However, Turner understood the intricacies of government finance and was a prodigious worker. This was appreciated by the first Treasury secretary, George Allen, who in 1909 said that Turner ‘stands first and highest in the calendar of his masters. There has never been a Treasurer like Sir George.’5 His successor in the role, Sir Joseph Cook, described Turner as ‘one of the most useful public men Australia has ever known’.6 Even Deakin acknowledged that ‘his faculty of work was enormous, his love of detail great’.7 Manning Clark also credits Turner’s abilities, writing that ‘balancing the books was his great passion in life. By his great industry, his zeal and his deep conviction, he helped to raise that criterion into the standard by which politicians came to be judged in Australia.’8
To understand the office of Australian treasurer, it is important to understand its first incumbent, and the stamp he put on the role.
Beginnings
The year 1851 was a big one for the colony of Victoria. The great gold rush that saw a massive increase in Victoria’s (and Australia’s) wealth began in May, just before the colony achieved formal independence from NSW. It was also in 1851 that the man destined to be the first Australian-born premier of Victoria, and the first federal treasurer, was born in Melbourne.
George Turner came from a modest family of English immigrants. His father Alfred worked as a cabinet-maker, while his mother Ruth engaged in home duties. Turner was initially educated at Melbourne’s National Model School, the precursor to Melbourne High School, but he left when he was fourteen. Like many of his successors in the role of treasurer, his early years were marked by intense attention to self-improvement and part-time education. Turner became employed as a clerk for solicitor John Edwards, who was also a member of the Legislative Assembly. In 1874, at the age of twenty-three, Turner matriculated and became an articled clerk for another solicitor, Samuel Lyons. It is not clear how much the political activities of these two employers piqued his own interest in politics, but we do know that Lyons was a founder of the Australian Natives Association (ANA), an influential lobby group for Australian-born men that promoted liberalism, nationalism and federation, as well as sponsoring education and self-improvement for its members. Turner joined the Freemasons in 1882, becoming a senior grand warden in 1896, and was also involved in several friendly societies. Turner was admitted as a solicitor in 1881 and became Lyons’ partner in practice.
By this time, Turner had been married for nearly a decade to Rosa Morgan, whom he’d wed two days after his twenty-first birthday in 1872. Morgan was then a young English migrant who, by all reports, had seen potential and talent in this shy and retiring man. Deakin would later note that Turner was ‘fortunate in finding a partner who assisted him at every step and constantly pushed him forward’.9
Turner was elected to St Kilda Council in 1885 and became mayor in 1887. He maintained his seat on the council after he was elected to the Legislative Assembly, and even after he became the colony’s premier. It was said of him that he was ‘never more at home, never more himself, “plain George”, than after a council meeting in the mayoral supper room’.10
Turner’s election as the liberal Protectionist member for St Kilda took place in 1889. That poll saw twelve members of the ANA enter the Victorian Parliament, forming a powerful bloc that continued for many years. Turner and his colleagues supported the conservative–liberal coalition government of Duncan Gillies. However, the Gillies government fell after twelve months, largely due to its poor handling of a crippling maritime strike, and James Munro became premier—again with the support of Turner and his ANA colleagues. Turner impressed senior members of the government with his attention to detail and was appointed commissioner for trade and customs in 1891.
Turner added the solicitor-general’s job to his portfolio in 1892, the same year Munro was forced from office because he’d been a founder of, and shareholder in, one of the banks that engaged in the property speculation that led to the banking crash and subsequent economic crisis in Victoria in the early 1890s. He was replaced by William Shiels, who kept Turner in the Cabinet. In 1893, Shiels lost a vote on the floor of the assembly over the handling of the depression that was engulfing Victoria, and Turner soon found himself appointed leader of the opposition, up against the newly minted government of James Patterson. This was not a position he’d sought; rather, he’d largely been elected by a process of elimination.
The Patterson government proved no more adept at managing the economic crisis than had its predecessor, so Turner moved a motion of no confidence on the floor of the assembly, in the taciturn fashion for which he would become known:
On this occasion according to my usual practice, I do not propose to detain the House at any great length. It is well known that I do not claim to have a flow of language such as some members of the House possess, and I have always put matters as concisely and briefly as I can.11
Despite the less-than-inspiring nature of Turner’s call to arms, his motion was successful in precipitating an election.
Unusually for this period in Victorian politics, the cleavage between the premier and the leader of the opposition was clear: Patterson was a conservative and Turner was a liberal.12 Turner campaigned on a policy of direct taxation to repair the colony’s finances after the ravages of depression. He implied this would take the form of a ‘surplus wealth tax’ but was vague on details. Still, the trade union movement was attracted to Turner’s liberal
