Referendums and Plebiscites Overview
…republicans believe they would lose another referendum, so they propose a plebiscite or plebiscites… The Australian Founding Fathers were conscious of the risks associated with starting out as a republic. They had observed how Napoleon Bonaparte used constitutional plebiscites to increase his These plebiscites involved only questions without any details, and as a result, Europe suffered a great deal of war as it resisted his attempts to subjugate the continent. Napoleon III continued this practice and used plebiscites to consolidate his power. Therefore, our Founding Fathers rejected the French style of” constitutional plebiscite and instead opted for the Swiss-style referendum, where the issue is on the table before, rather than after the vote. hold on power. also noted how a “blank cheque.
The United States
It is curious that the Australian Republican movement does not consider the United States constitutional system as a possible model for Australia. At the time our Founding Fathers were moving towards the federation of our nation, the American constitutional system had some attractions, particularly in the upper house of Congress, the Senate. There was, however, no interest in becoming a republic. The Westminster system, increasingly Australianised, was working too well. Could we now go the way of the United States? There are significant differences between us, as there are between Canada and the USA. The crown founded Australia. Development was led by the crown. The USA was founded not so much by the crown but by dissident groups of people wishing to escape the religious rigours of the established church. They settled and developed their territories with a minimum role for government. Nevertheless, the American colonies still had the benefit […]
What is the Magna Carta?
This Wikipedia article is about the English Charter of 1215. Magna Carta Libertatum (Medieval Latin for “Great Charter of Freedoms”), commonly called Magna Carta or sometimes Magna Charta (“Great Charter”), is a royal charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton, to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood behind their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons’ War. After John’s death, the regency government of his young son, Henry III, reissued the document in 1216, stripped of some […]
The Sixth Pillar: Federation
The Sixth Pillar: Federation This is an edited version of a speech Professor Flint delivered to the Order of Australia Association. The themes here are developed in Give Us Back Our Country, How to Make the Politicians Accountable … on Every Day, of Every Month, of Every Year, by David Flint and Jai Martinkovits (Connor Court). In addressing you as “ladies and gentlemen”, it appears I am in breach of the instructions given to schoolchildren under the Safe Schools program. This decrees that phrases such as “ladies and gentlemen” and “boys and girls” should be avoided. That is what is being taught or proposed to be taught to our children. Now, let us consider what is no longer being taught to our children—our heritage. In 2006, a report about the teaching of history in Australian schools found that three-quarters of school students surveyed did not know why we celebrated Australia […]
Independence
Emergence Of Nationhood And Constitutional Conventions An understanding of the gradual development of the role of the crown, including the governor-general and the queen, requires such developments to be viewed in the context of the development of Australia as an independent nation. The developments involved changes in convention and, less often, statutes. By convention, we mean those usages or customs that are not to be found in the statute books but nevertheless are binding. In jurisdictions governed by a written constitution, there is a greater reluctance to acknowledge the role played by convention than there is where no such document exists, as in the United Kingdom. THE AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM At the moment, our principal concern is directed to the conventions governing the relations between the governments of what were formerly referred to as dominions, now realms, and that of the United Kingdom and those governing the role of the […]
They Did Not Come Alone
By: Professor David Flint AM The First Fleet was that extraordinary venture when, under the command of Captain, later Admiral Arthur Phillip, eleven ships sailed from Portsmouth on May 13, 1787, with about 1487 people to establish the first European colony in Australia. They did not come alone. Captain Phillip did not only bring people and provisions – he brought institutions which are with us today and which have made this nation. Those institutions – and the concepts and ideas behind them – are not the property of the Anglo-Saxons of Australia, to the extent that there are still people whose lineage over the last two hundred and twenty-three years can be described as pure Anglo-Saxon. Just as in the USA, these are the institutions, concepts and ideas which belong to all Australians, whenever they or their ancestors came to this land, wherever they came from and whatever their race. […]
The Future of Our Federation: in safe hands?
