Lyons adhered to the principles of "sound finance", opposing inflation and government debt and stressing the importance of balanced budgets and orderly loan repayments. Although he had been state treasurer for seven years, he portrayed himself as a relative outsider to economic policy who would take the advice of experts. Lyons appointed himself Treasurer, the first non-Labor prime minister to do so and the first incoming prime minister to do so since Andrew Fisher in 1914. He had earlier offered the treasurership to Ben Chifley as an inducement to leave the Labor Party, but Chifley declined. He appointed experienced assistant treasurers, initially Stanley Bruce and later Walter Massy-Greene and Richard Casey, who eventually succeeded as Treasurer in 1935.