Federations are defined by having a national character and a federal character. For instance the House of Representatives in Australia's parliament is organised with a national character while the Senate has a federal character. The House has equal sized electorates and single members, while the Senate has the states as its electoral boundaries and each state has an equal number of members. So the Senate represents the states, which are the federal components of the Federation, while the House represents the Australian people, which is the national character of the government.
One of the innovations of American constitutional design was to put the national and federal characters into tension so that the national government would not grow to consume the states, yet have enough national character that the states would not assert themselves over the national government. This vertical balance of powers in the federation was designed to protect liberty and cemented through constitutional limited government.
One of the blind spots in Australian politics is that federalism is ignored as a technology to ensure liberty and natural rights. Too often people assume the role of government is service delivery, not limited government, and seek to order the political structures accordingly. (more)
In The Great Constitutional Swindle Peter Botsman challenges and explores the triumphalist history surrounding Federation. One of the areas he focuses on is how few of the population voted for federation.
He certainly has a point, voter turn out for both the 1898 and 1899 referendums were low. If those results were obtained today we would not consider it democratically legitimate. (more)
He certainly has a point, voter turn out for both the 1898 and 1899 referendums were low. If those results were obtained today we would not consider it democratically legitimate. (more)
NSW was a free trade colony while all the others were protectionist
. NSW worried that federation would force them to follow national protectionist policies.
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Since this is my first diary entry, and this is an Australian based blog, I thought I'd better start with the issue of Australian union.
Yesterday the
New Zealand Herald
asked for the opinions of its readers on whether New Zealand should join the Australian federation. I disagreed (with one mistake I didn't notice before publishing!):
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Deakin marked Thomas Playford from South Australia as a confederate. Deakin can be pretty nasty in his book to those who didn't share his views
or competed with him; ie George Reid
, so it might be good to check from the 1891 debates what Playford did actually foresee in the Australian Constitution.
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Description
A group of organisations, without ending their independant existence, create a new common institution to advance their common interests.
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George Grey
was the New Zealand representative at the 1891 Constitutional Convention. His
speech for an elected Governor-General
at the Convention in Sydney is contained inside. The debate on this issue continued on for a considerable time after Grey's words.
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