader as a compromise candidate—Fadden would remain the leader for eighteen years before handing over to McEwen.
When the government lost the Corio by-election in Victoria in 1940 after Casey resigned the seat in order to become the first Australian ambassador to Washington, the political shock caused Menzies to reconsider his position on the Country Party, inviting it to join his government in order to bolster support in the House. Page gave this rapprochement his blessing, noting that the outbreak of World War II the previous September had changed everything, and that there had to be a maximum war effort.
The first Menzies government was destined to be short-lived, however. Menzies spent four months in London, combining his role as prime minister with that of Australia’s representative in the British War Cabinet, and he saw this as his proper place. On his return to Australia, he proposed that he go to London for the duration of the war, a suggestion that the Labor Party would never agree to and that was too much even for his colleagues. So Menzies resigned from the prime ministership and, in the absence of any suitable candidates from the main conservative party, Fadden took over.
Given Menzies could no longer be Australia’s representative in the War Cabinet, the new Fadden government had to choose an alternative. They chose Page. Even when the Fadden government fell after less than two months in office, the new prime minister, John Curtin, indicated he had confidence in Page to continue as Australia’s representative.
Page’s posting to London reunited him with his old friend Bruce, who was serving there as Australia’s high commissioner. As would be expected, the duo again worked closely together. There was tension, however, between the pair and the new Labor government, which came to a head in February 1942 when Curtin insisted that the Australian 7th Division return home to bolster the country’s defences after the bombing of Darwin. Churchill disagreed, wanting the troops diverted to Burma to defend Rangoon. Bruce and Page both backed Churchill in this argument and beseeched Curtin to relent, but to no avail. The troops returned to Australia, and so did Page.
Page continued in opposition until 1949, when he returned to the Cabinet as minister for health, after he and Menzies had improved their relationship (Page had also mended bridges with Hughes, the other conservative prime minister with whom he had so violently clashed). He was an active health minister, developing a scheme for essential medicines to be placed on a ‘free list’ (the precursor to today’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) and a subsidised private health insurance scheme, which he saw as a ‘bulwark against the socialisation of medicine’.29 And just as he had introduced direct tied grants for roads as treasurer, so he now introduced federal hospital grants.
In 1956, Page retired from the ministry and returned to the back-bench to concentrate on writing his memoirs, which he entitled Truant Surgeon. He was the first former Australian prime minister to write a comprehensive autobiography, founding a tradition that is now the norm for retired prime ministers. He remained in parliament and contested the 1961 election, despite having been earlier diagnosed with lung cancer. Page was actually unconscious in Sydney when the election results were known. No doubt, Page being too sick to campaign had contributed to one of the greatest political upsets in Australian history: the father of the House and the local member for forty-two years had been defeated by the Labor candidate Fred McGruen, whom Page had delivered as the local doctor many years before. Page never regained consciousness and died without ever knowing he had lost his seat.
An Evaluation
Earle Page was a dominant figure in Australian politics for forty years. It is a gap in the written historical record of Australia that no substantive biography of him has been prepared. He was a solid treasurer whose performance deserves to be regarded as being in the top half of the rankings of those who have held this role. Deeply conservative in many ways, he was highly innovative in others. His support for and advocacy of the need for a central bank was a significant modernising step in the management of the Australian economy, though his failure to support his successor Theodore in creating a stand-alone central or reserve bank means that his legacy in this regard is not as strong as it could have been. It is also to his credit that he stared down the protectionist elements in his party to promote freer trade.
His reforms to budgeting—separating out government business enterprise spending from the general Budget, and bringing down the Budget earlier in the financial year—were sensible, and his creation of the Loan Council was an important reform that has stood the test of time. His budgeting was prudent and his fiscal strategy sound, even though he was sympathetic to state borrowings over this time, which meant Australia was more exposed when the global conflagration which was the Depression eventually hit.
By far Page’s biggest contribution
