THE SENTIMENTAL STATE – AUSTRALIA’S FEDERATION

The COVID pandemic focussed Australians’ attention on the limits of their federation constitution. Border closures and state regulations have begged the question, “Did the Founding Fathers get it right?” Associate Professor at the Australian National University and author of Their Fiery Cross of Union – A Retelling of the Creation of the Australian Federation 1889-1914 William Coleman has reassessed the making of Australia’s federation unencumbered by any “affirmative” premise. He argues that Federation was the accidental upshot of a contest for personal political supremacy; that the cause’s leadership was mediocre; its democracy superficial, its motivations banal, its ideals more imperial than patriotic and its consequences injurious to Australia’s economic welfare, military security, industrial peace, and social harmony. On Tuesday 19 October 2021, in a Sydney Institute Zoom meeting, William Coleman was joined by author and NSW Solicitor General Michael Sexton SC to take up some of the issues arising from Australia’s federation.

THE SENTIMENTAL STATE – AUSTRALIA’S FEDERATION

WILLIAM COLEMAN

The chaos of Covid has renewed attention to Australia’s federal nature, and provoked various summary censures of its federation. Any worthwhile reconsideration of Australia’s federal nature would surely review its history. But such a review may seem unnecessary: is not Federation the most researched event in Australia’s political history? The writing of that history began even before the year 1901 had closed, with the publication of the The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth by John Quick and Robert Garran; and has continued over subsequent decades, with fluctuations, to surge simultaneously with the centenary of Federation in 2001, culminating in John Hirst’s The Sentimental Nation: the Making of the Australian Commonwealth

And yet, for all its bulk, the history of Federation remains incomplete and lopsided on account of its “affirmative premises”. In the near universal assumptions of this history, the Federation of 1901 was virtuous in provenance – begotten of the commendable ideals of our better selves (patriotism, brotherhood, equality); led by remarkable men; and pursued to its consummation by democratic processes. And it was for the good in its effects; it was fitting, functional, and almost inevitable; at the very least, a mark of progress.

From these sunny premises of affirmative history the present writer dissents.  In my recently published book Their Fiery Cross of Union,[1] I argue that the federation of the six Australian states initiated by Henry Parkes was tainted in provenance; mediocre in its leadership; undemocratic in its processes; botched in its execution; premature in its advent; and damaging in certain enduring consequences.

When I say “tainted in provenance”, I mean that the pre-eminent motive of Federation was a hunger of a small bourgeois elite for a grander stage upon which to exercise their sometimes thwarted ambitions. In the central figures of the cause – Barton, Deakin, Griffith – this motive is evident. To their banal hunt for power and glory, another impetus was added by the resentful impulse of remote Australia to punish their neglectful state capitals. Probably the next most important animator of the movement was a facile hopefulness in Federation as an opportunity which would serve every particular cause: as one diarist of the day wrote, “Federation … is to do for everybody what they most wish!”

When I say ‘mediocre in leadership’, I am observing that at the pinnacle of its leadership stood Edmund Barton; a figure of ordinary capabilities and capacious weaknesses. Granted, Barton is the least impressive of Federationists of the front rank. But I am not overawed by a comparison of that front rank with that of their leading opponents: I find more ‘honourable mettle’ in John Robertson; more elevation in Rose Scott; more true valour in John Haynes than in any Federationist of comparable prominence.

When I say “botched in execution”, I speak not so much of the blotting of the Constitution by certain follies, quirks and crudities, but of its more fundamental design faults: the muddying of to whom the executive is responsible (the House of Representatives alone, or the Senate also?) and its creation of a powerful High Court, while laying down virtually nothing about the process, or conditions, of appointments to that Court.

That the process of Federation was “undemocratic” I argue at length. But to simply illustrate the contention, I believe it is characteristic, and telling, that who would be Australia’s first Prime Minister (Edmund Barton) was decided not by parliament – there was no parliament – but by the feverish intrigues of a ring of unelected politicians, a press baron and a Colonial Secretary.

Finally, when I say “damaging in enduring consequence” I am thinking, above all else, of workplace relations. The Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1904 disastrously cast the mould of those relations for more than a century, (even ”permanently” it would seem), by removing them from the workplace and placing them of bureaucratised and politicised tribunals.

In seeking to justify these harsh judgements, Their Fiery Cross of Union evidently does something quite new: it supplies a revisionist history of the creation of the Commonwealth. It is revisionist under five heads:

Fiery Cross debunks myths

A myth: “The Australian flag was chosen by competition” The truth: it was chosen by the Colonial Office

A myth: “Australia before 1901 was divided by colonial tariffs”. The truth: the tariffs of the four largest colonies on imports from the rest of Australia were minor. And in NSW they verged on non-existent; by Reid’s Custom Duties Act of 1895 they were scheduled to be reduced zero, save for those on tea, sugar, alcohol tobacco and opium.

