The Sir John Forrest Lecture:
Inaugural Lecture: Tuesday 9 July 2013
This paper was presented by Professor Geoffrey Bolton AO at the
Constitutional Centre of Western Australia.
Geoffrey Bolton is Emeritus Professor and former Chancellor at Murdoch University, having
previously held chairs at four Australian universities and The University of London. He
delivered the ABC Boyer Lectures in 1992, Citizen of the Year(Western Australia) in 2006 and
is an Officer of the Order of Australia. He has written extensively on Western Australia, his
publications including Alexander Forrest: His Life and Times (1958), A Fine Country to Starve
In (1972) and Land of Vision and Mirage (2008). He is currently completing a biography of Sir
Paul Hasluck. "Who's Who" lists his recreation as "sleep".
WOULD JOHN FORREST HAVE BEEN A SECESSIONIST?
I greatly appreciate the honour of giving what I confidently believe will be
the first in a long line of John Forrest Lectures. You will realise that if you invite a
historian to speak, what you are likely to get is history. Accordingly tonight I’m
going to begin with Sir John Forrest and to conclude with the question: ‘If he had
been premier of Western Australia in this year 2013 would he have been a
secessionist?’ I don’t at all expect that in future years speakers who give the John
Forrest Lecture will feel obliged to take a similar perspective. They might and
should feel free to address a great range of political and constitutional questions
from many different points of view. But it is appropriate that we start with Sir
John Forrest.
As I am an old-fashioned historian I shall begin with some facts. John
Forrest was born in 1847, third of nine sons of Scottish immigrants William and
Margaret Forrest. Thrifty and hardworking – William established the first mill at
Picton, near Bunbury – they sent three of their boys to Bishop Hale’s school after
it opened in 1860. This qualified John Forrest to enter the Survey Department in
1865. He soon proved his quality and was placed in charge of a minor expedition
in 1869 and two major transcontinental journeys in 1870 and 1874. In 1876 he
married Margaret Hamersley and in the same year became deputy-surveyorgeneral. In1883 he was promoted to be surveyor-general and became the first
locally born member of the executive council. When Western Australia achieved
self-government he became premier in December 1890 and held the office for
just over ten years. For half a century this achievement stood as a record in
Australian politics.
When Australia federated in 1901 he entered the Commonwealth House
of Representatives as member for Swan. For eight of the next seventeen years he
held cabinet office, briefly as postmaster-general, then minister for defence, and
then treasurer. He was acting prime minister in 1907, and in 1912 missed the
leadership of his party by one vote, thus losing the chance of becoming prime
minister in 1913. He was appointed to the House of Lords in 1918 but died on
shipboard en route to London before he could take his seat. His life has been the
subject of one and a half biographies by Frank Crowley, as well as important
articles by Sir Paul Hasluck and Martyn Webb. They give a consistent picture of a
straightforward character who took leadership confidently, with a sound
strategic sense and a remarkable clarity in defining the aims of policy. Taking
advantage of the gold discoveries of the 1890s, his government attracted capital
and migration in unprecedented quantities, and embarked on major works of
infrastructure including Fremantle harbour, a network of railways, and the
pipeline bringing water to the Kalgoorlie goldfields. If his career in federal
politics was never quite as impressive, nor were his opportunities.
Shortly after Forrest formed his first ministry Western Australia was invited
to send seven delegates to the National Australasian Convention in Sydney in the
April of 1891 to consider the merits of bringing the colonies (including New
Zealand) into one political unit. The Convention was presented with a draft
constitution that was the direct ancestor of our present federal constitution. It
provided for a House of Representatives elected on a basis of population and a
Senate in which each of the States would have equal representation. The framers
of the constitution had a precedent to guide them in the confederation of Canada
in 1867, but whereas the Canadian model vested all power in the central
government except those specifically retained by the provinces, the Australasian
draft specified the Commonwealth’s powers, leaving the residue to the States. In
cases of dispute a High Court would adjudicate.
