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Tony Charlton
The Hon. Anthony (Tony) Lewis Charlton AC, (13 January 1970 - 4 July 2050), was an Australian politician and businessman. Charlton served as the Prime Minister of Australia from March 2025 until July 2032, however he is best known for being the Australian leader during the Five Day War in July 2032.
An avowed conservative and fundamentalist Christian, Charlton attracted considerable controversy during his life for his belligerent style of diplomacy and win at all costs mantra that led to his downfall at the hands of the New Englanders. These actions have made him one of the best-known political figures in twenty-first century Australia.
Early Life
Charlton was born in Kingaroy, Queensland on the 13th of January 1970, the only child of John and Janette Charlton. His father was a peanut farmer and was a prominent member of the local Baptist church. A stern man, who often beat his son, left a strong impression on Charlton as a young man. His mother was also poorly treated by her husband, and this left a further impression on him.
In 1975, Charlton began schooling, but a desire to be his own man meant he left school quite early and left for Brisbane and went out to get a trade at the age of fourteen. Never one to appreciate a good education, Charlton believed in working to gain "real experience" and such attitudes fed his anti-intellectual tendencies in later life.
Working Life
Trained as an electrician, Charlton worked for his uncle for the next ten years before striking out on his own in 1996. At the same time, dissatisfaction with the government led Charlton to join the Liberal Party of Australia. He remained active in politics for the rest of his life, which along with his church, made up the bedrock of his life.
In 1997, Charlton married long time love Jennifer Owen in Brisbane. Three children were later born, John in 1998, Lucy in 2000 and Alice in 2004. The couple settled into their newly built home at Narangba on the northern outskirts of Brisbane.
In the meantime, Charlton built his electrical business into one of the most successful in south-east Queensland. He acquired several smaller businesses and using his political connexions, won a number of lucrative federal government contracts over the next few years.
Civil War
The outbreak of the civil war led to Charlton joining the defence force in 2007. He placed the business into the hands of his wife and went off to fight. Joining the army at that time was a rare thing, with many people shunning the defence force, but Charlton, a deeply patriotic man, saw the need to join and was driven by a desire to serve his nation.
For four years, Charlton served as an NCO and was stationed in Armidale, Coffs Harbour and then Lismore. The defeat of the Australian forces left a bitter taste, and Charlton was forever haunted by the notion that the army was stabbed in the back by the academic elite of inner metropolitan Australia. Such notions led him back into civilian life (he was demobilised in 2011), and into politics.
Political Career
In the 2012 general election, Charlton easily won the seat of Petrie for the Liberals. He remained on the backbench under Malcolm Turnbull until he was elevated as a parliamentary sectary in 2015, and then as Minister for Industry in 2017. Charlton easily won his seat at the 2015, 2018 and 2021 general elections before an electoral redistribution led him to switch to the Division of Longman in 2024. In 2019, Turnbull announced his retirement as Liberal leader, and treasurer Julie Bishop was elected unopposed as the new Prime Minister. Charlton was made Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, and was promoted again to Defence in 2022. He was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in January 2023.
The merger of the Liberal, National and Country Liberal parties in July 2023 led to the formation of the Conservative Party of Australia. The following year, Bishop announced in private that she would retire after the next election, and an informal contest for the leadership began. Charlton was considered an outsider at the beginning, but he was able to unite to disparate factions of the conservatives and proved to be an excellent compromise choice for many MPs. The official party room vote on the 26 February 2025 elected Charlton as leader by a margin of 100 votes to 49.
Prime Minister
Charlton hit the ground running as PM, and worked quickly to bring to end the détente that had been cultivated between Bishop and New England First Ministers since 2019. He cut off negotiations to renew the border treaty, suspended any involvement in the Australasian Council and imposed massive border levees of $150 (C145) on movement between the two countries.
At home, Charlton severally cutback public education funding, with the closure of sixteen universities across the country. He also commercialised the publicly owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and forbade government members from appearing on the network. He introduced mandatory Christian instruction and forbade the teaching of other religions in schools receiving federal funding. With a complicit electorate, he also increased the size of defence force with the re-introduction of national service for 19 and 20 year old men.
Dissent was aggressively purged both inside his party and in general. Anti-terrorist and sedition, already made extreme under John Howard, was further beefed up. Treason and sedition once again carried a death penalty, while the Office of Film and Literature Classification were asked to review a number of publications from the previous thirty years. Thousands of books were banned, and many academics fined for "anti Australian behaviour". The concept of "un-australian behaviour " was formally defined in law, and fines and gaol terms for dissent were introduced.
A referendum passed in 2027 neutered to the states of any judicial or policing power, with the Australian Federal Police given nationwide jurisdiction for all law and order matters from the 1st January 2028. The court system was restructured with a series of new courts created to deal with dissent in a more timely manner. The resulting exodus of left-wing academics and civil servants to New England, New Zealand and Britain left the opposition Labor Party unable to capture more than a third of the seats in parliament after 2024.
