by Dr John Hirst
Late in 1856 Victorians elected the first parliament by which they were to govern themselves. In its first year the parliament legislated to give all men the vote. At this time there were few places on the globe where ‘manhood suffrage’ prevailed – certainly not in Britain, the mother country of the colony.
Victoria was regularly referred to by outsiders as a democracy. But by our standards today it was far from being democratic. All men had the vote, but they voted in electorates that were very unequal: the countryside was over-represented compared with the towns and the goldfields. From 1857, all men had the vote, but men of property had votes in every electorate where they owned land. Men of property could also more easily become parliamentarians, as members were not paid.
Furthermore, manhood suffrage applied only to one house of the parliament, the Legislative Assembly. The second or upper house, the Legislative Council, had been designed to check the popular will and to protect property. Only substantial property holders could vote for it, and to be a member one had to be the equivalent of a millionaire in today’s terms. All laws had to pass the Council, and if the Council was at odds with the Assembly there was no mechanism for overcoming their differences. The fight for democracy in Victoria happened after manhood suffrage had been passed. It was a fight with far more defeats than victories.
Men had acquired the vote in the 1850s without a struggle and almost by accident. When Victoria separated from New South Wales in 1851 it was given the same standard beginner’s parliament as the other colonies had: there was one house, called a legislative council (but not to be confused with the upper house of the full parliament created later) which could pass laws but not control the British governor, who was still in charge of the government. The governor appointed a third of the members of the council, with the colonists electing the rest. As in England, voters had to be men who owned or rented property of a certain value. But the gold rushes, which began at the same moment that Victoria became a colony, led to a huge rise in property values, so that every householder in Melbourne and the larger towns automatically became qualified to vote. This was a huge step towards manhood suffrage.
In 1852 the British government decided that the Australian colonies, growing and prospering with the gold rushes, could govern themselves. The legislative councils in each colony were invited to draw up a constitution providing for two houses of parliament. The councillors in Victoria were men who had made their money before the gold rushes. They were frightened by the number of the diggers and by the new voters that inflation was creating. This is why they planned an upper house that was the most narrowly based in Australia. They made their plans without facing any protest: the diggers were still preoccupied with gold-hunting.
The diggers were to have the vote for the new Legislative Assembly, but only if they bought an annual licence to dig. Very few did so; the diggers were already unhappy about the burden of paying a monthly licence. Licence fees and the heavy-handed enforcement of them were the chief grievances behind the diggers’ protest at Ballarat, which ended when soldiers stormed the diggers’ stockade on the Eureka Lead in December 1854. The Governor was forced to call an inquiry into the administration of the goldfields, which recommended a cheap yearly digger’s licence called the miner’s right, costing less than the old monthly licence. When this was implemented, it meant that all diggers held an annual licence and so became qualified to vote. Anyone could buy the right to vote by taking out a miner’s right. There was no longer any protection to ensure that voters were settled, ‘respectable’ people.
On this basis the first Legislative Assembly of the new parliament was elected. When that body adopted manhood suffrage it actually took the vote away from many diggers, because only men who had resided in the electorate for three months were eligible to vote. Diggers who were regularly on the move would now miss out. The Assembly also retained the right of property holders to vote in each electorate where they held property. Haines, who had been the first premier, thought that without the property vote Victoria would be a ‘naked’ or a ‘pure’ democracy. Most of the men who voted for manhood suffrage did not want a pure democracy either, and they knew that other barriers to democracy would remain after all men had been given the vote. They called themselves liberals rather than democrats. The word ‘democracy’ was thought to be un-English and smacked of disloyalty to the Queen. The struggle to make the people the true rulers of the colony was handicapped because it was hard to say openly that the people should rule.