Most of the Western Australian delegates had little to say during the
Convention debates. Alexander Forrest, for instance, spoke only once. They were
not on the whole convinced of the merits of Federation, and they returned home
to a public intensely hostile to the idea. Winthrop Hackett reported to his friend
Alfred Deakin that ‘the feeling against amounts almost to frenzy’ and named John
Forrest as the only man in public life inclined even to consider the matter.
Why was Forrest different? Ambition played a part in Forrest’s makeup.
From modest origins to becoming first premier of his colony at the age of fortythree was an honourable achievement, but more remained. North America
offered two examples of how diverse settler colonies succeeded in binding
together to form a strong union through the device of federation. The United
States provided a model. The original thirteen states of 1787 more than trebled
in number during the 19th century as the nation expanded west to the Pacific and
south to the Mexican border, overcoming in the process the trauma of the Civil
War. More relevantly for Australia, the Canadian colonies united between 1867
and 1873, incorporating the largely French Canadian province of Quebec and
remaining loyally within the British Empire. In both the United States and
Canada the statesmen who negotiated the union went down to posterity with
great reputations. Forrest was not immune to the thought that he too might be
numbered among the makers of a nation.
In Forrest’s case there was a personal factor that has received little
attention. His wife Margaret came from a family of English landed gentry. Her
cousin, the head of the family, Edward Hamersley, took an Australian wife. She
was Alice, the favourite elder sister of Edmund Barton, the Sydney lawyer and
politician whose single-minded advocacy of federation would earn him the
distinction of becoming the first prime minister of the Commonwealth of
Australia. Unhappily the damp climate of the Thames Valley brought on a
tubercular condition in Alice Hamersley, and she died at the age of thirty; but the
relationship formed a basis for a deep and enduring friendship between John
Forrest and Edmund Barton that survived occasional political disagreements.
Both shared a genuine, if conservative taste in literature, as well as enjoying food
and liquor in generous quantities. Late in life Forrest wrote to a friend: ‘Barton
was the most high-minded and honourable of all the Prime Ministers, and that is
not sufficient comparison as he was so far ahead of the others - so true and
faithful and reliable altogether. He and I were sworn friends. We thought alike
and were not full of guile and deceit, or willing to win at any price.’ I wonder if
modern politicians would write of each other in such terms – but we had better
not go there.
Another explanation might be that, as the young explorer who had twice
crossed the desert separating Western Australia from the rest of the continent,
Forrest was accustomed to think Trans continentally. It seemed symbolic that on
his first visit to Melbourne after the 1874 expedition he and his brother
Alexander gave first priority to viewing the monument to Burke and Wills. We
might see the Forrest’s as identifying with the Australian epic theme of linking
the colonies by transcontinental exploration, but there would have been an
element of competition. John Forrest succeeded in his enterprise without loss of
life, whereas Burke and Wills perished through their own lack of competent
judgment. If the explorers shared a common purpose, the discovery and mastery
of the unknown interior of the continent, there was also competitiveness
between the native Western Australian and the expensively equipped Victorians.
Was Federation the creature of Australia’s geography? We are so
accustomed to regard the State boundaries as immutably set in concrete, yet it
requires only a little thought to see that they are often illogical. Certainly there
are some geographical features that are hard to ignore, such as the Nullarbor
Plain and Bass Strait. – though even Bass Strait might be overcome. During the
republican debates of 1999 I remember one republican arguing that we would
have to get rid of place names with royalist associations such as Queensland and
Victoria. Asked what he would recommend in the place of ‘Victoria’, he suggested
that it should be amalgamated with the large island to the south, and become the
State of Tasmania with its capital at Melbourne. There are historical and
economic reasons why this is not an entirely silly notion – but I digress.
Returning to the Australian map it is obviously incongruous that half
Brisbane’s hinterland should lie in the north of New South Wales, whereas
Brisbane is further from Cairns than it is from Albury. As one North
Queenslander said, it is like a man being governed by his big toe. The Riverina
could very easily have been added to Victoria, with the boundary at the
Murrumbidgee rather than the Murray. Even in Western Australia the State’s
northern boundary might very well have stopped at the 20th parallel, where the
desert reaches the sea at the Ninety Mile Beach. The Kimberley district has more
in common with the adjacent parts of the Northern Territory than it has with the
Pilbara. The homestead of Rosewood station has its kitchen in Western Australia
and the remainder in the Northern Territory. This was a great help to the overenterprising cattleman who owned the property and was more than once in
trouble with the authorities because of his easy going ways with his neighbours’
stock.
