James Fenton (Australian politician)

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James Edward Fenton (1864-1950) was an Australian politician. He was first elected as a Labor member of the House of Representatives for the Division of Maribyrnong in Victoria in 1910, and would hold the seat until 1934. When James Scullin led the Labor Party to victory at the general election of 1929, Fenton became Minister for Trade and Customs in the Labor Government. However, the government soon was divided over the appropriate means to combat the Great Depression. Fenton became a supporter of the conservative, deflationary economic policies championed inside the Cabinet by his fellow minister Joseph Lyons, while other ministers supported more radical inflationary policies. While Scullin was overseas in Britain from August 1930 to January 1931, attending the Imperial Conference and seeking to raise a low interest loan for Australia, Fenton served as Acting Prime Minister, and Lyons as Acting Treasurer. Lyons, with Fenton's support, pursued conservative economic policies that caused great anger among many in the Labor Caucus.

When Scullin returned to Australia in January 1931, he reappointed Ted Theodore, the major proponent of inflationary economic policies, as Treasurer. In response, Lyons and Fenton both immediately resigned from Cabinet. In March, with three other Labor MPs, they resigned from the Labor Party and crossed the floor to sit with the conservative Nationalist Party opposition. Soon the two groups merged to form the United Australia Party (UAP), with Lyons as its leader. At the general election in December 1931, the UAP won government in a landslide, and Fenton won his seat of Maribyrnong as a UAP candidate.

Fenton was appointed as Postmaster General in the new UAP government. But he soon fell out with his fellow ministers over tariff policy. He resigned in October 1932 over a Cabinet decision which he felt gave insufficient protection to Australian industry. He remained on the government backbench and ran again as the UAP candidate for Maribyrnong at the general election in 1934, but the seat was naturally a Labor one. He had been able to win it for the UAP in the anti-Labor landslide of 1931, but in 1934 Fenton lost to the Labor candidate, Arthur Drakeford, suffering a 7% swing.

After his defeat Fenton served as a director of the Commonwealth Oil Refineries from 1934 to 1936. He died on December 2, 1950.

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