under the name of Queensland, from the original province of New South Wales, took place in 1859. At that time the district contained about 25,000 inhabitants; and in the first six years its population was quadrupled and its trade trebled. Responsible government.At the beginning of 1860, when the excitement of the gold discoveries was wearing off, five of the states had received from the home government the boon of responsible government, and were in a position to work out the problem of their position without external interference; it was not, however, until 1890 that Western Australia was placed in a similar position. After the establishment of responsible government the main questions at issue were the secular as opposed to the religious system of public instruction, protection as opposed to a revenue tariff, vote by ballot, adult suffrage, abolition of transportation and assignment of convicts, and free selection of lands before survey; these, and indeed all the great questions upon which the country was divided, were settled within twenty years of the granting of self-government.[1] With the disposal of these important problems, politics in Australia became a struggle for office between men whose political principles were very much alike, and the tenure of power enjoyed by the various governments did not depend upon the principles of administration so much as upon the personal fitness of the head of the ministry, and the acceptability of his ministry to the members of the more popular branch of the legislature.
The two most striking political events in the modern history of Australia, as a whole, apart from the readiness it has shown to remain a part of the British empire (q.v.), and to develop along Imperial lines, are the advent of the Labour party and the establishment of federation. General Australian problems.As regards the last mentioned it may be said that it was accomplished from within, there being no real external necessity for the union of the states. Leading politicians have in all the states felt the cramping effects of mere domestic legislation, albeit on the proper direction of such legislation depends the well-being of the people; and to this sense of the limitations of local politics was due, as much as to anything else, the movement towards federation.
Before coming, however, to the history of federation, and the evolution of the Labour party, we must refer briefly to some other questions which have been of general interest in Australia. Taking the states as a whole, agrarian legislation has been the most important subject that Agrarian legislation.has engrossed the attention of their parliaments, and every state has been more or less engaged in tinkering with its land laws. The main object of all such legislation is to secure the residence of the owners on the land. The object of settlers, however, in a great many, perhaps in the majority of instances, is to dispose of their holdings as soon as possible after the requirements of the law have been complied with, and to avoid permanent settlement. This has greatly facilitated the formation of large estates devoted chiefly to grazing purposes, contrary to the policy of the legislature, which has everywhere sought to encourage tillage, or tillage joined to stock-rearing, and to discourage large holdings. The importance of the land question is so great that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it is usual for every parliament of Australia to have before it a proposal to alter or amend its land laws. Since 1870 there have been five radical changes made in New South Wales. In Victoria the law has been altered five times, and in Queensland and South Australia seven times.
The prevention or regulation of the immigration of coloured races has also claimed a great share of parliamentary attention. The agitation against the influx of Chinese commenced very soon after the gold discoveries, the European miners objecting strongly to the presence of these Immigration question.aliens upon the diggings. The allegations made concerning the Chinese really amounted to a charge of undue industry. The Chinese were hard-working and had the usual fortune attending those who work hard. They spent little on drink or with the storekeepers, and were, therefore, by no means popular. As early as 1860 there had been disturbances of a serious character, and the Chinese were chased off the goldfields of New South Wales, serious riots occurring at Lambing Flat, on the Burrangong goldfield. The Chinese difficulty, so far as the mining population was concerned, was solved by the exhaustion of the extensive alluvial deposits; the miners’ prejudice against the race, however, still exists, though they are no longer serious competitors, and the laws of some of the states forbid any Chinese to engage in mining without the express authority in writing of the minister of mines. The nearness of China to Australia has always appeared to the Australian democracy as a menace to the integrity of the white settlements; and at the many conferences of representatives from the various states, called to discuss matters of general concern, the Chinese question has always held a prominent place, but the absence of any federal authority had made common action difficult. In 1888 the last important conference on the Chinese question was held in Sydney and attended by delegates from all the states. Previously to the meeting of the conference there had been a great deal of discussion in regard to the influx of Chinese, and such influx was on all sides agreed to be a growing danger. The conference, therefore, merely expressed the public sentiment when it resolved that, although it was not advisable to prohibit altogether this class of immigration, it was necessary in the public interests that the number of Chinese privileged to land should be so limited as to prevent the people of that race from ever becoming an important element in the community. In conformity with this determination the various state legislatures enacted new laws or amended the existing laws to cope with the difficulty; these remained until they were in effect superseded by Commonwealth legislation. The objection to admitting immigrants was not only to the Chinese, but extended to all Asiatics; but as a large proportion of the persons whose entrance into the colonies it was desired to stop were British subjects, and the Imperial government refused to sanction any measure directly prohibiting in plain terms the movement of British subjects from one part of the empire to another, resort was made to indirect legislation; this was the more advisable, as the rise of the Japanese power in the East and the alliance of that country with Great Britain rendered it necessary to pay attention to the susceptibilities of a powerful nation whose subjects might be affected by restrictive laws. Eventually the difficulty was overcome by the device of an educational test based on the provisions of an act in operation in Natal. It was provided that a person was to be prohibited from landing in Australia who failed to write in any prescribed language fifty words dictated to him by the commonwealth officer supervising immigration. The efficacy of this legislation is in its administration, the language in which coloured aliens are usually tested being European. The agitation against the Chinese covered a space of over fifty years, a long period in the history of a young country, and was promoted and kept alive almost entirely by the trades unions, and the restriction acts were the first legislative triumph of the Labour party, albeit that party was not at the time directly represented in parliament.
One of the most notable events in the modern history of Australia occurred shortly after the great strike of 1890. This was what is ordinarily termed the bank crisis of 1893. Although this crisis followed on the great strike, the crisis of two things had no real connexion, the crisis being the Bank crisis of 1893.natural result of events long anterior to 1890. The effects of the crisis were mainly felt in the three eastern states, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia being affected chiefly by reason of the fact of their intimate financial connexion with the eastern states. The approach of the crisis was heralded by many signs. Deposits were shifted from bank to bank, there were small runs on several of the savings banks guaranteed by the government, mortgagees required additional security from their debtors, bankruptcies
- ↑ Australia, it may be noted, has woman’s suffrage in all the states (Victoria, the last, adopting it in November 1908), and for the federal assembly.