The diggers and other newcomers took up politics seriously in 1857, the first year of the new parliament. At public meetings throughout the colony they elected delegates to go to Melbourne to convene a sort of rival parliament, just down the hill from the official one. This was the most serious popular challenge ever mounted against the parliament. The people’s parliament was called the Land Convention as its purpose was to draw up a policy to give ordinary people cheap and ready access to land, the issue on which the diggers felt most keenly. Most land was in the hands of the squatters, and the Convention organisers realised that parliament – especially the Legislative Council – would not readily yield to the popular cry to ‘unlock the lands’. Despite the whiff of revolution, the Convention members conducted themselves in an orderly way and obeyed the rules of parliamentary debate. They spent three weeks drawing up their policy, then set up a committee to watch over parliament, organise petitions and demonstrations, and help get their delegates elected to the official parliament. To get its land policy adopted the Convention knew it would need a more democratic parliament. It demanded that members be paid and that the goldfields and the towns get their due representation.
This huge popular mobilisation had very little effect. The Legislative Council mauled the land bill sent up by the Assembly. The Assembly passed payment of members, but the Council rejected it. Electorates were altered, but the countryside was still over-represented. Those under the leadership of the Convention tried force: they stormed parliament and hurled stones at the windows. But the demonstration backfired: parliamentary supporters of the cause hastened to distance themselves from the demonstrators.
The barrier to popular success was the Legislative Council, and the battle against the Council continued through the 1860s and 1870s. The divisions in politics were not so much within the houses but between them; liberals dominated in the Assembly and conservatives in the Council. Since the Council was practically impregnable, the liberals were forced to use unconstitutional methods to break its power, bringing the colony to the brink of chaos.
The method they used was this. They ‘tacked’ items that they knew the Council would reject onto the end of the annual budget. The Council could only pass or reject the budget; it could not amend it. In 1865 James McCulloch’s government ‘tacked’ on tariffs to protect local industries; in 1877 Graham Berry’s government ‘tacked’ on payment of members. Unwilling to accept the ‘tack’, the Council threw out the budget and left the government without authority to spend money. According to the rules, a government left without money should resign, but these governments refused to do so. McCulloch got money by borrowing from a bank of which he was chairman of directors. Graham Berry, left without funds, sacked civil servants, starting at the top with District Court judges and magistrates. There was massive popular support for both these governments, so governors did not have the ‘Kerr’ option of sacking the premiers.
The crises were finally resolved through compromise. The Council agreed to pass the protective tariffs and payment of members if they were ‘untacked’, or submitted as separate measures. This was victory for the liberals, but it left the Council’s powers intact. To break that power the liberals submitted schemes that deadlocks should be resolved by referendum or by a joint sitting of the two houses. The Council threw them out. The Council’s response to all attacks was to widen the number of people who could vote for it, but not yield up its power to go on rejecting measures it did not like.
Victoria was at the forefront of the battle for a more complete democracy. It was, for instance, the first colony to establish payment of members. But by the late 19th century there was a strong movement throughout Australia to democratise the colonial constitutions, including a new cause: the granting of votes to women. Liberals were now committed democrats and the Labor Party, which began in the 1890s, wanted a pure democracy. Whereas liberals wanted to reform the upper houses and introduce a mechanism to resolve deadlocks, Labor wanted to abolish the Councils. Labor did not accept that there was a role for a house of revision; if Labor won an election, the parliament should simply adopt the Labor platform.
The democratic movement had only patchy success in the colonies, which all had Legislative Councils resistant to change. But the situation was entirely different in the planning for the new Commonwealth of Australia. Liberals and democrats would never agree to establish a new system of government on undemocratic principles. If the conservatives wanted federation they had to swallow progressive measures. In the new constitution no-one could vote more than once. If women had the vote in the colonies they could vote in Commonwealth elections. There was an upper house, the Senate, to represent the states, but its electorate was to be the same as the House of Representatives, and a deadlock between the houses could be resolved by a double dissolution and a joint sitting. At the constitutional conventions the Victorian liberals were at the forefront of the movement to ensure that the Senate would not be an upper house like the one they had been fighting for years. The new constitution was to be under complete popular control. A referendum was required to accept it and to amend it.
The democratic federal constitution made it a little harder for the Victorian Legislative Council to maintain its old ways. In the 1890s it had regularly rejected moves to abolish plural voting. It had countered with schemes to allow all property holders an extra vote, not just those who had property in two or more electorates. Then in 1899 it gave way, knowing that the ‘one person, one vote’ model would come into operation for the Commonwealth in 1901. On votes for women it took longer to yield. The women’s suffrage movement began in Victoria in 1884, but Victorian women were the last to vote in state elections. The Legislative Council waited to see that women’s suffrage made little difference to electoral outcomes in the other states and the Commonwealth before agreeing to the change in 1908.