“Never before have a group of self-governing, practically independent communities, without external pressure or foreign complications of any kind, deliberately chosen of their own free will to put aside their provincial jealousies and come together as one people, from a simple intellectual and sentimental conviction of the folly of disunion and the advantages of nationhood… the Australian Commonwealth, the fifth great Federation of the world, came into voluntary being through a deep conviction of national unity…” Founding Fathers Sir John Quick and Sir Robert Garren. “We need a new vision splendid,” argued Australian Democrat Senator Andrew Murray recently. He said that our political and social contract is under serious strain, and not just because the Commonwealth has the money and the states want to spend it. He believes that some of this strain comes from our “creaking constitution and institutions” and the consequent need to modernise our governance. He also […]
No Constitutional Plebiscites
No Constitutional Plebiscites WHY OUR FOUNDING FATHERS WOULD NOT HAVE A BAR OF CONSTITUTIONAL PLEBISCITES To understand the danger of what is being proposed, let us go back to the work of our Founding Fathers. Our Founders carefully and exhaustively considered the question of how the Constitution should be amended. The Constitution they had drafted was to be a “binding and indissoluble social compact” between the people of the Australian Colonies (now States). The people of each Colony had to be involved at all stages, and finally, the Constitution was the centrepiece of the process initiated by Sir John Quick at Corowa in 1893. Under this, neither the drafting of the Constitution nor its final approval was to be exclusively in the hands of the politicians. This is not to denigrate the role of the politician in the Commonwealth. But the politician’s role is to be limited in constitutional matters, […]
The Evolving Constitution
There are two distinct approaches to constitutional reform, observes Professor Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics. One is evolutionary and minimalist. The other is theoretical, abstract, and often revolutionary. The first recognises that when an evident evil arises in government, it needs to be corrected with as little disturbance as possible. This is the traditional Australian approach, as demonstrated not only in the way we have made our constitutions but also in the way we change them. It could be summed up by the maxim, Si fractures non sit noli id refinery, which could be translated as, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This is not a desire to cling to the past but to preserve a system that has exhibited enough inner dynamism to survive the twentieth century. Minogue says that it is precisely the capacity of constitutional monarchy not just to change but to respond […]
What Founding Fathers Intended
How the founding fathers intended the Australian referendum to work. It is not surprising that the Founding Fathers, democrats to a man, would have found nothing at all attractive in the constitutional plebiscite. Even in a democracy, as France was in 1851 and 1852, a constitutional plebiscite could be so easily misused as it so clearly was. They were determined to prevent change made by stealth, something which is now being proposed in Australia to take up the first decade of the 21st Century. So what did the Founders do? In 1891 the draft Constitution provided that amendments be first proposed by the federal Parliament and then submitted for approval by a majority of elected State Conventions. But at the Corowa Conference, a peoples’ conference, it was decided that the process for constitutional approval, and by implication constitutional change, was to lie with the people. It was only when the […]
Australian Settlement
Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney PC (24 February 1733 – 30 June 1800) was a British politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1754 to 1783 when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Sydney. He held several important Cabinet posts in the second half of the 18th century. The cities of Sydney in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Sydney in New South Wales, Australia, were named in his honour in 1785 and 1788, respectively. When the British came to Australia, they did not find a country in which there was anything recognisable as a government. They had in other parts of the non-European world, but not in Australia. To say that is to denigrate neither the Aboriginal history of this continent nor the Aboriginal people. But modern Australia began with the settlement, which had both harsh and good consequences for the indigenous people. Some form of European […]
Politicians Abuse Plebiscite – Again
POLITICIANS ABUSE THE PLEBISCTE – AGAIN The experience of countries since federation confirms the misuse, and the potential for misuse, of constitutional plebiscites, even to this day. For example, when the Quebec government decided in 1995 that it was time to secede from Canada, they knew they would need the support of the people in what was called a referendum but in reality was a plebiscite. The honest approach — the approach to ensure an informed vote — would have been to put all the facts before the Quebecois. In particular, that there was no guarantee that even if Quebec were able to secede, the new state could retain the advantages it had enjoyed as part of Canada. Could Quebec continue to use the Canadian dollar? What would happen to the national debt? Would Quebec continue to be a party to each of Canada’s treaties, for example, the free trade […]
France
At the time of our movement to Federation, our Founding Fathers did not look to the French constitution for processes and institutions worthy of adoption. Nor has the present Australian Republican movement. In fact, the French know more about constitutional models than most countries. France has experienced an absolute than a constitutional monarchy, five republics, a restored monarchy, then a “bourgeois monarchy”, two empires, various revolutionary regimes (Legislative Assembly, Convention, Directorate, Consulate), as well as the Vichy dictatorship. Incidentally, all of this occurred in France at the time that Australia evolved from a penal colony to autonomy, to federation and to independence. We should never forget that we are more experienced in democratic government than any of the principal mainland European powers, indeed any major world power except the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. The First French Republic ended in the Reign of Terror and then Bonaparte’s dictatorship, […]