A myth: “The quarrel of May 1900 over appeals from the High Court to the Privy Council was dispute between Australian patriots and English imperialists.” The truth: it was dispute between Australians, which tore the country in two.

A myth: “The Federationist cause was an expression of Australianist feeling.”  The truth: among Federationism there was little feeling for Australia as it was. There was a “make a nation” sentiment at large in part of the population. But any Australianism was merely an undertow to the main current of the Federationist cause, which was distinctly Imperialist. Thus, on 9 May 1901 – the day of the opening of the Commonwealth parliament – it was the Union Jack, and no other flag, which was hoisted in hundreds of school yards across Australia. If anything, the Commonwealth of 1901 delayed the formation of an Australian nation.

I might, finally, mention a myth which no serious historian would go near, and yet nevertheless retains remarkable currency amongst the public:  that 1901 was Australia’s ‘independence’. The truth is the Commonwealth of Australia as it was created in 1901 was a British colony, legally, effectively, palpably.

Fiery Cross salvages disparaged reputations

Federationist history dismisses the Federal Council of Australasia as a faintly ludicrous body; in truth it was a legislature whose legislation served both justice and utility. Federationist history applies a similar scornful disregard to Australia’s armed forces before 1901; in truth all three Victoria Crosses of the Boer War were won by colonial and state forces; and just about every shot fired in anger was fired by the same.

Fiery Cross tells the untold

Fiery Cross explores, for the first time to my knowledge, the contamination of the referendums of 1898, 1899 and 1900 by significant ballot fraud, facilitated by the extraordinary absence of scrutineers in both NSW referendums. This fraud was not large enough to alter the outcome of any referendum; yet it remains tarnishing. The greatest fraud seems to have taken place at Corowa, the location of “Corowa Conference”, a much touted milestone in Federationist history.

Fiery Cross highlights the strangely overlooked

The eruption of the Labor Party after 1901 is an oddly absent chapter from Federationist history. Labor had been winning some seats in NSW Queensland and SA for ten years, without any upward trend its representation. And then, come 1901, the party experiences an explosive transformation: within ten years it has a handy majority in the House of Representatives, and a massive one in the Senate.

Fiery Cross gives adequate space to the role of both chance and continuity in Federation episode

It seems unlikely that the Federation would have come to pass in the form it did in 1901 if in September 1898 the Premier of Queensland, T.J. Byrnes, had not died of measles at the age of 37. With respect to continuity, rather than inaugurate a bright new day of union, Federation simply intensified a style of quasi federal government already established by the 1880s.

Fiery Cross censures certain deeds of the new Commonwealth which have been neither ignored nor untold nor mythified, but which have frequently received an easy pass by forbearing historians.  

These deeds would include the disenfranchisement of aboriginals by the Commonwealth Franchise Act; the arbitrary, unjust, and perhaps brutal and cruel, deportation of Kanakas ordained by the Pacific Island Labourers Act; and the replacement of voluntarism in defence by compulsion, culminating in “Boy Conscription” of the 1909 Defence Act.

Perhaps the greatest act of forbearance “Affirmative” History is that it grants the extraordinary appointments by the Barton cabinet of two of its own members to the High Court, there to sit in judgement of appeals respecting their own legislation. A similar forbearance is granted the subsequent round of appointments to the Court which passed over Inglis Clark, John Quick, and Harrison Moore – each the author of a learned work on Australia’s constitution – and chose instead Isaac Isaacs and H.B. Higgins. The first of these two had been publicly doubting of the Federal cause and the Constitution, and the second had been furiously scornful of the Constitution he was, as a justice of the Court, supposed to uphold.

But does such “setting-the-record-straight” spell anything for us today? I believe it may in several ways.

First, a less mythified history of Federation would improve Australian history more generally. We are yet to have a true biography of Edmund Barton. Geoffrey Bolton’s Edmund Barton of 2000 is expert in its subject. It is also charitable. One might say “lenient”, even “indulgent”; for whatever the deeply flawed Barton does, Bolton affords him the most generous interpretation available. This is not necessarily an inadmissible procedure. But it makes Bolton’s book comparable to the official “Lives” once written of British monarchs. It is “eulogical”, that is to say, pertaining to eulogy; and eulogy is not biography. More generally, Federation has applied to Australia’s past a carnival mirror which exaggerates out of all proportion some parts of the subject –the federal parts – while miniaturising others.  Thus William McMillan – a Convention delegate and perfect political featherweight – has a biography, while John Robertson, a five-time premier of New South Wales, has none.

