In November 1917 during World War I, the Australian Government conducted a raid on the Queensland Government Printing Office in Brisbane. The aim of the raid was to confiscate any copies of the Hansard, the official parliamentary transcript, which documented anti-conscription sentiments that had been aired in the state's parliament.
Background
Following Australia's entry into the first World War, thousands of Queenslanders enlisted in the military to go and fight in Europe. However, as the war dragged on and it became evident that victory would not be achieved quickly or easily, the initial enthusiasm for the conflict waned and recruitment rates began to decline. The British government, needing fresh manpower to bolster its reserves in France, pressured the Australian federal government to send more reinforcements. The federal government, led by Billy Hughes, did not have the numbers to legislate for compulsory military service (conscription), and Hughes held a plebiscite in 1916 in an attempt to win the necessary political support to conscript able-bodied men and send them to Europe. This plan was derailed when, amongst much community division and controversy, the plebiscite returned a "No" result. The resulting political fallout led Hughes to leave his party, forming an alliance with former political foes, and a second plebiscite was called in an attempt to overturn the result of the previous one.
The Queensland Government had originally been mildly supportive of the notion of conscription, but this ended with the defeat of the Commonwealth Liberal government under Digby Denham, and the election of a Labor government led by T. J. Ryan in 1915. Initially ambivalent about the issue (Ryan having deferred from signing a letter in support of conscription in the days before the 1916 vote) the Ryan government's stance hardened by late 1916, as the position of the party's rank-and-file membership swung decisively to opposing compulsory service. This opposition was not welcomed by Hughes, and Ryan was the only state premier to openly oppose the federal government on the issue. The split became serious by 1917, with Ryan acknowledged as the de facto leader of those advocating a "No" vote in the 1917 plebiscite on conscription, and the state and federal government at odds on other issues including industrial disputes, price controls, and coastal shipping.
The federal government responded to this anti-conscription sentiment in the community with a series of censorship measures, enabled by the War Precautions Act 1914 which permitted the federal government to censor speech which in their view would have interfered with the war effort. Some of these censorship measures were unorthodox even for the time; the public performance of I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier was prohibited, a ban that was openly flouted by radical anti-conscription campaigner Cecilia John. An Australian Government regulation was issued in 1917 prohibiting over 200 publications, as diverse as Hearst newspapers from America, The Cincinnati Enquirer, Harpers Bazaar, as well as seemingly innocuous publications such as Cosmopolitan, Motor, and Good Housekeeping. Premier Ryan and Treasurer Ted Theodore, finding the situation intolerable, decided to counteract the actions of censor Jeremiah Stable by reading out some of the banned material on the floor of the Queensland Parliament, working on the theory that parliamentary privilege would allow a Hansard containing the material to be distributed.
The raid
Hughes did not take the provocation from Ryan lightly. Because the postal service was under the control of the Australian Government, Hughes ordered federal authorities to prevent the Hansard from being distributed through the post. Travelling to Brisbane ostensibly to address a public meeting, Hughes arrived late at night with Stable and a detachment of soldiers at the Queensland Government Printing Office, seizing all 3,300 printed copies of Hansard, along with all of the type. Hughes then informed Ryan that while there was "nothing worth censoring" in his own speeches, the anti-conscription materials of Theodore and his fellow minister John Fihelly were objectionable and would not be allowed to be distributed.
