After the ALP government of Premier
Lionel Hill endorsed the controversial
Premiers' Plan following the start of the
Great Depression in Australia and the subsequent
Australian Labor Party split of 1931, the ALP state executive expelled 23 of the 30 members of the ALP caucus, including the entire cabinet. The expelled MPs formed the
Parliamentary Labor Party (also known as Premiers Plan Labor), with Hill as leader and Premier, and continued in office with the support of the Butler-led
Liberal Federation. Amid increasing riots and protests, as well as skyrocketing unemployment, Hill left politics to become Australian Agent-General to the
United Kingdom. He was succeeded by
Robert Richards, who had the impossible task of leading the government into the election. In contrast to the ructions in Labor, the conservative forces in the state presented a united front at the
1931 federal election, when all anti-Labor major party candidates in the state ran under the banner of the
Emergency Committee of South Australia. This grouping took an additional two seats to hold six of the state's seven seats in the federal
House of Representatives and all three available seats in the
bloc-voting winner-take-all Senate. In 1932, buoyed by this success, the Liberal Federation and the
Country Party merged as the
Liberal and Country League under Butler's leadership. With three Labor factions—the
official ALP, Premiers Plan Labor and
Lang Labor—splitting the combined 47.8% total Labor vote, the result was a landslide victory for the LCL. The LCL won 29 seats versus only 13 for the three Labor factions combined. Though the Labor split in South Australia would only last until 1934, this would be the start of 32 years of LCL government in South Australia—one of the longest unbroken runs for a governing party in the Commonwealth. The LCL would stay in office until the
1965 state election with the assistance of a pro-LCL electoral
malapportionment known as the
Playmander, which would be introduced in 1936. ==Results==