Is Australia British or American?
The Emergence of Australia’s Hybrid Political System in the Victorian Age
The Victorian Era witnessed an incredible transformation of the British South Pacific. At the start of Victoria’s reign, Australia had a non-indigenous population of about 130,000.
In 1837, the continent of Australia was fractured into 6 separate and unconnected colonial administrations, all of which were still transitioning out of the legal framework of colonial penal settlements.
By 1901 though, Australia was unified and acted as an independent state. Sydney was a growing metropolis of half a million and the non-indigenous population in Australia grew to almost four million while New Zealand had almost one million. This means that the non-indigenous population of the British South Pacific grew by a factor of nearly four hundred in only 64 years.
With this amount of change and growth, the transformation of the Australian continent into a bureaucratic federated commonwealth was almost a necessity.
Each colony had significant variation in population and had different political and economic interests yet Australian politicians were still able to unite the entire landmass.
Usually, the constitution of the Australian Commonwealth is described as a compromise that kept many aspects of British representational government while at the same time instituting some representational and federal systems originally developed in the United States.
In this article, I will argue that after the initial stages of responsible government in Australia, the Australian people choose to implement mostly American systems rather than rely on legal systems already in place in Britain or other settler colonies.
In other words, the Australian development of responsible government before the late 19th century followed the path of the United Kingdom and Canada. But during the later century though, while the Australian Commonwealth constitution was being drafted, the most fundamental legal institutions and political organizations were overwhelmingly taken from the American legal tradition.
In 1842, the colony of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) instituted a representational assembly that worked with the governor and a privy council. Soon after, in 1850, the colony of South Australia and the new colony of Victoria incorporated a similar system. This was the first significant act leading to responsible government in the South Pacific.
By this time, the Australian colonies were shifting away from being primarily exile colonies. This shift to partial representational government would not have been possible in years past when the entire society was built around criminals whose rights were suspended to even bring them to the continent in the first place.
Until 1823, the governor of New South Wales had nearly unlimited power. By the mid-19th century, Australia no longer hosted a significant number of prisoners and mostly ended convict transportation. 1842 and 1850 were simply additional dates that further limited the possibilities of despotism in individual colonies.
Thanks to the end of the penal system and the Australian Gold Rush of 1851, which brought in hundreds of thousands of immigrants, even more steps were taken to bring individual Australian colonies closer to a fully representational system.
The 1850s saw each Australian colony become mostly autonomous. Britain, of course, was still in charge of some responsibilities. In 1856, New Zealand also gained self-rule. In this decade, some colonies allowed more people groups to vote than even the United Kingdom itself.
All colonies, with the exception of Western Australia, by the end of the 1850s, were self-ruled and passed legislation through a lower house of representatives and an upper house that acted in the governor’s favor or alongside the governor.
In 1865, Britain passed the Colonial Laws Validity Act. The official and lengthy title of the act is largely self-explanatory: “An Act to Remove Doubts as to the Validity of Colonial Laws”. This allowed Australian colonies to overrule almost any English law.
When the implementation of republicanism and resistance to authority occurred, these events were often associated with the United States in the Australian mind. Many Australians pushed for American-style political organization in the mid to late 19th century.
John Dunmore Lang, a radical republican politician from New South Wales, pushed for American forms of local government and universal male suffrage, a feat the United States conquered in 1848. Lang saw Australia as “the future America”: a continent destined to follow in the United States’ footprints. Rebels in the Eureka Rebellion saw the issue as an extension of the American War of Independence and even drafted their own “Declaration of Independence”.
Serious talks of federation started in the 1880s when Germany and France started new colonial ventures in the near Pacific in New Guinea and New Hebrides. Australians became concerned about their safety and ability to defend their own interests. Many were especially upset due to the lack of interest Britain had in protecting the Pacific settler colonies.
Representatives of each colony in Australia, along with New Zealand, and Fiji came together in 1883 to form the Australiasian Federal Council. The Federal Council of Australasia Act, passed by British parliament in 1885, explicitly allowed this interaction between the Pacific colonies but no serious action could be pursued without metropolitan approval. Section 17 of the British act states:
Every Bill passed by the Council shall be presented, for Her Majesty’s assent, to the Governor of the colony in which the Council shall be sitting, according to his discretion, but subject to the provisions in this Act, and to Her Majesty’s instructions, either that he assents thereto in Her Majesty’s name, or that he withholds such assent, or that he reserves the Bill for the signification of Her Majesty’s pleasure, or that he will be prepared to assent thereto, subject to certain amendments to be specified by him.
Most sections utilize similar language that secures convoluted ties with British parliament and with the imperial crown. As seen from this selection of the written law, the Australiasian Federal Council may have allowed colonies to communicate and cooperate with each other more effectively, but ultimately there was no change in sovereignty and the federal council resembled nothing like the federation of the United States or the later Australian commonwealth.
The Australiasian Federal Council additionally made discussing further integration and federalization more accessible and the possibility of a truly united Australia more plausible to the public.
According to University of Sydney historian, Mark McKenna, 19th-century Australians associated any move toward republicanism with a move toward American values. When these aforementioned movements toward representational government occurred, Australians certainly considered their country to be moving towards an American structure, regardless of the actual legal tradition their policies came from.
