Australian anxiety at the prospect of Japanese expansionism and war in the Pacific continued through the 1930s. Billy Hughes, by then a minister in the United Australia Party's Lyons government, made a notable contribution to Australia's attitude towards immigration in a 1935 speech in which he argued that "Australia must... populate or perish". However Hughes was forced to resign in 1935 after his book Australia and the War Today exposed a lack of preparation in Australia for what Hughes correctly supposed to be a coming war.
