Federation of Australia

Sir Edmund Barton, second only to Parkes in the length of his commitment to the federation cause, was the caretaker Prime Minister of Australia at the inaugural national election in March 1901.

"[2] In September 1846, the NSW Colonial Secretary Sir Edward Deas Thomson suggested federation in the New South Wales Legislative Council.

[6] However, it prompted the statesman William Wentworth to propose in the following year the establishment of "a Congress from the various Colonial Legislatures" to legislate on "inter-colonial questions".

[7][8] On 28 July 1853, a select committee formed by Wentworth to draft a new constitution for New South Wales proposed a General Assembly of the Australian Colonies.

This assembly was proposed to legislate on intercolonial matters, including tariffs, railways, lighthouses, penal settlements, gold and the mail.

Also in 1857, in England, William Wentworth founded the "General Association for the Australian Colonies", whose object was to obtain a federal assembly for the whole of Australia.

Wentworth, hoping to garner as broad support as possible, proposed a loose association of the colonies, which was criticised by Robert Lowe.

While there was in-principle support for a union of the colonies, the matter was ultimately deferred while NSW Premier Charles Cowper and Henry Parkes preferred to focus on liberalising Wentworth's squatter-friendly constitution.

[11] After it was rejected by the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Duke of Buckingham, Parkes brought up the issue again in 1880, this time as the premier of New South Wales.

The Federal Council had powers to legislate directly upon certain matters, and did so to effect the mutual recognition of naturalisations by colonies, to regulate labour standards in the employment of Pacific Island labour in fisheries, and to enable a legal suit to be served outside the colony in which it was issued, "a power valuable in matters ranging from absconding debtors to divorce proceedings".

Queensland, for its part, worried that the advent of race-based national legislation would restrict the importing of kanaka labourers, thereby jeopardising its sugar cane industry.

Smaller colonies also worried about the abolition of tariffs, which would deprive them of a large proportion of their revenue, and leave their commerce at the mercy of the larger states.

On the other hand, labour representatives feared that federation would distract attention from the need for social and industrial reform, and further entrench the power of the conservative forces.

They also regarded the proposed senate as much too powerful, with the capacity to block attempts at social and political reform, much as the colonial upper houses were quite openly doing at that time.

[15] Federationists such as Edmund Barton, with the full support of his righthand man Richard O'Connor, were careful to maintain good relations with Irish opinion.

[16][17] Accounts of its origin commonly commence with Lord Carrington, the Governor of New South Wales, goading the ageing Parkes at a luncheon on 15 June 1889.

The membership was: New South Wales, Parkes (Premier) and William McMillan (Colonial Treasurer); Victoria, Duncan Gillies (Premier) and Alfred Deakin (Chief Secretary); Queensland, Sir Samuel Griffith (Leader of the Opposition) and John Murtagh Macrossan (Colonial Secretary); South Australia, Dr. John Cockburn (Premier) and Thomas Playford (Leader of the Opposition); Tasmania, Andrew Inglis Clark (Attorney-General) and Stafford Bird (Treasurer); Western Australia, Sir James George Lee Steere (Speaker); New Zealand, Captain William Russell (Colonial Secretary) and Sir John Hall.

When the conference met at the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne on 6 February, the delegates were confronted with a scorching summer maximum temperature of 39.7 °C (103.5 °F) in the shade.

Similarly, Sir James Lee Steere from Western Australia and the New Zealand delegates suggested there was little support for federation in their respective colonies.

However, delegates from the smaller states were not enthusiastic, with John Alexander Cockburn of South Australia seeing the Canadian model as a "coercive" and "homogeneous National Union".

Andrew Inglis Clark, a long-time admirer of American federal institutions, introduced the US Constitution as an example of the protection of States' rights.

Griffith identified with great clarity at the Sydney Convention perhaps the greatest problem of all: how to structure the relationship between the lower and upper houses within the Federal Parliament.

The main division of opinion centred on the contention of Alfred Deakin, that the lower house must be supreme, as opposed to the views of Barton, John Cockburn and others, that a strong Senate with co-ordinate powers was essential.

"[26] In the twenty-first century, however, a lively debate has sprung up as to whether the principal credit for this draft belongs to Queensland's Sir Samuel Griffith or Tasmania's Andrew Inglis Clark.

[29] Given that the authors of this highly respected work were themselves active members of the federal movement, it may be presumed that this view represents—if not the complete truth—then, at least, the consensus opinion among Australia's "founding fathers".

George Higinbotham admitted the "acknowledged defects & disadvantages" of responsible government, but criticized Clark's plan to separate the executive and the legislature.

Although he took little part in the debates he assisted (Sir) Samuel Griffith, (Sir) Edmund Barton and Charles Cameron Kingston in revising Griffith's original draft of the adopted constitution on the Queensland government's steam yacht, Lucinda; though he was too ill to be present when the main work was done, his own draft had been the basis for most of Griffith's text.Clark's supporters are quick to point out that 86 Sections (out of a total of 128) of the final Australian Constitution are recognisable in Clark's draft,[27] and that "only eight of Inglis Clark's ninety-six clauses failed to find their way into the final Australian Constitution";[31] but these are potentially misleading statistics.

The same cannot always be said of Inglis Clark.The apparent enthusiasm of 1891 rapidly ebbed in the face of opposition from Henry Parkes' rival, George Reid, and the sudden advent of the Labor Party in NSW, which commonly dismissed federation as a "fad".

At the close of the Corowa Conference John Quick had advanced a scheme of a popularly elected convention, tasked to prepare a constitution, which would then be put to a referendum in each colony.

These included the limiting Braddon Clause, which guaranteed the states 75 percent of customs revenue, to just ten years of operation; requiring that the new federal capital would be located in New South Wales, but at least a hundred miles (160 km) distant from Sydney;[38] and, in the circumstances of a double dissolution, reducing from six tenths to one half the requisite majority to legislate of a subsequent joint meeting of Senate and House.