Nor was it ordained for all time that there should be only six States. When
Forrest was born in 1847 Australasia consisted of Western Australia, South
Australia, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and New Zealand. The rest was all New
South Wales, as New Zealand had been until only seven years previously.
Victoria was separated from New South Wales in 1851 and Queensland in 1859,
but nobody foresaw that this would be the end of the process, still less that no
new States would be created after Federation.
Consider the might-have-beens. There have been persistent cries to divide
Queensland into three states, a North Queensland based on Townsville and a
central state based on Rockhampton, with Brisbane as the capital of the
remainder. New England and the Riverina have demanded independence from
New South Wales. The western part of Victoria had a separation movement that
sometimes looked to take over the Mount Gambier district of South Australia.
The Northern Territory was for a few years divided in two. In 1900 the
Kalgoorlie goldfields wanted to break loose from Western Australia and join the
federation under the name of ‘Aurelia’. At the same time Albany and its
hinterland had a separation movement, though its partisans were undecided
whether the new state would be called ‘Plantagenet’ or ‘Albania’. If all the
secession movements in Australia had been successful, as some similar
movements were in North America, there would be at least fifteen states rather
than six as at present, with momentous consequences for the character of the
federal Senate and the balance of political power.
As it was, even after New Zealand had dropped out and there were only
six colonies to fit together into a federation, it was not until late in 1899 that New
South Wales, South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and Queensland had all
returned a “Yes” vote when the proposal was submitted to the voters. Given the
notorious reluctance of Australians to agree to any referendum proposal the
result was something like a miracle. Western Australia was the last to decide. By
the early months of 1900 Forrest was convinced that Western Australia could
expect no more concessions, and in May he announced that the question would
be put to a referendum on 31 July. If he had not secured a written guarantee for
the construction of a transcontinental railway linking Western Australia with the
East, he knew that the project stood so strongly among public expectations that
it would be given a high priority – though in fact it would not be until 1917 that
he had the satisfaction of travelling on the first train to cross the Nullarbor.
Agitators in Kalgoorlie were still continuing to urge the secession of the
goldfields, but historians have disagreed about the importance of this campaign.
Fear of losing the goldfields certainly pushed some previously uncommitted
politicians, such as Winthrop Hackett, the influential editor of The West
Australian, into coming down in favour of a “Yes” vote. But when a delegation
went to London to seek the British government’s support for the separation of
the goldfields, they were not even granted an interview with the British
secretary of state for colonies, Joseph Chamberlain. A successful businessman,
Chamberlain, like nearly all British ministers before and since, favoured the
grouping of smaller colonies into larger federations because they offered more
security to British investors. Future events were to justify him.
At the referendum on 31 July 1900 the “Yes” vote triumphed by 44 800
votes as against 19 691. Even if we exclude the goldfields vote there was a
narrow margin in favour. The ‘No’ vote in the rural South-West was offset by
“Yes” majorities in Perth, Fremantle and Albany, though of course we can’t know
how many recent arrivals were enrolled there. Subsequently the opponents of
Federation have been consigned to the dustbin of history as bucolic
reactionaries. Irresistibly there comes to mind a cartoon – by Ben Strange if I
remember rightly – depicting the “Anti-Fed” as an old Friesian cow wandering on
a railway line while the thundering steam-train of the Commonwealth bears
down on her, whistle blowing and driver gesticulating. But there was more to the
“no” case than sheer conservatism.
Consider the factor of distance. When John Forrest was born in 1847 the
majority of Western Australians were still Aborigines outside the influence of
government. Until he was a young adult the ultimate source of authority for
Western Australia was London, several months away by sea. It was only in the
1870s that steamship and telegraph brought Western Australia and Britain
closer together, and it was not until the end of 1890 that self-government was
granted. Only a decade later Western Australia entered the Commonwealth. So,
unlike the rest of Australia, unlike New Zealand with at that time nearly half a
century’s experience of self-government, there have been only ten years in
Western Australia’s modern history when authority has been centred locally.