Ours Is Not a “Horse and Buggy Constitution”
Some will say this is all very well, but the Australian referendum makes it too difficult to change the Constitution. That is not so. As two of our Founders, Sir James Quick and Robert Garran, wrote (The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, 1901, reprinted in 1995, at 988), the safeguard in s.128 is: “… necessary not only for the protection of the federal system but in order to secure maturity of thought in the consideration and settlement of proposals leading to organic changes. These safeguards have been provided, not in order to prevent or indefinitely resist change in any direction, but in order to prevent change being made in haste or by stealth, to encourage public discussion and to delay the change until there is strong evidence that it is desirable, irresistible and inevitable”. It is even said that we still live under a “horse and buggy” Constitution. In […]
Australia and Argentina
Republicans raised the constitutional status of Argentina. Richard Woolcott said that an Argentinian had told him it would be impossible to conceive of the King of Spain also being King of Argentina. Our Federation was born on the first day of the new century, 1 January 1901. A comparison with another similar country demonstrates the extraordinary success of the Australian Federation. In 1901, Australia had one of the highest incomes per head in the world, an honour it shared with another former settled colony, Argentina. We had much in common. Both were countries of European settlement, both supplanting an indigenous population, although Argentina was treated much more harshly. Both attracted large-scale immigration, and both imported much of their essentially Judaeo-Christian culture and their European language. Both were developed with substantial British investment, and both were rivals for shares in the lucrative British meat market. But our histories since then could […]
Repeat Referendums in Australia
REPEAT REFERENDA IN AUSTRALIA Having rejected a proposal, the Australian people have, at least until now, also rejected any subsequent similar proposal. In fact, they have been asked to give the following additional powers to Canberra more than once, and they have repeatedly said “No”: Monopolies (5 times). Corporations are not already the subject of federal power (5 times). Industrial matters within the State (5 times). Intra-state trade and commerce (3 times). Marketing schemes (twice). Price control (twice). (It could be said that some or most of these would be superfluous today because of the judicial interpretation of the Constitution.) Attempts to impose simultaneous elections of the House and Senate have been rejected on three occasions. (While these proposals might at first glance seem sensible, they would have reduced the Senate’s powers and thus the influence of the smaller States.) The people have also twice rejected a proposal to include […]
Republic Advisory Committee 1993
Republic Advisory Committee RAC 1993 In 1993 Prime Minister Paul Keating established a Republic Advisory Committee (RAC) to advise him on the various options for minimal change necessary to bring about a republican government in Australia. The RAC‘s terms of reference stipulated that it should not address any broader issues regarding other areas of constitutional reform or the normative question of whether Australia ought to become a republic. It should also not make any final recommendations but rather address the advantages and disadvantages of the possible approaches to a specified list of matters. (RAC, Vol. 1, p iv) So the Republic Advisory Committee was not intended to debate the advantages or disadvantages of a republic over the existing system. Its formation reflected Keating’s adversarial style. He once argued that the first question about a republic was: “Do you support an Australian republic?” Only if you supported such an entity were […]
Temptation: Change Through The Backdoor
This is a plan to circumvent the Constitution by the use of cascading constitutional plebiscites, which are designed to soften the people up before a final referendum. This is a constitutional change by stealth and by fatigue. It irresponsibly invites a vote of no confidence in our Constitution to create a vacuum for at least a decade. This might be the sort of tactic that political parties might adopt over some minor issue. It is not the way to deal with something so fundamentally important as the Constitution. Apart from the sheer irresponsibility of this approach, there is nothing in it for any of the political parties. It is a folly of monumental proportions, beside which the Millennium Dome will appear as a minor glitch. There is nothing in it for the Labor Party — that was clear from the way in which so many safe Labor seats voted. The […]
First Referendum Model
After Prime Minister Keating’s response to the report of the Republican Advisory Committee, a model for the Australian Republic emerged, the first Keating -Turnbull republic. APPOINTING THE PRESIDENT The first Keating–Turnbull model has met with both practical and ideological criticism. Despite strong electoral support for popular elections, the Keating government advocated parliamentary appointment and dismissal. Clerk of the Senate Harry Evans has argued against this method of appointment on principle: Most people, not intellectuals, are able to detect the massive contradiction at the heart of the elite orthodoxy: the monarchy must go partly because it is undemocratic, but the people must not be allowed to choose the replacement because they would stupidly make the wrong choice. (News Weekly, 29 July 1997) Bill Hayden, a former governor-general, warns of the practical effect of election by the special parliamentary majority: Those who believe a president elected by both Houses of Parliament would […]
Plebiscite Condemned
