Career
He served as Lord Mayor of Melbourne from 1938 to 1940. In 1940 he was elected to the federal parliament as an Independent from Henty. With Alexander Wilson), he held the balance of power, at first keeping the UAP-National government in office, but in 1941 switching sides to install a new Australian Labor Party government.
In 1946 Coles was appointed chair of the Australian National Airways Commission, which founded TAA or Transport Australian Airlines (later known as Australian Airlines, which became the domestic arm of Qantas).
Arthur Coles was born in Geelong, Victoria and educated at the elite private school The Geelong College. When World War I began, Coles enlisted as a private, fighting at Gallipoli and on the Western Front in France, and was wounded on three occasions before being commissioned as a lieutenant.
Working on the slogan "Nothing over 2/6", the business grew rapidly. The family opened a series of new around the country, Arthur moving to Sydney in 1928 to open and manage the first one in New South Wales.
In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, he returned to Melbourne to become Managing Director, a post he held until 1944.
G. J. Coles & Company became the largest retailer in Australia. Coles became Lord Mayor of Melbourne in 1938, remaining in that position until 1940, when he resigned to stand for the federal seat of Henty as an independent candidate. Coles was one of the two independents (the other was Alexander Wilson), who held the balance of power through the early years of the Second World War and crossed the floor in 1941 to remove the hapless UAP-Country Party government of Arthur Fadden to install John Curtin, of the Australian Labor Party, as Prime Minister of Australia.
In 1944, Coles retired from business and devoted himself to public works, becoming the chair of both the Commonwealth Rationing Commission and the War Damage Commission.
With the end of the war, he resigned from Parliament and became chair of British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines (BCPA) and the Australian National Airlines Commission (see Transport Australia Airlines). He was knighted in 1960 and retired in 1965.