Those ten years happened to coincide with an unprecedented growth in the
community’s wealth and progress. They gave a great boost to the collective selfconfidence of Western Australians.
But Western Australia’s remoteness could also be a source of fear. A small
population would be incapable of defending a long sea-coast and a large landmass against invasion. During John Forrest’s youth and early manhood fear of
intruders provoked several outbursts of excitement, if not panic, among sections
of the Western Australian community. In 1868 the threat was seen as coming
from Irish Fenians in American privateers who might seize Fremantle, release
the convicts and commit all manner of outrage on hapless citizens. In 1876 the
United States consul in Melbourne laid claim to the Lacepede Islands off the
Kimberley coast, but the party who raised the Stars and Stripes were ousted by
police, and Washington disowned his initiative. In the 1880s the French and the
Russians came under suspicion. One of Forrest’s strongest arguments for going
into Federation was the greater security of a united Australia. It was fitting that
some of his best work as a federal politician was done as minister for defence.
The sceptics about Federation could also put forward economic arguments.
Between 1890 and 1900 the population of Western Australia quadrupled, and
this stimulated the growth of many local industries. Forty years earlier, when
Victoria’s goldrush gave a similar stimulus to local industry, their continuity was
secured by a policy of tariff protection so that local manufacturers were shielded
from cheap competition elsewhere. Thus the foundations were laid for industrial
growth. In Western Australia, although the impact of federation was softened by
allowing for the gradual elimination of tariffs on a sliding scale over five years,
industrial growth was stunted. For most of the 20th century shoppers in Perth
became all too used to hearing: ‘You’ll have to wait till we can get it from the
Eastern States.’
One consequence of this development is that Western Australia has
fostered a persistent tradition of economic thought that has contradicted the
prevailing orthodoxy. Between 1896 and 1909 Perth had a second morning daily
newspaper competing with The West Australian. It was called the Morning
Herald, and its writers included Archibald Sanderson and Hal Colebatch senior
who criticised Federation because it would favour the established industries of
south-eastern Australia against a Western Australia still reliant on mining and
agriculture for its export income. In the next generation was Edward Shann, the
foundation professor of economics and history at The University of Western
Australia and the author of An Economic History of Australia, published in 1930,
which remains to this day one of the most elegantly readable of all Australian
histories. Shann questioned the value of protective tariffs and the usefulness of
centralised wage-fixing at a time when both practices were central to political
thought. In the second half of the 20th century the federal politician John Hyde
was a notable critic of protective tariffs. If mainstream economic policy has now
largely taken down the wall of tariffs that protected Australian producers, for
good or for harm, Western Australians can claim that they thought of it first.
In the years that followed Federation economic grievances were often the
trigger to set off a demand for secession. In 1906, at a time of downturn in the
goldmining industry, the Legislative Assembly voted by a majority of nineteen to
thirteen to withdraw from the Commonwealth, but the State government took no
action. The movement subsided with the return of prosperity as immigration
surged at the opening of the wheat belt. When the First World War came there
seems to have been a general expectation that participation in the common cause
of Anzac would sweep away all the old interstate jealousies. If there was any
such likelihood it was set back in 1916 and 1917 by the two referenda seeking to
permit the Australian government to introduce conscription for military service.
Both referenda were defeated, but both times Western Australia was foremost
among the minority that voted “Yes”. The cartoonist Ben Strange drew an
outline map of Australia in which the outlined coast of Western Australia was
depicted as resembling the patriotic British lion, while the Eastern States took on
the shape of a timid rabbit with its ears at the Cape York Peninsula.
