Hughes established the forerunners of the Australian Federal Police and the CSIRO during the war, and also created a number of new state-owned enterprises to aid the post-war economy.

He became one of Bruce's leading critics over time, and in 1928, following a dispute over industrial relations, he and his supporters crossed the floor on a confidence motion and brought down the government.

As late as 1939, he missed out on a second stint as prime minister by only a handful of votes, losing the 1939 United Australia Party leadership election to Robert Menzies.

Nonetheless, he received and replied to correspondence from Welsh-speakers throughout his political career, and as prime minister famously traded insults in Welsh with David Lloyd George.

After finishing his elementary schooling, he was apprenticed as a "pupil-teacher" for five years, instructing younger students for five hours a day in exchange for personal lessons from the headmaster and a small stipend.

[11] His relative financial security allowed him to pursue his own interests for the first time, which included bellringing, boating on the Thames, and travel (such as a two-day trip to Paris).

[16] Hughes's accounts are by their nature unverifiable, and his biographers have cast doubt on their veracity – Fitzhardinge states that they were embellished at best and at worst "a world of pure fantasy".

"We were destined to have our own way from the beginning..[and]..killed everybody else to get it," Hughes said, adding that "the first historic event in the history of the Commonwealth we are engaged in today [is] without the slightest trace of that race we have banished from the face of the earth."

[2] According to two contemporary writers, Hughes's speeches "have in particular evoked intense approbation, and have been followed by such a quickening power of the national spirit as perhaps no other orator since Chatham ever aroused".

At the 1917 Australian federal election Hughes and the Nationalists won a huge electoral victory, which was magnified by the large number of Labor MPs who followed him out of the party.

For this reason, Munro-Ferguson used his reserve power to immediately re-commission Hughes, thus allowing him to remain as prime minister while keeping his promise to resign.

However, due to wartime stresses and other considerations the council endured until 1920, at which point an act of parliament was passed transforming it into a new government agency, the Institute of Science and Industry.

[45] On a Christmas visit the year before, in 1918, to wounded servicemen convalescing in Kent, Hughes had met Australian pilots who were facing the seven-week sea voyage home and were eager to pioneer an air route and fly to Australia instead.

[46] Despite the risks of such a venture, Hughes' eagerness to see Australia at the forefront of technological development and in a central position in world affairs, had him seeking the support of his cabinet for a scheme to establish a Britain–Australia route.

[49] Brothers Ross and Keith Smith, pilot and navigator, and mechanics Walter Shiers and Jim Bennett won the prize when their Vickers Vimy G-EAOU twin engine plane landed in Darwin on 10 December 1919.

At a meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet on 30 December 1918, Hughes warned that if they "were not very careful, we should find ourselves dragged quite unnecessarily behind the wheels of President Wilson's chariot".

[58] Hughes, unlike Wilson or South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, demanded heavy reparations from the German Empire, suggesting the sum of £24,000,000,000 of which Australia would claim many millions to off-set its own war debt.

Many of the more conservative elements of his own party never trusted him because they thought he was still a socialist at heart, citing his interest in retaining government ownership of the Commonwealth Shipping Line and the Australian Wireless Company.

In the New Year's Day Honours of 1922, Hughes's wife Mary was appointed a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE).

[75] At the 1922 Australian federal election, Hughes gave up the seat of Bendigo and transferred to the upper-middle-class Division of North Sydney, thus giving up one of the last symbolic links to his working-class roots.

[76] He rented a house in Kirribilli, New South Wales in his new electorate and was recruited by The Daily Telegraph to write a series of articles on topics of his choosing.

[80] In 1925 Hughes again had little involvement in parliamentary affairs, but began to portray himself as "champion of Australian industries struggling to get established against foreign competition and government indifference", with the aid of his friends James Hume Cook and Ambrose Pratt.

With the Allies suffering a series of defeats and the threat of war growing in the Pacific, the Menzies government (1939-1941) relied on two independents, Arthur Coles and Alex Wilson for its parliamentary majority.

[citation needed] Unable to convince Curtin to join in a War Cabinet and facing growing pressure within his own party, Menzies resigned as prime minister on 29 August 1941.

Although the UAP had been in government for a decade, it was so bereft of leadership that a joint UAP-Country meeting elected Country Party leader Arthur Fadden to lead the Coalition.

The independents, under prodding from Governor-General Alexander Hore-Ruthven, 1st Earl of Gowrie, then threw their support to Opposition Leader John Curtin, who was sworn in as prime minister on 7 October 1941.

[91] Hughes led the UAP into the 1943 Australian federal election largely by refusing to hold any party meetings and by agreeing to let Fadden lead the Opposition as a whole.

[93] A major redistribution and expansion of the House of Representatives occurred prior to the 1949 election, with much of the northern portion of North Sydney transferred to the new Division of Bradfield.

Hughes faced a preselection challenge for the first time since 1894, but defeated Harry Turner for Liberal Party endorsement and won a comfortable victory.

With regard to Hughes's personal philosophy, Clark wrote that he had a "bleakly Hobbesian view of life", seeing it as "a savage elemental struggle for survival in which strong men crushed the weak".