Australian Republican plebiscites slammed as irresponsible vandalism: Senator Minchin 13 June 2008 Senator Nick Minchin was responsible for implementing the Coalition’s promise at the 1996 election to hold a Constitutional Convention to consider the question of a Republic. He regards this as one of the greatest honours bestowed on him by Prime Minister John Howard. The conduct of the Convention is a great tribute to him. It was open, fair and transparent, and allowed participation by the people, political leaders of all parties across the Commonwealth, as well as a selected group of outstanding Australians. The process of selection for this was so fair that the very competent chairmen turned out both to be Republicans, and most of the nominated members were not constitutional monarchists. Compare that with the 2020 Summit. Senator Minchin is one of those honourable people in politics who are not afraid to hold to their principles […]
Australian Constitutional Convention of 1998
Australian Constitutional Convention of 1998. In early 1998, the Old Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, became the centre of a significant event known as the Constitutional Convention. The purpose of this event was to address a critical matter that would impact Australia’s future, namely whether the country should become a republic or maintain its current system. Esteemed personalities from various backgrounds gathered to engage in constructive and thought-provoking discourse. However, as the summer of 1998 approached, Robert Manne, an Associate Professor in Politics at Monash University and a regular columnist, expressed surprise in the Sydney Morning Herald (1 February 1999) about what he described as “infighting” within Australia’s Republican Movement (ARM). Even if the Republican camp were united, he noted, persuading a majority of Australians and a majority of states during the upcoming referendum would have been immensely challenging. However, with an “internally divided, self-lacerating Republican Movement,” these challenges would […]
A Mate for Head of State
The Republicans’ major campaign in 2006 was “A Mate for Head of State.” Since the referendum, one of the preoccupations of the republican movement has been to ensure media attention so that a mainly disinterested public would be reminded of an issue they are not at all interested in. This has not been difficult, given that the mainstream media is one of the two strongholds of republicanism. (The other is among the politicians.) These republican stunts are usually mounted around Australia Day or the Queen’s birthday and are too often monumentally foolish. One of their silliest was the demand that The Queen give back Tom Robert’s wonderful painting of the State Opening of the first Federal Parliament in 1901 by our future King. That painting hangs on permanent loan in the Parliament in Canberra. It is hardly the personal property of The Queen! But even one state premier joined in […]
The Second Referendum Model
The Second Referendum Model We come now to the so-called “bipartisan model” for a republic that emerged from the Constitutional Convention. It is essentially owned by the Australian Republic Movement (ARM), which had for years espoused the first version of the Keating—Turnbull republic. That is why it is best described as the second version of the Keating—Turnbull republic. The fundamental question for Australians in the coming ref¬erendum is whether this model is better than, or at least as good as, the present constitution. The Australian Republic Movement (ARM) argues that it is as good and that the change is only symbolic. But if the Australian Republic Movement (ARM) is questioned about the details of their model, the response usually is that opponents are engaged in the “mother of all scare campaigns”. This will be a term used over and over during the campaign. It is clear the last thing the […]
The 2001 Corowa Conference
Author of the McGarvie Model, McGarvie was an appointed delegate to the Constitutional Convention on the Australian Republic in February 1998 and initiated the 2001 Corowa conference to find common ground among republicans after the referendum defeat in 1999. He took the unusual position of making contributions to republicanism without directly supporting the broader republican movement. He promoted his own model and, at the 1998 convention, argued the provision for two-thirds parliamentary dismissal of a president was unworkable. The Republic: Report from CorowaProfessor David Flint, AM …The invitation… The 2001 Corowa People’s Conference was conceived and developed by the Hon. Richard McGarvie, who insists he is neither a constitutional monarchist nor a republican, to approve a process to “resolve the Head of State issue”. Mr McGarvie was formerly a Victorian Supreme Court judge and then the Victoria Governor. He is a distinguished jurist and author of Democracy—Choosing Australia’s Republic. Mr […]
The 1999 Referendum
The 1999 Referendum. The republican model, the Keating Turnbull republic, was then referred to the people. This emerged in the last days of the Constitutional Convention. This was the Second Keating-Turnbull Republic, one which was highly authoritarian and anti-federal and which was suddenly pulled out of the hat. After telling us in 1993 that there was an almost universal view that the President was not to hold office at the whim of the Prime Minister, the ARM (Australian Republican Movement) now proposed the first republic in recorded history where it would be easier for the Prime Minister to dismiss the President than his cook! Not developed from the point of constitutional principle, this model was formulated only to procure the maximum votes from the politician delegates so as to obtain a majority vote at the Convention. And it failed even in that. But as the constitutional model was chosen and […]
Before Federation
With the Settlement of Eastern Australia in 1788, the British brought four of the six pillars of the modern Australian nation. These were the Rule of Law, the English language, the Crown and our Judeo-Christian values. In a surprisingly brief period of time, the colonies were moving gradually towards self-government. The celebrated scientist, Charles Darwin, observed in 1836: “When I arrived in Sydney, I felt proud to be an Englishman. We have achieved more in decades here than what those who colonised South America have achieved in as many centuries.” Legislation to introduce self-government and Parliamentary Democracy in New South Wales and Victoria was approved by the British government before the Eureka Stockade, which is often misrepresented as the source of Australian democracy. The legislation was passed in 1855 and gradually extended to the other colonies. Parliamentary democracy is, in fact, the fifth pillar of our nation.
