During his time as Premier, Kingston was responsible for such measures as electoral reform including the first law to give votes to women in Australia (and second in the world only to New Zealand), a legitimation Act, the first conciliation and arbitration act in Australia, establishment of a state bank, a high protective tariff, regulation of factories, a progressive system of land, and income taxation,[1] a public works program, and more extensive workers' compensation.

He was the youngest of six children born to Luduvina Catherina Da Silva (née Cameron) and George Strickland Kingston.

[4][5] Kingston's mother was the daughter of military officer Charles Cameron and his Portuguese-born wife Luduvina Rosa Da Silva, who married in 1812 during the Peninsular War.

[6] Kingston's mother died in 1851 at the age of 27, after which he and his siblings were probably raised by servants as their father was heavily involved in business and political activities.

[7] At an early age he was sent to John Lorenzo Young's Adelaide Educational Institution, where he regularly won awards and had a talent for mathematics.

[8] He left the school at the end of 1867 and decided to study law, beginning his articles of clerkship in March 1868 with future attorney-general Samuel Way.

He was described by William Maloney as the originator of the White Australia policy; he was opposed to Chinese immigration, and was very involved in crafting the framework for regulating it.

[citation needed] A big, imposing man with a full beard, a booming voice and a violent, cutting debating style, Kingston dominated the small world of South Australian colonial politics in the 1890s.

[1] Kingston did not support votes for women at the 1893 elections but was subsequently persuaded by his ministerial colleagues, John Cockburn and Frederick Holder of its political advantages, and was lobbied by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

In 1897, he travelled to London for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, where he was made a Privy Councillor and awarded an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws degree by Oxford University.

[citation needed] When the Constitution came into effect on 1 January 1901, Barton formed the first federal ministry, and Kingston was appointed Minister for Trade and Customs.

[1] In July 1903, Kingston resigned suddenly in a fit of anger from the opposition of John Forrest and Edmund Barton to his attempt to impose conciliation and arbitration on British and foreign seamen engaged in the Australian coastal trade.

He was re-elected unopposed at the 1903 federal election and made his final parliamentary speech in March 1904, which left him exhausted; a month later he was admitted to a private hospital in Melbourne.

[22] He was nursed by his wife Lucy at their home south of Adelaide, with visitors including John Langdon Bonython noting his obvious mental decline.

Lucy was also in poor health and became the subject of derision in society circles following an incident with Jenkin Coles, where she reportedly "set the dogs on him and chased him away, menacing him with a broomstick".

[25] Kingston's body was exhumed in March 2008, nearly 100 years after his death because two people thought they may be his direct descendants from one of his illegitimate children.

After the Black Lives Matter gained pace in June 2020, with various statues representing slave traders and various perpetrators of racism being removed or defaced both in the US and in the UK during the George Floyd protests, archaeologist and historian Jacinta Koolmatrie pointed out what she saw as the irony of the statue being so close to the Aboriginal flag in the square, which was also the site of the Adelaide Black Lives Matter protest.