50.
although we ought to have some general law in regard to their recognition."
As this reveals, the concern then being addressed was very narrow.
112 The suggestion that the power be extended was not agreed. As ultimately revised, the proposal made by the 1891 Convention was that the federal Parliament have power to make laws with respect to:
"Establishing uniform laws throughout the Commonwealth concerning the following matters, that is to say:–
…
(I) The Status in the Commonwealth of Foreign Corporations, and of Corporations formed in any State of the Commonwealth".
113 The proposal was one that reflected what then was seen as the problem requiring national attention–a problem about recognition of the status of artificial juristic entities created in a State or elsewhere. The issues about corporations and their regulation that had been in such legislative and litigious ferment in the immediately preceding decades of the century were not then seen as matters warranting the grant of national legislative power. To adapt what Sir Samuel Griffith said in 1891, these were, it seems, seen as matters about which the States "may be trusted".
114 By the time the Convention met again, in 1897 in Sydney, the financial scandals of the Victorian land boom had been revealed for all to see. Building societies and banks had been formed, appeared to prosper for a time, but then had collapsed leaving investors and depositors with their claims, totalling many tens of thousands of pounds, substantially unsatisfied. Prominent citizens of the colonies who had been directors or officers of these failed entities had been prosecuted and imprisoned. The reputations of many others had been ruined. All of these events would have been well known to the delegates who attended the Convention sessions in Sydney and then Adelaide in 1897, and in Melbourne in 1898.
115 In Adelaide in 1897 the reference that had been made in the 1891 drafts to the status of corporations was dropped. The corporations power was first put to debate in Adelaide in the form: "Foreign corporations and trading corporations