It has to be remembered that in those years many Western Australians
identified more closely with the Mother Country than they did with the Eastern
States. Large numbers of British migrants had arrived in Western Australia
shortly before the war, and there was an understandable tendency for such
families to identify more closely with Britain than with the Eastern States which
they did not know. This attitude persisted long after the war. Growing up in
Perth as the child of such parents I was much more interested in travelling to
London after the Second World War w than in going to Sydney, and I was not
alone. During the 1920s the inflow of British migrants resumed. In those years
however interest in secession was at a low ebb. Its main supporter was James
McCallum Smith, proprietor of The Sunday Times, and his editor Alfred Chandler,
and although they formed a Secession League in 1926 it made little impact for
three or four years. But then came the Great Depression.
Between 1929 and the first half of 1932 unemployment among trade
unionists went from 8 per cent to nearly 30 per cent, and this doesn’t take into
account the problems for the self-employed, the farmers, and the pensioners. In
many parts of the world, not least in eastern Australia, such a sudden downturn
led to an increase in industrial strife as labour confronted the bosses. In Western
Australia the feelings of anger and frustration in the community found a different
target. The Eastern States could be seen as the source of the tariffs that bore
hard on farmers, the home of radicals such as Jack Lang, the maverick premier of
New South Wales, and the site of the new federal capital in Canberra, which
many saw a waste of money.
Suddenly in 1930 the secession movement roared to life with a speed of a
bushfire. The elderly sponsors of the Secession League were reinforced by a
brilliant young publicist, H K (later Sir Keith) Watson, who reinvented the
organisation as the Dominion League, In the face of mounting public demand the
premier, Sir James Mitchell, agreed to hold a referendum on two questions:
should Western Australia secede from the Australian Commonwealth or should
another convention be called to discuss the problems in the federal constitution?
The vote was held on 8 April 1933, the same day as the State elections. By a two
to one margin the voters said “Yes” to secession, and by a slightly slimmer vote
rejected the idea of a convention. But on the same day they threw out Sir James
Mitchell’s government, all the cabinet ministers losing their seats, and brought in
a Labor government under Philip Collier, who was an opponent of secession.
Collier procrastinated artfully. He was aware that a gathering improvement
in the Western Australian goldfields was creating new jobs and reviving the
State’s economy, taking the sting out of the grievances that had largely rallied
support for secession. Also the Commonwealth government made annual grants
to boost the Western Australian budget (as it did for Tasmania), and this was to
continue until the first mineral boom of the 1960s. A secessionist delegation
went to London in 1934 with a petition in a jarrah casket requesting the British
Parliament to authorise the separation of Western Australia as an autonomous
dominion in the British Empire and Commonwealth. The case for secession made
much of Western Australia’s loyalty to the British Empire, while claiming that the
Eastern States had not honoured the contracts under which federation was
negotiated. But they were to be disappointed.
The request was referred to a select committee who dawdled for months,
and eventually reported in May 1935 in the week when the Silver Jubilee of King
George V dominated public attention. The committee found that as Australia was
a self-governing nation under the Statute of Westminster of 1931 the British
parliament no longer had authority to sever Western Australia from the rest of
the federation. Only the parliament in Canberra could decree the divorce. This
took the steam out of the secession movement, for it had nowhere to go short of
armed rebellion. .
The British parliament’s decision thwarting the secession movement
might have been open to constitutional challenge, but there were cogent reasons
why the British did not favour secession. It will be remembered that Britain
supported the Australian federation back in 1900 in the belief that a large
combination of colonies would be a safer haven of investment and less likely to
default on its financial obligations than an individual colony. Events during the
Depression of the 1930s sharply reinforced this idea. In 1932 when the premier
of New South Wales, Jack Lang, tried to withhold payment of interest to British
bondholders, he was frustrated because the Commonwealth government was
able to make the payments and then to pass legislation to recover the money
from the State. Any risk of a standoff was averted by Lang’s dismissal from office
and subsequent defeat at an election.
