Click here to return to Federation Gateway Home

Home
About this Site
Chronology
Exhibitions
Links
People
Politics
Resources
Contact Us

Federation Gateway Image:
An invitation to meet Their Royal Highness the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York in celebration of the opening of the first Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. [1901].
Chromolithograph; 23 x 29 cm.
NLA Call no. PIC S40098

THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA'S
FEDERATION GATEWAY


Federation Political Groups—to 1901 and beyond

Introduction

The main political parties in the Australian colonies before Federation based their platforms around policy differences on tariffs. The parties were either free trade (no tariffs on imports) or protection (intercolonial trade tariffs).

This economic focus was a dominating factor in shaping Federation. After Federation the free trade and protection party governments continued to govern in Federal Parliament. The Labor party also governed at intervals in 1904, 1908–1909 and 1910.

From 1910 the Labor/non-Labor division became the pattern of government in federal politics. From 1901 a tariff operated on goods coming into Australia from non-British countries, while trade between and within individual states was (in the words of the Commonwealth constitution) ‘absolutely free’. From the 1970s the national policy of tariffs (or protection of Australian goods) has decreased in a world of economic and political globalisation.

Many other political parties and pressure groups also influenced Federation. They included feminist, temperance, mutual benefit, pro-federation and anti-federation organisations. Class assumptions, sexism, racist attitudes and xenophobia were often either implicit or explicit in the programs of many of these groups.

New South Wales and Her Duty to Posterity

[New South Wales and Her Duty to Posterity]
Reproduced from the Daily Telegraph June 20, 1899, page 5
geletin silver photograph; 22 x 25 cm
Pictorial Collection

Labour

The Labour movement in Australia, as distinct from the Labor party, comprised socialist, Marxist and other diverse groups. It emerged from the economic depression of 1891–1896 and a growing militancy in trade unions such as those organised by maritime and shearing workers.

The colonial parliamentary Labor parties played off other groups and gained some progressive social legislation from them. In Queensland a Labor government—the first in the world—assumed power in December 1899 for 10 days. Labor attitudes towards Federation were divided. The New South Wales party in 1891 supported national rather than imperial federation. Labor unsuccessfully fielded candidates for the 1897 Federal Convention. One historian has stated that Labor’s subsequent criticism of the Convention is a reason why the 1898 referendum failed in NSW.

The Victorian Labor leader William Trenwith was elected to the 1897 Convention on a liberal ticket and supported the draft Constitution, while the left-wing Melbourne newspaper Tocsin and the Victorian Trades Hall Council opposed it. Queensland Labor activists feared that Federation would favour non-European workers, while Western Australian miners supported Federation and played an important role in bringing that colony into a federal union. John Watson was Australia’s first Labor prime minister for four months in 1904.

The Australian Natives’ Association (ANA)

The ANA was not an association of Indigenous Australians as the name suggests, but Anglo–Celtic, middle class and male until 1900 when women’s chapters formed. Originally called the Victorian Natives’ Association it started in Melbourne on 4 May 1871. Both an insurance society and a nationalist pressure group its motto was ‘Advance Australia’. It grew from the base in Victoria to branches in other Australian colonies and in London. Its years of strongest influence spanned the 1890s to pre–World War II and its members included Alfred Deakin, Edmund Barton and Sir Isaac Isaacs.

The ANA first called for a federated Australia in the 1880s during perceived threats from European powers in the Pacific and from Chinese immigration. In 1893 the ANA was well represented at the Corowa (‘Peoples’) Conference and formed federation leagues to revive flagging federation sentiment. Five men associated with the ANA topped the Victorian poll for the 1897–1898 Federal Convention. In September 1993 it merged with the Manchester Unity Friendly Society to become Australian Unity Friendly Society.

Enfranchised!

Cotton, Herbert Walter (1872-1931)
Enfranchised! 1902
ink drawing; 33.5 x 51.5 cm
Pictorial Collection

The ‘Federation Leagues’—mainstream and feminist

Non-official leagues formed in the 1890s (with the backing of such bodies as the ANA) after the colonial parliaments did not pass the Constitution Bill of the 1891 Federation Convention. Branches formed along the Murray River between Victoria and New South Wales in early 1893. In July the Australasian Federation League was established in Sydney. The leagues convened The Corowa Conference (31 July to 1 August 1893). The Australasian Federation League of Victoria formed in 1894 and the South Australian equivalent a year later. The Queensland League began in 1898 and Western Australian and Tasmanian branches started in time for the 1898–1900 referendums.

Many women’s federal leagues were formed between 1898 and 1900. The Womanhood Suffrage League, started in Sydney in 1891 by Maybanke Anderson, Rose Scott, Louisa Lawson and Dora Montefiore had an anti-federation focus in the late 1890s. Both groups pushed for votes for women at colonial, State and federal levels. By 1902 they had largely achieved the right to vote in federal elections but not at State elections.

The ‘anti-billites’

Those who advocated a No vote in the Constitutional Bill referendums of 1897–1898 were called ‘anti-billites’.

Conservative opponents of the Bill included the Anti-Convention Bill League, the Colonists’ Anti-Bill League and the Womanhood Suffrage League in New South Wales. The Sydney Daily Telegraph, conservative politician George Dibbs and Labor politicians W.M. Hughes and William Holman, supported them.

The Anti-Commonwealth Bill League formed in South Australia with business and labour members. The main objections of this coalition of conservative and labour interests were the cost of Federation and the perceived excessive power of the Senate. This prompted the Sydney Bulletin to quip about ‘Wealth and Want’—an allusion to both the ideological contradictions in the coalition and to J.H. Want, the Anti-Convention Bill League leader.

Other opponents of the Bill and Federation included the anarchist, collectivist socialist and left-Labor polemicists, poets and writers of the Sydney Worker, the Melbourne Tocsin, the Tasmanian Clipper, and the Brisbane Worker. They objected to the imperial, anti-democratic and capitalistic forces they saw at work in the making of the Australian Constitution. The Sydney Bulletin first opposed Federation as an imperial plot and then supported it with some misgivings.

The March of NSW Free Trade

May, Phil (1864-1903)
The March of NSW Free Trade 1888?
pen and ink drawing; 47.5 x 37 cm
Pictorial Collection

Temperance groups

The first Australian temperance organisation began in 1834. By the 1880s, most operated with the support of Christian churches. In 1882 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) formed with charitable and educational purposes as well as being a pressure group against the liquor interests. The WCTU and other temperance groups were also active in the cause of federation and during the Federation Conventions pushed for regulations in the Constitution against the importation and sale of liquor.

Pressures from the legislative assemblies of Victoria and New South Wales, both houses of the South Australian parliament, many petitions and the support of Alfred Deakin resulted in section 113 of the Australian Constitution. This gives the States the right to control the sale of liquor and resulted in either partial or complete prohibition at various times in many States of Australia until the 1950s.

Written sources

  • Anderson, Hugh, (ed.), Tocsin: Contesting the Constitution. Melbourne: Red Rooster, 2000.

  • Hirst, John, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000.

  • Irving, Helen, (ed.), The Centenary Companion to Australian Federation. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

  • McKenna, Mark, The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia, 1788–1996. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Links