First Four Pillars
Australia, also known as the Commonwealth of Australia, has a rich history that dates back to the settlement established in 1788. The British brought with them four fundamental elements that form four of the six pillars of our nation, the foundation of our nation. These elements have been adapted to Australian culture and are now integral to our identity. Our national language, English, the rule of law, our Judeo-Christian values, and the Crown, our oldest institution, offer guidance beyond politics. They have helped shape our nation into the prosperous and diverse country it is today.
The Golden Thread
The Australian Constitution is sometimes criticised by those wanting to change it because it does not, for example, refer to the Cabinet or the Prime Minister. However, the Constitution was not intended to be a complete text on the constitutional system. It was a document federating the six self-governing countries into a nation, setting up new Federal institutions and granting them certain limited powers. The Founding Fathers, led by the Queenslander who was to become the first Australian Chief Justice, Sir Samuel Griffith ( shown above in the illustration from The Samuel Griffith Society site, the only Australian site dedicated to the study and advancement of federalism) would have seen the constitution as Bolingbroke did, as that “assembly of laws, customs and institutions…according to which the community has agreed to be governed.” The Founding Fathers assumed that the absolute rights Australians had brought with them from Britain would continue.
New States
The Australian Constitution has always envisaged the admission or establishment of new states. The fact is that no new states have ever been admitted or established. The use of the word admitted probably refers to the possible admission of other British colonies. There seems to be no reason why other territories which were never British colonies could not become Australian states[I]. [The Haka could be Australian…if New Zealand were one or two Australian States] From time to time, there have been proposals to create new states, most notably in New South Wales and Queensland. In New South Wales, there have been proposals to establish new states in the north, “New England”, the south, “Illawarra”, and in the Riverina. There has also been a proposal to establish a new state in the North of Queensland, “Capricornia”. There have been proposals to establish the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory as […]
The Glorious Revolution
Three Centuries of Freedom The Glorious Revolution is as relevant today in Australia and the wider world as it was in England in 1688. It is arguably the most significant single advance in the provision of good government that the world has ever seen. This has been overshadowed by concentrating on its quite peripheral impact on the divisions among Christians. But the Calvinist Prince of Orange who became William III was driven by his fear of absolutist French hegemony over Europe, not by worries about Catholicism, whose leader, the Pope, was his temporal ally. The point is that the freedoms ensured and the benefits gained from the Glorious Revolution far exceed anything gained from any other single event, including the mistakenly more celebrated French Revolution. The Reign of Terror in the French Revolution was bad enough, but the loss of life from the resulting years of war, which ended only […]
Centralism
Federation, although first proposed by the British, was our own decision. This was to establish “an indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown … and under the Constitution”. The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act provided that the six self-governing Australian colonies would be “Original States” in the new Commonwealth of Australia. The law-making power of the new Commonwealth was to be vested in a Federal Parliament, which was to have only those powers clearly set out in the Constitution. Some powers would be exclusive to the Commonwealth, such as making laws for Commonwealth Territories, raising military forces to defend the Commonwealth or minting coins. Other powers would be shared with the states (the “concurrent powers”), for example, banking, insurance, corporations, marriage and divorce. But for each of these, the Commonwealth law would prevail if there were an inconsistency with State laws. The powers not listed, the so-called “residuary powers, were to […]
The Australia 2020 Summit
The 2020 Summit was called by the Prime Minister of Australia, the Hon. Kevin Rudd, as an ideas summit of the “best and brightest”. It was held on 19 & 20 April 2008 at Parliament House in Canberra. The Prime Minister described the Summit as” an exciting initiative aimed at harnessing the best ideas for building a modern Australia ready for the challenges of the 21st century. “ The media treated the Summit’s endorsement of a vague, undefined republic as its most important and central recommendation. This emerged with minimal discussion and no details from the Summit’s governance panel by a vote of 98:1 with one abstention. It is hard to take the Summit seriously. Indeed, one leading Republican academic, Professor Robert Manne, described the governance session as resembling a Mad Hatter’s Party. Another respected constitutional authority, Dr Anne Twomey, criticised the resort to chat show formats. The following comparison […]