The British were also mindful of the case of Newfoundland. Newfoundland
had stood out from joining the Canadian confederation and retained its selfgovernment. Its government had run into debt through the expenses of raising
and equipping a separate Newfoundland regiment during the First World War
and by acquiring and funding an over-ambitious railway in the 1920s. Reliant on
its fisheries as Western Australia had been on its wheat and wool, its economy
collapsed during the Depression as export income fell. Early in 1934 the British
government was obliged to take over the running of Newfoundland, suspended
the legislature and set up a commission of government. This lasted until 1949
when a referendum secured the admission of Newfoundland as a province of
Canada. Given the fate of Newfoundland, the British may have sensed an element
of risk in allowing Western Australia to go it alone.
In any case the darkening international situation of the late 1930s revived
the old Western Australian fears of isolation and reduced the attractiveness of
secession. When Campbell Barracks was established at Swanbourne in the late
1930s the residents of neighbouring suburbs complained that they were being
made a target for enemy action. When Japan entered the Second World War at
the end of 1941 the State government sent one of its number to Canberra to
complain to the Prime Minister, John Curtin, that not enough was being done to
safeguard Western Australia – for although Curtin represented a Western
Australian constituency Canberra was not trusted.
Many Western Australians believed the story that in the event of Japanese
invasion Australia would be defended behind the “Brisbane line” extending
across the south-east to the neighbourhood of Adelaide and abandoning Western
Australia, the Northern Territory and most of Queensland. No federal
government ever considered such a plan, but Western Australians found it
credible. It was not reassuring that the officer in charge of Western Command
was the controversial Major-General Gordon Bennett, who when Singapore fell
to the Japanese in February 1942 ensured that he was one of the few to escape.
But the war ended with Japan defeated, and many thought that secession had
been put to sleep for good. Lecturing to students at The University of Western
Australia in the 1950s Frank Crowley used to refer to the movement as ‘the
secession joke’.
Crowley was provocative, but there is one curious statistic that causes one
to wonder how seriously Western Australians took secession. During the first
half of the 20th century, up to and including the referendum to ban the
Communist Party in 1951, the Commonwealth on twenty-seven occasions put
referenda to the voters, usually asking for some extension of the federal
government’s authority. Three-quarters of these proposals failed to secure the
approval of the voters. If you consult Wikipedia you will be told that this is
because the smaller States (smaller in terms of population, that is) feared the
domination of New South Wales and Victoria. But Wikipedia is wrong. The State
which most consistently voted “Yes” – on twenty-one occasions out of the
twenty-seven – was Western Australia. This has ceased to be the case in recent
decades, but it is a phenomenon for which no historian has given a completely
satisfactory explanation.*
When secession came to the fore in the 1970s it was not as a result of
Western Australia’s economic disadvantage as against the Eastern States. Rather
the tide had turned with the mineral boom of the 1960s, Western Australia was
no longer a claimant State requiring subsidies from the Commonwealth, but its
growing contribution to the nation’s export income seemed to some to be under
threat from interference by Canberra. Lang Hancock, the major sponsor of the
renewed secession movement, was not easily tolerant of any form of government
control over the mining industry. During the 1960 he had often squabbled with
the State government, especially with Charles Court as minister, but these
disputes paled into insignificance after the Whitlam Labor government came to
office in Canberra at the end of 1972, with Rex Connor as its minister for
minerals and energy. Pugnacious and autocratic, Connor was soon seen as one
of the main examples of the Whitlam government’s tendency to intervene in
matters that had previously been managed by what Whitlam, in his elegant way,
referred to as ‘the pissant States’ . Hancock hoped to capitalise on a rising sense
of resentment in Western Australia, bankrolling a newspaper to advance the
cause.
There were paradoxes in Hancock’s brand of secession. Some of its
keenest supporters were not native-born Western Australians but expatriate
Englishmen like Don Thomas, the party’s parliamentary candidate at the 1974
elections. Perhaps, having grown up in an offshore island whose inhabitants
were suspicious of proposals to integrate with continental Europe, they saw
similarities in Western Australia’s position. Also, although wanting to separate
from Canberra, Hancock advocated a transcontinental railway between the
Pilbara and Queensland. It was almost as if he saw Australia divided in two, with
the dynamic west and north pulling away from the dominance of the old southeast. But with the return of Court as premier of Western Australia in 1974 and
the defeat of Whitlam in 1975 the pressure towards secession slackened. The
issue subsided into the background, though never completely extinguished.
