Francis Hill was an Australian politician and a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly

New South Wales Legislative Assembly

The Legislative Assembly, or lower house, is one of the two chambers of the Parliament of New South Wales, an Australian state. The other chamber is the Legislative Council. Both the Assembly and Council sit at Parliament House in the state capital, Sydney...

 between 1941 and his death. He was a member of the Australian Labor Party

Australian Labor Party

The Australian Labor Party is an Australian political party. It has been the governing party of the Commonwealth of Australia since the 2007 federal election. Julia Gillard is the party's federal parliamentary leader and Prime Minister of Australia...

.

Early life

Hill was born in Brisbane, Queensland and was the son of a contractor. His family moved to Sydney when he was young and he was educated to elementary level at the Sussex St Public School. He worked as a warehouseman and a foreman in a factory. A member of the ALP from an early age he became involved in local government and was elected as an alderman to the councils of the Cabramatta and Canley Vale Municipality, which is now part of the City of Fairfield

City of Fairfield

The City of Fairfield is a Local Government Area in the south-west of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia.- Suburbs in the local government area :Suburbs in the City of Fairfield are:* Abbotsbury* Bonnyrigg* Bonnyrigg Heights* Bossley Park...

. Hill was mayor between 1935 and 1945 and a member of the executive of the Local Government Association in 1945. He was also active in the establishment of community co-operative credit unions

State Parliament

Hill was a member of the New South Wales ALP executive elected at the 1940 Easter state conference. This executive had been infiltrated by clandestine members of the Communist Party of Australia

Communist Party of Australia

The Communist Party of Australia was founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1991; it was succeeded by the Socialist Party of Australia, which then renamed itself, becoming the current Communist Party of Australia. The CPA achieved its greatest political strength in the 1940s and faced an attempted...

 (CPA) including Jack Hughes and Walter Evans. Following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union and signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939...

, the prime objective of the CPA and Hughes and Evans was to have the ALP support a "Hands off Russia Campaign". This effectively meant Australian neutrality in World War Two, a position which was unacceptable to the Australian electorate. In response, the former party leader Jack Lang

Jack Lang (Australian politician)

John Thomas Lang , usually referred to as J.T. Lang during his career, and familiarly known as "Jack" and nicknamed "The Big Fella" was an Australian politician who was Premier of New South Wales for two terms...

 withdrew from the party and, together with his followers, formed the Australian Labor Party (Non-Communist)

Australian Labor Party (Non-Communist)

The Australian Labor Party was the second Lang Labor breakaway party, associated with New South Wales Premier Jack Lang. It operated from 1940 to 1941....

. The Federal Executive of the ALP then acted to suspend the Hughes-Evans executive and replaced it with supporters of Bob Heffron and William McKell

William McKell

Sir William John McKell GCMG , Australian politician, was Premier of New South Wales from 1941 to 1947, and was the 12th Governor-General of Australia. He was also the oldest Governor General of Australia, at 93 when he died....

, the parliamentary leaders of the NSW party. Many of the supporters of Hughes and Evans then left the ALP and formed the State Labor Party

State Labor Party

The State Labor Party , was an Australian political party which operated exclusively in the state of New South Wales in the early 1940s. The party was initially a far-left faction of the Australian Labor Party, strongly opposed to the right-wing faction of the party dominated by Jack Lang, former...

 (Hughes-Evans Labor Party) which fielded candidates at the 1941

New South Wales state election, 1941

The 1941 New South Wales state election was held on 10 May 1941. This election was for all of the 90 seats in the 33nd New South Wales Legislative Assembly and was conducted in single member constituencies with compulsory preferential voting....

 state election but gained less than 6% of the vote. The party then rapidly disintegrated with most members joining the CPA. Hill appears to have been a dupe during these machinations. When the executive was suspended he was reported to have said that the executive has brought this on themselves by the way they have conducted some of their meetings and that he regretted the methods the executive had used to undermine the party.. Hill was not expelled from the party. He remained a member of the ALP under the new federally imposed executive and successfully contested the party pre-selection for the new seat of Blacktown at the 1941 election, which he then won easily. He retained the seat at the 1944

New South Wales state election, 1944

The 1944 New South Wales state election was held on 27 May 1944. It was conducted in single member constituencies with compulsory preferential voting and was held on boundaries created at a 1940 redistribution...

election but died suddenly the next year. He did not hold caucus, parliamentary or ministerial office .