The Senate Inquiry 2003-4
On 26 June 2003, less than four years after a resounding rejection in 1999, the Senate referred an Inquiry into the Australian Republic to the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee. The Terms of Reference were not whether a politician’s republic was desirable. ____________________ Terms of Reference The committee is also required to facilitate wide community participation in this inquiry by conducting public hearings throughout Australia, including in rural and regional areas. ____________________ Remarkably, the inquiry was to establish “the most appropriate process for moving towards the establishment of an Australian republic with an Australian Head of State.” At considerable expense, the Committee travelled around the country conducting hearings in all state capitals. Australians for Constitutional Monarchy made this submission. The Committee tabled its report called Road to a Republic on 31 August 2004, a time when the nation was increasingly engrossed in the approaching Federal Election. As expected, the majority […]
Power
Probably the best definition of a constitution was given by Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751), who, in modern language, described it as “that assembly of laws, institutions, and customs, by which the people have agreed to be governed.” A constitution, which is not just one document, is about government. It determines the way powers to govern are allocated within a country. On this, there have been two principal schools of thought. As early as the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato, we find the notion that good government is about finding the best people, trusting them and endowing them with full powers. In Plato’s Republic, the elite guardians, with superior knowledge and understanding, are trusted to govern. Aristotle, another celebrated Greek philosopher, criticised this. Much of modern history has been about whether governments should be endowed with near-absolute powers or whether effective checks and balances should limit power.
From Federation
From Federation The Federation of Australia was a Unique Achievement: Although the British had first proposed it decades before, it was actually drafted in Australia by Australians and approved by the Australian people in each of the colonies states. The British allowed Australians to change their Constitution without reference to London. The Governor-General was Granted by a constitutional provision the direct exercise of the executive power of the Commonwealth. It was Peaceful. Federation was thus the sixth pillar of the nation. Australia has been able to enjoy a peaceful, limited government, both in times of peace and war, as well as during times of prosperity and depression, thanks to the Federal Constitution. This document has allowed the nation to transition from being a self-governing Dominion within the British Empire to achieving full independence as a Realm within the Commonwealth. The Federation was established on the principle of the new entity being […]
Australian Constitutional Evolution
Australian Constitutional Evolution The beauty of the Australian constitutional system is that it has evolved over the centuries through trial and error. Much was inherited from Britain. From the Magna Carta of 1215 down to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and through the development of the Westminster system, we have a rich treasure which we have adapted to our own needs and made Australian. Until the Federation, our constitutional system came wholly from Britain. Although given legal effect by the British and although first proposed by them, the Constitution of our “indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown” was drafted by Australians in Australia and approved by the people in each of the Australian colonies, or as they consequently became the Australian States. Our Founding Fathers not only borrowed from Britain. They wanted the best. So they also looked to Switzerland for the referendum and the United States for a […]
Parliamentary Democracy
The French, the Spanish, and the Portuguese did not transmit the parliamentary concept to their colonies, as the British did to their American colonies long before independence and as they did to Australia. Why? Because they could not. The other European powers, with the possible exception of the Dutch, did not have this concept at home. And the Dutch showed no interest in granting self-government to their colonies. So parliament, self-government and the Westminster system, the fifth pillar of our nation, came very early to Australia within our one generation of the founding of the penal colony. And Australians quickly adapted to these institutions, making them even more democratic and, thus, more Australian. AUTONOMOUS SELF-GOVERNING COMMUNITIES DEVELOP OUT OF THE COLONIES OF SETTLEMENT Initially, the power of the colonial governor was restricted only by the law and by instructions from London. This power was later tempered by an advisory legislative […]