A few years ago a survey published in the Sunday Times suggested that
thirty per cent of Western Australians would support secession. Various theories
may be offered to account for that state of mind. One consideration is that ever
since the 1890s Western Australia has housed a greater proportion of overseasborn residents than the other Australian States. In some parts of Perth today the
proportion is more than one-third. Many of these people may be assumed to
have little or no experience of the Australia beyond the Nullarbor, either in
reality or as part of a shared historical past. It is sometimes complained that
Australians are a monotonously homogenous people, but in reality the States
differ in their ethnic and genetic makeup. ‘One size fits all’ is not an appropriate
slogan in Australia.
It might be thought that the tyranny of distance has been subdued by
modern advances in communication, but problems remain. Canberra and
Sydney are more than four hours’ flight from Perth. Curiously Perth is more than
five hours’ flight from Sydney. Whenever a national conference is held in Perth
participants from the Eastern States complain about the distance that must be
covered, ignoring the difficulties for Western Australians. I have known Western
Australian federal cabinet ministers from both sides in politics over many years,
and all complain that prime ministers regularly call meetings that require only a
day out for Sydney or Melbourne participants but entirely disrupt the week’s
schedule for Western Australians.
It is hard to quantify these things, but experience suggests that many of
the inhabitants of New South Wales and Victoria have never visited Western
Australia and are inclined to regard us as unsophisticated provincials who have
had the undeserved good fortune to sit on a treasure house of mineral deposits.
It is certainly the case that leading federal politicians of both sides – Barwick,
Whitlam, Hawke (who should have known better), Keating, and Abbott for some
– regard the States as an unfortunate anachronism whose powers should be
overridden. Such views overlook a simple and obvious facet of human nature.
We all prefer that our public life should be administered by authorities who are
accessible and responsive. In many, though not all respects, State and local
governments fit this purpose best.
Among the activities that are best served by a unified Australia are
defence and foreign policy. It is hard to see the advantage to Western Australia
of bring out of step with the rest of the continent about its armed forces or its
refugee policy or its relationship with major foreign powers. The shared
experience of combat in two world wars and several lesser wars has made its
imprint on all Australians. More benignly, common sporting achievements have
also been a strong emotional cement. These factors can’t be quantified but are
none the less important.
So if Sir John Forrest was premier today where would he stand? He would
probably not be too far apart from the views expressed by one of his successors,
Richard Court, in his Vista public lecture in October 2008. In this lecture Richard
Court drew attention to the imbalances in the federal financial arrangements:
Western Australia with slightly less than ten per cent of Australia’s population
contributed a little more than ten per cent of GST revenue, but received back
only six per cent. There should be a more equitable distribution of the royalties
from offshore mining. Court was not himself an advocate of secession, but he
urged the Commonwealth government to take more initiative in addressing the
grievances that might encourage a secessionist frame of mind in the West.
So far the Commonwealth has not significantly responded. Perhaps the
federal Labor government considers it hopeless to negotiate with a Western
Australia in which it has so little support, and the Coalition feels that it can afford
to be complacent. Too often decisions are made in Canberra without adequate
consultation at the State level. Perhaps Western Australia needs an agentgeneral in Canberra to try and influence the framing of national policy. Perhaps
more could be done to delegate specific federal powers to the State governments
to administer. Constitutional change is not required so much as a pragmatic
willingness to co-operate in the shaping of policy.
Before any of this happens one other thing is needful. Many Australians,
especially young Australians, find politics boring and irrelevant. They do not
value the stable political democracy that has endured in this country for longer
than all but a handful of nations. They are ignorant of the workings of
government. This is why an institution like the Constitutional Centre needs
support and capacity to expand its operations, using where it can the resources
that modern computer technology is opening up. John Forrest and his
contemporaries liked to believe that they were serving an educated public. It
would be good to believe that today’s debates on federalism are also conducted
with an educated public.
*Jeremy Buxton has sent me a paper arguing that a correlation can be
established betweenWestern Australia’s votes at referenda and political party
allegiances.