[1] Following his 1945 election as leader of the Australian Labor Party after the death of John Curtin, Chifley, a former railway engine driver, became Australia's 16th Prime Minister on 13 July 1945.

To combat inflationary pressures, he proposed a continuation of wartime price and import controls, and rationing of scarce commodities.

In keeping with the Labor government's socialist leanings, the bill declared that licences of private operators would lapse for those routes that were adequately serviced by the national carrier.

[4] Labor had sought to secure power over the supply of money and credit – amidst opposition from the private banks.

[3] In the pursuit of centralist economic policy, the Chifley government also confirmed the continuation of the wartime measure under which the Commonwealth was the sole collector of income tax.

[3] In foreign policy, attorney-general and minister for external affairs H. V. Evatt was active in the formation of the United Nations.

Chifley sought to oppose the re-establishment of Dutch control of Indonesia and refused help to British efforts to quell the developing insurgency in Malaya.

[3] At the conference of the New South Wales Labor Party in June 1949, Chifley sought to define the labour movement as having:[3] [A] great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind... [Labor would] bring something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people'.With an increasingly uncertain economic outlook, and after his attempt to nationalise the banks, his government's continuation of some wartime controls, and a strike by the Communist-dominated Miners Federation, Chifley lost office at the 1949 federal election to Robert Menzies' Liberal-Country Party Coalition.