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Conscription Debate - Australia and World War I

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After World War One, Australia had 60,000 fallen soldiers out of the 416,809 soldiers that enlisted with 160 000 wounded or MIA, today Australia still pays for the butchers bill (Dunn, 2014, Journal from the front line details sacrifices). The major debate within Australia caused people to start questioning the unity of Australia. Australia’s involvement in World War One was not a unifying experience for all Australians because of the massively debated conscription topic. The Conscription Debate caused divisions between: Politics, religion, social classes, families all separating themselves into two groups; for and against conscription. Prior to 1915, war was a misconceived idea, people’s belief of war was very fanciful and due to this many young men rushed to enlist. Most of the young Australian men were enthusiastic towards the idea of war; this was due to most Australians being raised up upon stories of British Heroism (SOSE Studies of Society & Environment pg. 85). The Enthusiasm levels were so immense in the first year alone 50 000 Australian soldiers had enlisted; most of these men were ignorant of the horrors of war. (Enlistment statistics, First World War 2013) The deaths of those who had enlisted cause a large amount of disunity among many Australian communities. After the first year of the war people realized that statement “over by Christmas” was false propaganda, and that the casualty rate was higher than expected, this resulted in a lot less enlistments. This caused the current Prime Minister at the time Billy Hughes to introduce the act of conscription; conscription is the mandatory enlistment of men between the ages 18-45 to join the armed forces during times of war. Billy Hughes initiated a referendum in which created a large division within Australia (Anderson et.al, 2000 pg. 86-87) One side of the conscription debate was for conscription, this side was led by Prime Minister Bill Hughes who argued many reasons

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