In the 20th century, parties came to dominate the political process. There were three parties in Victoria – Liberal, Labor and Country Party (the predecessor to the National Party) – and all combinations between them were possible. The Liberals and Labor at different times supported Country Party governments; and sometimes they were in alliance against the Country Party. On democratic reform, since Labor wanted to abolish the Council, the Liberals and Country Party wanted to preserve its restricted franchise and its powers. The Country Party wanted to preserve the over-representation of country areas, which Labor and (less certainly) the Liberals wanted to remove. The next democratic reforms came not from widespread popular movements but in the wheeling and dealing of three parties jockeying for power.
In 1944 the Liberal Party under Tom Hollway supported a Country Party government on condition that it cut back country representation, which it reluctantly did. In 1950 Labor supported a Country Party government on condition that it introduce adult suffrage for the Council. Hollway of the Liberals made a counter offer: he would support a Labor government to introduce adult suffrage and a thorough redistribution of electorates for both houses. Labor stuck with its existing deal, but both the Country Party and the Liberals were now committed to adult franchise for the Council, which formerly both had vehemently opposed. This great democratic reform passed the Council ‘on the voices’ – that is, without a division to record ayes and noes. The president could not believe it: he put the question a second time to make sure.
Hollway was passionate about getting a fairer electoral distribution, which would have the advantage of reducing the Country Party’s power. Not all the Liberals were prepared to follow him (for Liberals won some country seats, and equal electorates would also help the Labor Party). The Liberals split on this issue; Hollway was expelled and formed the Electoral Reform League which won four Assembly seats at the election in 1952, which was fought on the issue of electoral reform. Labor won enough seats to form a government in its own right (a very rare event). It rearranged electorates according to the plan Hollway had developed (two state seats to be created in every federal electorate).
Labor changed its policy on the Legislative Council in the 1980s. Since Labor had never controlled the upper house and never looked like being able to abolish it, it now called for it to be elected on a system of proportional representation. This is the system that has operated in the Senate since 1949. It makes it harder for one party to control the house and gives minor parties a much better chance of securing seats. In 2001 Steve Bracks’ Labor government took up this plan and ordered a commission of inquiry composed of a retired judge and two former Liberal politicians – clearly thinking it would need bipartisan support to carry this measure. But, to everyone’s surprise, at the 2002 election the Labor government gained control of the upper house. Labor could now have abolished the Council! But Bracks stuck to the plan he had put to the people, even though it would make it hard for either major party to control the Council in the future.
After the elections in 2006 the two houses will have the same fixed term of four years. The Council will be elected by proportional representation with eight regions returning five members. Deadlocks can be resolved by a joint sitting following an election. The key elements of the constitution can only be altered by a referendum. The Commonwealth constitution continues to influence the state’s.
The switch in Labor’s approach to the Council reflects a wider change in our thinking about democracy. More and more people see a government in control of both houses as a threat to democracy. They like to see minor parties and independents holding the balance of power in the upper house. Even a government supported by a majority of the people needs to be subject to scrutiny and obliged to argue its case. So democracy is more complicated than simply letting the people rule. Ultimately, we don’t want our democracy naked.
Dr John Hirst is a Reader in History at La Trobe University.
Illustrations
Top: The Mace (detail), Election sketches in the Legislative Assembly in Australasian Sketcher with pen and pencil, 4 August 1877
Middle left: Recording Angels (detail), Election sketches in the Legislative Assembly in Australasian Sketcher with pen and pencil, 4 August 1877
Middle right: Outside Paradise (detail), Election sketches in the Legislative Assembly in Australasian Sketcher with pen and pencil, 4 August 1877
Bottom: Samuel Calvert, Parliamentary Elections, 1871 - Getting Warm - Steam Up, in Illustrated Australian News for home readers, 20 March 1871