Secondly, a less mythified history of Federation would encourage Australians to think more critically (or rationally) about the value of central government. The leading  article of Australia’s civic religion is the beneficence of Federation, and the Commonwealth of Australia is that religion’s primary object of devotion.  While much is prayerfully implored of that object of devotion, it is hardly held to any strict account. Australians, I suggest, should think demandingly of their central government. Above all else, they should expect it to be functional. Functionality was an afterthought in the making of the Commonwealth. Consider the planned transfer postal services to the Commonwealth. Certain second tier Federationists panned this as an “absurdity”; Barton’s public and explicit defence was that this transfer was required in order for the Commonwealth to have something to do.

Truly, the Commonwealth was first created, and then its creators cast around to find tasks it might perform.  The Post Office was duly transferred; with dysfunctional effect on the important services it performed. The truth at the bottom of this dysfunctional transfer is that the Commonwealth was created primarily as a terrain for dominant personalities express their dominance. And although since at time the Commonwealth has picked up useful roles (defence, foreign affairs) – its original motivation still imparts to it a functionless, aggrandizing accent.

There is one last use in demythologizing the Federation of 1901: in looking truthfully at Federation we are holding up a mirror to present ourselves.  And what do we see?

Firstly, the shallowness of Australia-wide feeling. The predominant national sentiment of 1901 was Pan Britainism. And today, despite a 100 years of frantic “nation building”, premiers of its components parts still believe it is politically advantageous to spitball one another’s states.

Secondly, the weakness of ideas in public counsel. The thinness of ideas in the Australian Constitutional Convention of 1897-8 is dismaying, but hardly surprising knowing Australia as we do.

Thirdly, the peculiar prominence of the professions in Australian life – well corroborated by formal studies – and exemplified by the ascendancy in the Federation episode of lawyers, civil servants, soldiers, clerics, and doctors.

Fourthly, the pre-eminence of the ritualistic, legalistic and the bureaucratic. Each tinctured the new Commonwealth, as they have Australian life since.

Fifthly, the mechanicality of Australian conceptions of democracy. Democracy in Australia today is understood proceeding to a box, placing therein in a ballot, and later counting them. This same mechanical understanding of democracy prevailed in the Federation episode; and yielded an absurd voting system for the Constitutional Convention, which produced a Convention distinctly unrepresentative of the range of public opinion. This delinquent voting system was used in the Senate for its first 17 years; and a modified form was used for another 30, then to be replaced by the Hare-Clark system. In 2013, that voting system awarded a Senate seat to the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party on the basis of one half of one percent of first preferences. But at least that Senator received some votes: some 12 members of that Senate, sat, and legislated, having received no votes at all; a gross offence against the spirit of democracy, sanctioned only by the awkwardness of the Hare Clark system in dealing with deaths and resignations.

I would like to conclude with a thought that may have struck and unsettled some members of the Sydney Institute: is Fiery Cross’s critique of the Federation of 1901 just another piece of cultural destruction? Has not the Commonwealth knitted the inhabitants of Australia together in some degree of common consciousness – ‘a nation’ – which has a value independent of any taint in its now distant origins? Is there not, it might be pressed, an unnerving parallel between the revisionism of Fiery Cross and several (surely) indecent species of revisionism presently current of Australia and United States?

Revisionism, like most things, can be used or abused. Specifically, revisionism may constitute either intellectual progress or intellectual regression. Which of those it is lies in the balance of the number of novel truths it reveals over the number of novel falsehoods it introduces. I maintain that the balance is positive for Fiery Cross; and is sharply negative for other species of revisionism currently receiving extended media attention. Similarly, revisionism may either contribute to welfare or damage it. I allow that to the extent that revisionism damages some useful myth, it is damaging to welfare, regardless of how debunkable those myths may be. The “myth” of the Australian nation doubtless has been useful, and worth defending if alive. But the myth of Australian nation is dead. At the same time, the myth of Commonwealth remains robust. Further, the myth of the Commonwealth is no longer the ally of Australian nation. The Commonwealth is now, in fact, an adversary of any Australian nation: see, for example, the travesty of Australia’s past which is presented to every member of the public who takes the officially sanctioned tour of Australian Parliament House.

Thus 2021 in Australia we have a state without a nation.  Not a “Sentimental Nation” but a “sentimental state”. This is not necessarily a catastrophe: historically, most states have been without nation. But sentiment about a nation is a perhaps natural, perhaps useful, thing; while sentiment about a state, given the depersonalisation of the state over the past 250 years, is unnatural and ludicrous. The inhabitants of Australia would be better off if they were not sentimental about the state created in 1901, but treated it a (hopefully) useful means to certain useful ends.

[1] Their Fiery Cross of Union: A Retelling of the Creation of the Australian Federation, 1889-1914, Connor Court, 2021.