Charlton was however, well supported for his initiatives in health. Again, the states were stripped of all administrative power in the area, and the Commonwealth was able to reduce waiting times over the course of Charlton's time as PM. Changes of climate, which were labelled as temporary by the government, were also well dealt with. Large scale public works programs to bring monsoon water to the south-east of the continent were brought online. Much of the decimated Murray-Darling river basin was abandoned by farmers as they moved north to take advantage of the tropical wet season every year.
Downfall
Charlton was determined to destroy New England as a viable state, in the hope that he could reunify the kingdom with Australia. The economic value of New England had risen throughout the 2020s, and the nation looked like it would survive, especially as it had negotiated a series of preferential deals with the European Union.
The attempt to bring down the New England banking sector led to the Banks Scandal in late 2026, which ruined the career of Yvonne Gates and brought the SDLP back into power. The various sanctions had little impact on the New Englanders, and had cost the Commonwealth millions of dollars as it had to fund upgrades to the national highway and railway system to allow lorries and trains to bypass New England to west and north.
Unable to starve the New Englanders out, Charlton sought American support to invade and annex the country directly. The US supported the move, and from 2030 began to increase the size of the US Ninth Army in Australia and added to the US South-West Pacific fleet. The New Englanders seemed to respond in kind, and a stalemate throughout the early 2030s developed. This was broken in May 2032 when Charlton decided to invade regardless, believing his forces to be superior in numbers and technology. Despite warnings from the army and US advisors that such an assualt would be a bloodbath, Charlton pressed ahead throughout June and into July, with an invasion slated for the 15th July.
Unfortunately, the New Englanders beat Charlton to the line and launched a surprise attack on the 5th July 2032. The following Five Day War was Charlton's undoing. The Australian Defence Force was caught off-guard and swiftly lost ground. A defence mounted near Tamworth was a failure, with the Battle of Kootingal being the single greatest defeat ever inflicted upon Australian forces. On the 7th July, Charlton took personal command of the defence of Newcastle and Brisbane (which had both been heavily bombed), an act that was unprecedented in Australian history. As public opinion now turned against him, Charlton invoked the ANZUS treaty as asked for US support. Support stabilised briefly in the press as the Americans went north to hold the line against the invaders. But this proved to be short lived, as the US generals and Charlton fell out over how best to handle to counter offensive. Two generals resigned on the spot, the US President had to intervene to prevent a complete schism.
The final blow came with sinking of the USS Abraham Lincoln on the 8th July. With it, any hope of a successful counter attack failed. Charlton continued to hold a strong command over the defence force, dismissing his Minister of Defence, Jack Sayer, on the same day as the Abraham Lincoln went to the bottom. With defeat imminent, Charlton sued for peace, and the war ended with a ceasefire on the 9th of July.
Sayer however, would have the last word. Angered by his dismissal, he precipitated a party room meeting on the 11th July to "discuss the outcomes of the war and the future of the leadership of the Conservative Party". At the meeting, Charlton and his deputy, Stuart Smith, were successfully deposed by Sayer by a margin of 99 votes to 36. Charlton however, refused to resign as Prime Minister. The stand-off was resolved after a period of negotiation on the 15th July, when the President, Brendan Nelson, threatened to dismiss the government. Charlton meekly resigned from the Prime Ministership and parliament and went into hiding.
Later Life
Charlton remained out the public spotlight until after the fall of the Conservative government after the 2033 general election. It was the first time they had been out of power since 1996. The Labor Party, previously moribund, was refreshed and revitalised by the collapse of the government and swiftly re-established the prewar détente between Australia and New England. The Australasian Council was revived and many of the reforms of the Charlton years were swept away.
In an interview for the Canberra Times conducted just after the election, Charlton railed against his former party, and in particular, "the traitorous actions of Sayer and Nelson". He also believed that the Labor Party carried "the blood of every solider, sailor and airman who died in the war" through its actions "to undermine public support for this war of patriotic duty". Widely condemned as the ramblings of a madman, Charlton's interview failed to garner any support for the former leader and he again vanished into exile.
In 2045 it was announced by his personal secretary that Charlton had been diagnosed with Leukaemia. He was able to overcome the condition for a time, but in June 2049 it was announced that he was again in poor health. The death of his wife in a plane accident in December 2049 was said to be the last straw, and Charlton spoke little to friends or family again. He lingered for a further six months, most of it in and out of a coma before succumbing on the 4th July 2050. He was eighty years old.
Eulogised as a "giant figure of the twenty-first century" and a "reformer for the ages", Charlton's family was not offered a state funeral by the government. This provoked an outcry from the Conservative opposition, but public opinion preferred to see Charlton's legacy forgotten as soon as possible. Charlton's funeral was a private affair and he was later cremated, with the ashes scattered on the family farm in Kingaroy.
A figure whose rule marked a watershed in Australian and New England history, Charlton has been seen as one of the makers of New England's identity as a separate nation. His threats of war and annexation galvanised the New England people to unify and defeat a foe much greater than themselves. His legacy is one of allowing a small nation to become great.
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| People: Tony Charlton | ||
