The Making of Australia by Robert Murray

Author:Robert Murray [Murray, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rosenberg Publishing
Published: 2014-03-04T14:00:00+00:00

Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin (right), the first and second prime ministers of Australia. (National Library of Australia)

Most of the political and business leaders from that time on were Australian-born. Barton’s successor, ‘affable’ Alfred Deakin, the senior figure in the early Commonwealth, was born in Melbourne in 1859. His English immigrant father was a middle manager with Cobb & Co., the leading colonial coach service. Intellectually gifted and personally popular like Barton, Deakin was also trained as a lawyer, but naturally more of a writer – he was once an Age journalist – and politician, a great speaker and parliamentarian. He led the federal movement in Victoria and worked closely with Barton in drafting the Constitution. Deakin was prime minister in 1903–04 and again in 1905–08 and 1909–10. The breaks were due to the chronic party instability of the early Commonwealth. Similar instability affected the states.

Party labels can be confusing. The two broad streams in colonial politics were liberal and conservative, but this British division did not translate well. They coexisted uneasily, for example, with the division between free-traders and protectionists. In Victoria, with protected manufacturing and processing industry encouraged in order to hold population after the gold rush, protection and liberalism usually went together. In NSW free trade had been the popular cause, because it encouraged trade in the port, a major source of jobs, and kept prices down, whereas protection appealed to farmers because customs income provided an alternative to a land tax. Other colonies had variations on these themes. Liberals favoured one man one vote, payment of members, unlocking the land, moderate government intervention in industry and society, free and secular education, slightly higher taxes and social welfare. They were less averse to an income tax. Conservatives in varying degrees had opposed these. Catholics and some Anglicans tended to support the conservative side, as it offered the better prospect of state funding for church schools

By 1901 the differences of colonial politics were breaking down. Full democracy had been achieved. All governments needed customs revenue, which the Commonwealth collected and distributed, so necessity soon brought agreement on moderate protection, for both revenue and industry assistance. State aid for church schools had dropped into the too hard basket, given the economic stringency and needs of the state systems. To the horror of some old stagers, free trade and protection, conservative and liberal, ‘fused’ in 1909 to become the Liberal Party.

The common opponent by then was Labor (the spelling the party adopted in 1912), which had sat on the cross-benches in its early years and used its numbers to play one side off against the other to gain concessions. These included protective tariffs and arbitration of industrial disputes, which Deakin’s side largely supported, and old-age pensions. Victoria introduced age pensions in 1900 – very welcome after the income devastation of the 1890s – and some other states had pensions but in 1908 they became a Commonwealth function.

Deakin’s legacy with Labor support was the so-called ‘Deakinite settlement’, in which industrial arbitration

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