Up until this point, most political developments were internal to individual colonies and their structures resembled those of Britain and other British colonies. True comparisons to Australian republicanism resembling the American government comes from the Commonwealth of Australia.
The 1901 Australian Constitution aimed to give limited powers to the federal government and the majority of power to the states. Each colony kept its territory and sovereignty. They were now, however, to be called “states”, in the American manner.
The new Australian government was composed of a senate that consisted of an equal number of representatives from each state, which mirrors the American senate, and gives disproportionate power to states with smaller populations. Much unlike Canada, at this time, which had a senate designated by the central government. In Australia, the lower house would then be of representatives that accurately reflect the distribution of population across all states, exactly what the United States Congress was designed to do.
Additionally, the Constitution declares a separation of church and state, like the American Bill of Rights, and very much unlike the United Kingdom and Canada, which do not have this legal separation even to this day.
Also like the United States, the Constitution had to be ratified by each state in Australia for the new federation to be valid. There are three separate but equal branches of government for the sake of checks and balances and was a division of powers in regard to federal and state legislative authority.
Furthermore, the new commonwealth was designed with an easy escape from the British Empire in case opinions changed and the people of Australia wanted a fully independent federation without the British Monarch as head of state, like that of the United States.
These institutionalized similarities to the American political system were spearheaded by a select few individuals, some of which are often colloquially referred to as Australia’s founding fathers, who had positive feelings about the US.
Andrew Inglis Clark, Australian politician and member of the Federal Council of Australasia is one of the most famous of Australia’s founding fathers as well as one of the most enthusiastic admirers of the American political system.
Clark explicitly stated that the goal for Australia was to avoid the Canadian model and aim towards an American model. In preparation for the creation of an Australian constitution, Clark studied philosophy and historical moments of republican revolution. He was especially interested in the American founding fathers and American Transcendentalists.
In 1876, while he was a member of an “American Club”, Clark declared that the “principles which were proclaimed by the founders of the Anglo-American Republic” were ideally to be applied universally. Clark later traveled to the United States and discussed his plans for an Australian constitution with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Moncure Conway. After his visit, he continued to write to Holmes for the rest of his life.
Clark was not the only later 19th-century Australian Yankophile, although he serves as an excellent example because of the amount of change he was able to initiate. Since the Civil War and the economic recovery of the Civil War, the United States was a success story. The United States has long since passed the population of Britain and all European countries. In the last two decades of the 1800s, the US became the country with the largest economy.
Additionally, the US, by the time of the drafting of the Australian constitution, was becoming just as much of a Pacific power as an Atlantic power. The United States was heavily involved with Pacific trade, exploration, and expansion.
Technological change of the 19th century saw that contact between North America’s west coast and Australia was constantly becoming more accessible. Interestingly enough, as Australia became less isolated to the world, thanks to technology, it became more isolated from Britain.
Britain’s influence never went away but it became less relevant as global contact, communication, and trade became within reach. Australia will always be relatively isolated to some extent, and this is why, even today many are concerned about trade opportunities if the country were to further break away from its associations with the United Kingdom.
Regardless, the historical trend has shown that as Australia becomes less isolated and transportation and communication technology increases, a growing number of Australia’s population declines the option of sticking with the security of associating with Britain.
A British perspective comes from an article in Westminster Review from January 1889. The author by the name of O. J. Casey regards Australia to be aligned with the United States in a comradship of being self-absorbed and indifferent to England and the United Kingdom.
Interestingly enough, he does place Canada or any other British territory in this category. He states, “The democracies of America and of Australia have probably energy enough to create a new type of civilization peculiarly of their own”.
It is unclear whether Casey regarded this new type of civilization as independently American or Australian or whether he regarded it to be shared between the two countries. Regardless, the grouping of the two countries is telling that there was a shared attitude towards the United Kingdom between the United States and Australia.
Australia’s political system is extremely interesting because it came in two separate arrivals. The first of which was a slow birth, starting with even the smallest opportunities of representational government at the beginning of Australian settler-colonization.
The 1840s saw the first colony-wide authorizations of representational assemblies which worked beside a privy council that reinsured that institutionalized and elite interests would still be sought. This first wave of responsible government was fully realized with the end of the penal system and the arrival of countless new immigrants thanks to the Gold Rush of 1851.
Suffrage rights were spread to more and more people and colonies grew to a level of autonomy unthinkable in decades past. Australian political thought and movement towards responsible government until the later 19th-century was almost completely of domestic British origin.
Local and colonial governments followed established paths that the United Kingdom and Canada had already accomplished, thanks to their greater extent of development and lack of being composed of almost exclusively prisoners among other reasons.
The second arrival of Australia’s political system came from the Constitution of 1901. The document was made specifically to resemble the US constitution, partially thanks to the success of American influence in the late 19th-century.
This American-influenced document overhauled many British-styled legal elements but did not result in a complete replacement of these elements. The result is a complete amalgamation of two distinct political traditions with British tradition acting as the bedrock and American tradition acting as the foundation.
