Henry Bolte

Sir Henry Edward Bolte GCMG (20 May 1908 – 4 January 1990) was an Australian politician who served as the 38th premier of Victoria from 1955 to 1972.

After working in various manual jobs he married Edith Elder in 1934 and bought a small farm called 'Kialla' at Bamganie near Meredith, where he lived for the rest of his life, running sheep and cattle.

In April 1935, Country Party leader and Deputy Premier Albert Dunstan unexpectedly withdrew support for the Premier, Stanley Argyle, breaking the coalition agreement and forming a minority Country government, which Labor supported in return for some policy concessions.

In 1940 Bolte joined the Australian Army and served as a sergeant with a training regiment until 1945.

After the war he returned to farming and became active in the newly formed Liberal Party.

At the 1945 election he stood unsuccessfully for the Victorian Legislative Assembly in the Western District seat of Hampden, but in 1947 he stood again and was elected.

Victorian politics was volatile at this time, with a succession of weak short-term governments.

The electoral system was malapportioned in favour of rural areas, which gave the Liberals' junior partner, the Country Party disproportionate power.

As a rural Liberal, Bolte despised the Country Party nearly as much as the Labor Party.

He held office as the leader of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party of Australia (LPA) and was a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly (MLA) for the division of Hampden from 1947 to 1972.

He is the longest-serving premier in Victorian state history, having been in office for over 17 consecutive years.

Henry Bolte was born in Ballarat, the son of a publican of German descent.

He was to spend the first 24 years of his life (apart from three years at boarding school) in the small Western District town of Skipton.

He was educated at Skipton Primary School and Ballarat Grammar School: to date, he was the last Victorian Premier not to attend a university.

When Bolte was elected to Parliament in 1947 the Liberal leader was Thomas Hollway, who also came from Ballarat but was somewhat less conservative than Bolte.

In 1951 Hollway tried to reform the electoral system, which caused a split in the Liberal Party and his replacement by Les Norman, with Bolte as Deputy Leader.

Norman would lose his seat to Hollway in 1952, and be replaced as leader by Trevor Oldham.

The Labor Party under John Cain Sr. had come to power at the 1952 elections, but in 1955 the party suffered a split over the issue of communist influence in the trade unions.

With Cain's government reeling, Bolte tabled a no-confidence motion on 19 April.

The anti-communist Catholic MPs, who had organised as the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), crossed the floor to support the no-confidence motion, bringing Cain down.

Due in large part to Labor (A-C) directing its second preferences to the Liberals, Bolte won the ensuing election with a huge majority, routing both Labor and the Country Party.

When Oldham was killed on BOAC Flight 783 in May 1953, Bolte succeeded him.

Bolte was easily re-elected at the 1958, 1961 and 1964 state elections.

Bolte was a proponent of using capital punishment as a deterrent against violent crime.

Many believed he was foiled when Robert Peter Tait who had murdered Ada Hall, an elderly widow, at the Hawthorn vicarage where she lived with her son and who had been sentenced to hang for the crime, was granted an eleventh-hour reprieve in 1962 after the High Court had found him insane.

In 1965, two prisoners, Ronald Ryan and Peter Walker, had escaped from Melbourne's Pentridge Prison, allegedly killing a prison guard in the process.

They were recaptured, and Ryan was sentenced to death for murder.

Bolte had the power to recommend clemency, but declined to exercise it, arguing that the death penalty was a necessary deterrent for crime against government officials and law enforcement officers.

All calls for clemency, petitions and protests were to no avail.

Justice Starke subscribed to the substitute Tait theory, Starke had defended Tait but later on was the sentencing judge in the R v Ryan & Walker 1966.

Starke said "After Bolte was denied with Tait he simply waited for the next cab off the ranks, and poor Ryan happened to be the next cab!"

It peaked at the 1967 election, which saw the opposition reduced to just 28 seats (16 Labor and 12 Country) in total.

Bolte used state debt to provide a wide range of state infrastructure and he was very successful at winning overseas investment for the state.

Some of the large projects undertaken during his time in government were increased coal production and power generation in the Latrobe Valley, new offshore oil and gas fields in Gippsland, the West Gate Bridge over the lower Yarra River, a new international airport for Melbourne at Tullamarine and two new universities (Monash University and La Trobe University).

There was little hint at the time that he would reverse the pattern of unstable government in Victoria; he headed the state's 11th government in 12 years.

However, he was able to form the first stable non-Labor government in Victoria for many years.

Bolte was a rough-hewn politician who liked to be seen as a simple farmer, but he had a shrewd political mind.

With the help of the expelled faction of the Labor Party, which became the Democratic Labor Party, Bolte was able to consolidate his position.

Due in part to the DLP continuing to direct its preferences to the Liberals at elections, Bolte was reelected six times.

His populist attacks on the trade unions, intellectuals, protesters and the press won him a large following.