The 1917 plebiscite was held a year after the highly contentious 1916 plebiscite on conscription. The 1916 plebiscite had resulted in a surprise "no" vote, with voters in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, as well as a majority of electors nationwide, rejecting the proposal. The political fallout was swift, and by November 1916 had led to the collapse of the First Hughes Ministry. This resulted in a split of the ruling Australian Labor Party into two factions, with Prime MinisterBilly Hughes and some Labor MPs forming the breakaway National Labor Party, which by February 1917 had merged with the conservative Commonwealth Liberal Party to form the Nationalist Party of Australia. While the Nationalist Party was dominated by former Commonwealth Liberals, it retained Hughes as leader. After Hughes and the Nationalists scored a convincing victory at the 1917 election, Hughes announced a second plebiscite on the question of conscription to be held on 20 December 1917. During the course of World War 1 38.7% of eligible Australian men enlisted for service, around 420,000 out of an eligible population of a little over 1 million. During the war the range of men eligible to volunteer was expanded, with the initial age range of 19–38 expanded to 18–45 in June 1915. Similarly medical standards were lowered, for example the minimum height dropped from 5 ft 6in in August 1914 down to 5 ft by April 1917. There was however a significant decrease in the number of enlistments after 1915, with the average in 1917 of less than 4,000 enlistments per month:
1914: 52,561
1915: 165,912
1916: 124,352
1917: 45,101
The 1917 Plebiscite
The proposal for the 1917 plebiscite was less far reaching than that of the 1916 poll, eschewing full conscription of able-bodied men and instead proposing to conscript men between the ages of 18 and 44 through a ballot system, and only in months where voluntary enlistments fell below 7,000 men. This plebiscite was held due to the Australian Government's desire to introduce conscription to increase the recruitment of forces for overseas service during the ongoing World War I, to a total of 7,000 men per month. It was conducted under the War Precautions Regulations 1917. It formed part of the larger debate on conscription in Australia throughout the war. All of the historical documentation refer to the ballot as a referendum, even though it did not involve a proposal to amend the Australian Constitution. Because it was not an amendment to the constitution, it had no legal force, it did not require approval in a majority of states and residents of federal territories were able to vote. Such a ballot is now usually referred to as a plebiscite to distinguish it from a referendum to alter the Constitution. The campaign was notable for the Egg Throwing Incident where a protester threw an egg at Prime Minister Hughes in Warwick, Queensland, and for the Raid on the Queensland Government Printing Office, where the Australian Army stormed a Queensland government building to confiscate copies of the Queensland Government Gazette deemed to contain subversive anti-conscription materials.
