Steele Hall

Hall was elected to the South Australian House of Assembly as the Liberal and Country League (LCL) member for Gouger, based on Balaklava, at the 1959 election. Quickly gaining a reputation for his independence and strength of his views, Hall rose through the LCL parliamentary ranks to assume party leadership following Sir Thomas Playford's retirement in July 1966. Playford, who had earlier served as premier for 26 years, endorsed Hall as his successor. Although Hall was considerably more progressive than Playford, the two men shared a background as small farmers, rather than members of the rural elite or the Adelaide establishment. Playford realised that the LCL needed a new image and new leader to broaden its appeal.

Hall served as Leader of the Opposition for two years before leading the LCL into the 1968 election. Considered young and handsome, he was also the first Australian state premier to sport sideburns. Indeed, the 1968 election, fought between Hall and his Labor opponent Don Dunstan, was described by the Democratic Labor Party as the battle of "the matinee idols". The election resulted in a hung parliament, with Labor and the LCL winning 19 seats each. LCL-leaning independent Tom Stott announced his support for the LCL. Dunstan and Labor were defeated in the legislature on 17 April, and Hall was sworn in as premier later that day.

Hall immediately set out to deal with the issue of electoral reform. Deliberately inequitable electoral boundaries, called the Playmander, had greatly advantaged the LCL over the past 40 years. Since 1932, the House of Assembly had 39 members—13 from the Adelaide area and 26 from country areas. However, by the 1960s, even though Adelaide accounted for two-thirds of the state's population, a vote in Adelaide was effectively worth only half a country vote. Hall was highly embarrassed that the LCL had been in a position to win government despite winning 43.8% of the first preference vote compared to Labor's 52%. He was also concerned by the level of publicity and growing public protest about the issue. This made him all the more committed to the principle of a fairer electoral system.

Hall sponsored an electoral reform bill which expanded the House of Assembly to 47 seats, including 28 in the Adelaide area. It fell short of "one vote one value," as Dunstan and Labor had demanded, since rural areas were still overrepresented. As mentioned above, Adelaide now contained two-thirds of the state's population. Nevertheless, it was a much fairer system than its predecessor. Hall undertook this knowing that it would considerably strengthen Labor's hand. Even at the height of the LCL's popularity under Playford, Labor had dominated Adelaide, with the LCL only able to win a few seats in the "eastern crescent" and around Holdfast Bay. With Adelaide now electing a majority of the legislature, conventional wisdom held that Hall pushed for electoral reform knowing that he was effectively handing the premiership to Dunstan at the next election.

Whatever the public outcry over the electoral inequalities, Hall's political bravery in introducing legislation to reform the House of Assembly to a more equitable system of representation should not be underestimated. It ranks as one of the few instances in Australian political history when a politician initiated a reform knowing full well that it would put his own party at a disadvantage.

In addition to electoral reform, Hall also introduced improvements in social welfare, aboriginal affairs and abortion regulation.[2] Hall also began the distribution of fluoridated water in South Australia in 1968.

Hall with Prime Minister John Gorton in 1970.

Hall served as his own Treasurer for two months in 1970. Hall and Stott soon fell out over the location of a dam. Stott wanted the dam built in his electorate while Hall thought it more use to locate it elsewhere. Constituent anger forced Stott to vote against the Hall government, forcing an election for June 1970. As expected, Labor regained power, taking 27 seats to the LCL's 20. As a measure of how distorted the Playmander had been, Labor won easily despite picking up a swing of only 0.1 percent.

Hall remained Leader of the Opposition for two years before resigning from the LCL on 15 March 1972, claiming that the party had 'lost its idealism [and] forgotten...its purpose for existence'. He founded the Liberal Movement, a progressive liberal party that initially included about 200 former LCL members. Hall and his fellow LM members helped the Dunstan Government introduce adult suffrage and proportional representation for Legislative Council of South Australia elections.[3]

After much of his base was transferred to the Yorke Peninsula-based seat of Goyder before the 1973 state election, Hall ran as the Liberal Movement candidate there and won.

Hall won a federal Senate seat for the Liberal Movement at the double dissolution 1974 election, after resigning his state seat, which sparked a Goyder by-election. At the Joint Sitting of Parliament, Hall supported the Labor government's three electoral reform Bills, citing his experience as South Australian Premier.[4] During the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, though opposed to the Whitlam government, Hall joined Labor (and independent Cleaver Bunton) in voting against the deferral of supply bills.

Hall was re-elected at the 1975 election. He became a member of the Liberal Party in June 1976 after the Liberal Movement reintegrated into the LCL, which was renamed to match with its interstate counterparts. He resigned from the Senate on 16 November 1977 to unsuccessfully contest the seat of Hawker in the House of Representatives.[5][6] Premier Dunstan appointed Janine Haines of the Australian Democrats to replace him.

After four years out of politics, Hall won the 1981 Boothby by-election as the Liberal Party's candidate.

In August 1988, after the then opposition leader John Howard expressed his wish to control Asian immigration in Australia,[7][8][9][10] Steele Hall (along with Ian Macphee and Philip Ruddock) dissented by crossing the floor of parliament and voting with the Labor government on a motion against the use of race as a criterion for selecting immigrants.[11]

Steele Hall addressed the Parliament, saying:

"The question has quickly descended from a discussion about the future migrant intake to one about the level of internal racial tolerance. The simple fact is that public opinion is easily led on racial issues. It is now time to unite the community on the race issue before it flares into an ugly reproach for us all."[11]

Hall held Boothby until his retirement at the 1996 election. He had been instrumental in blocking Liberal Senate leader Senator Robert Hill to succeed him in the Liberal preselection contest for Boothby. The preselection went instead to Andrew Southcott, who succeeded Hall in the seat in 1996.[12]

Unusually for a former state premier, Hall spent most of his time as a federal Liberal MP on the backbench. His long-standing antagonism to Malcolm Fraser kept him out of cabinet during the last term of the Fraser government. In Opposition, Liberal leader Andrew Peacock appointed him to the frontbench as Shadow Special Minister of State in 1983.

However, he returned to the backbench in 1984, where he remained for the remainder of his parliamentary career including when fellow South Australian Alexander Downer became leader in 1994. Hall had defeated Downer for Liberal preselection for the 1981 Boothby by-election.[3]