Talk:1904 Queensland state election

}

Labour leader: Kidston or Kerr?

I was filling out some of the background of this election, and am confused by some discrepancies in the party leaders in the infobox. I replaced Robert Philp with Arthur Rutledge as leader of the Opposition for the election (as the previous section says, Rutledge tried to change seats and lost). The one I am most confused about is the Labour leader – the infobox has William Kidston as Labour leader, however I can find no references on Trove which refer to Kidston as leader at this point (I know he leads the coalition after a split in 1905/6). The main reference would appear to be Kidston's ADB biography, which pretty unequivocally states: "In April 1904 Browne died and Kidston became party leader and deputy to Premier Morgan. Despite Kidston's emphasis on Labor moderation, the coalition remained tenuous and lost defectors to Philp, particularly over Kidston's demand for electoral equality. Having barely survived a division, the government went to an election in August which proved a triumph for Kidston. Labor won 34 seats, the Morganites 21 and the Opposition only 17. As leader of the larger partner, Kidston could have claimed half the portfolios and the premiership for his party but chose to do neither, because without electoral reform Labor's electoral base remained weak. He preferred a judicious alliance with Morgan.".

On Trove, it's a completely different story: George Kerr is referred to as Labour leader from May 1904, when he was elected leader after Billy Browne's death. Trove refers to Kidston before and after the election as State Treasurer. ADB refers to Kerr as "Leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party from May 1904 to May 1907". So am I missing something? Is there a distinction between party leader and parliamentary party leader? --Canley (talk) 07:19, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Nice work on the background info. I've never come across an Australian newspaper article that uses "party leader" to mean anything other than "parliamentary party leader". I would be more inclined to go with the contemporary sources that state Kerr was leader in 1904. I use the ADB as a source regularly and it's definitely not immune to errors, especially in some of the older articles where researchers weren't able to trawl through databases like we can today. IgnorantArmies (talk) 08:47, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

From what I can gather, Kidston was the most senior Labour Party minister in Morgan's cabinet in 1904, but Kerr was the party leader outside the cabinet. It says in the book "Premiers of Queensland" by DJ Murphy that after Browne died, he was replaced by Peter Airey in Morgan's cabinet, but it seemed that Kerr remained outside of it despite being Labour's Parliamentary leader before the election. Kirsdarke01 (talk) 08:52, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Kirsdarke01, yes, this is starting to make sense. This 1907 article on Trove has profiles of several MPs, and says that Airey became Leader of the Labour Party not when Browne died, but when he took a position on Morgan's cabinet. When Browne died, Airey became Home Secretary in the cabinet, and Kerr was elected to replace him as parliamentary leader, not Browne. So that sounds like it – that in Labour at least, the leader could not be a member of the coalition cabinet. --Canley (talk) 09:22, 4 March 2017 (UTC)