his involvement in the development of the national capital, Canberra. Less well known is that in the parliamentary ballots to select the area in which the capital would be located, in October 1908, he had not voted for Canberra. O'Malley voted for the rival site of Dalgety, in the ninth and final ballot, having voted for Bombala and later Tooma in earlier elimination ballots. O'Malley became Minister for Home Affairs, and played a prominent role in the planning and development of, Canberra. He declared American architect Walter Burley Griffin winner of the town planning competition. On 20 February 1913, O'Malley drove in the first peg marking the start of the development of the city. He was also present at the ceremony for the naming of Canberra on 12 March 1913. As a teetotaler he was responsible for the highly unpopular ban on alcohol in the Australian Capital Territory from 1911 to 1928. He could also claim credit for beginning the building of the Trans-Australian Railway from Port Augusta to Perth. Commonwealth Bank O'Malley also agitated for the establishment of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, a state-owned savings and investment bank although, contrary to his later claims, he was not the bank's sole creator. He later wrote that he had led a "torpedo squad" in Caucus to force a reluctant Cabinet to establish the bank, but historians do not accept this. Prime Minister Fisher was the bank's principal architect. Partly to allay fears of "funny money" aroused by O'Malley's populist rhetoric, Fisher ensured that the bank would be run on firmly "sound money" principles, and the bank as established did not provide the easy credit for farmers that the radicals desired. Final years in parliament Labor was defeated at the 1913 federal election, and when it returned to office at the 1914 federal election, O'Malley was not re-elected to the Cabinet. In October 1915, however, Fisher retired and O'Malley returned to office in the first ministry of Billy Hughes, again as Minister for Home Affairs. But a year later the government split over the determination of Hughes to introduce conscription to fill the ranks of Australia's armed forces in World War I. Although he was not an active anti-conscriptionist, O'Malley was pressured by Hughes to resign his portfolio but he refused to do so. He finally lost office on 13 November 1916 when Hughes and twenty-four other Labor members walked out