1897 Australasian Federal Convention election

The Australasian Federal Conventions elections were held on 4 and 6 March 1897 in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania for the purpose of choosing ten representatives from each colony to constitute the Australasian Federal Convention, a key milestone in the Federation of Australia. The election of delegates to such a convention was almost entirely without historical precedent, but the method of electing representatives was criticised at the time, and later, as not well serving of democratic principles. Background In January 1895 a meeting of the premiers of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania approved a scheme, devised by John Quick and adopted by George Reid, to directly elect the members of a convention which would be tasked to draft for the six colonies a federal constitution. Western Australia later decided its delegates would be MPs chosen by parliament, and the Queensland legislature could not settle on how to choose delegates, but the other four colonies went ahead with elections according to the Quick scheme. Electoral system The Enabling Acts, which the four colonies passed to regulate the election of their convention representatives, conferred the right to vote on anyone entitled to vote in their lower houses of parliament: all male British subjects over 21 years of age in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, and all British subjects over 21 in South Australia. The right to nominate as a candidate was similarly defined, except in Victoria where a hefty £50 deposit was also required, with the upshot that there only 32 candidates nominated, compared to 32 in both Tasmania and South Australia, and 49 in New South Wales. Each colony voted as a single electorate; there was no division of any into geographical constituencies. All four colonies used the same voting method to decide the ten successful candidates, known then as scrutin de liste, block voting, or general ticket voting. Each voter indicated on the ballot the ten candidates they favoured, and the total of such indications (or "votes") for each candidate was then computed. The ten candidates with the ten largest totals filled the vacancies. Objections Contemporary critics of general ticket method of electing the Convention focused on the fact that it gave no recognition of the voter's ranking of the ten candidates which the voter selected; 'We gave as much weight', Spence observed, "for the tenth man for whom we did not care, as for the first for whom we did".William Coleman,Their Fiery Cross of Union. A Retelling of the Creation of the Australian Federation, 1889-1914, Connor Court, Queensland, 2021, p.400. T.R. Ashworth, leader of the Victorian section of the Australian Free Trade and Liberal Association, reinforced this critique by noting that the fact that a voter could not validly select fewer than ten candidates could produce a perverse result: "supporters of the defeated candidates voted for some on the successful list who defeated their own favourites".T.R. Ashworth and H.P.C. Ashworth,Proportional Representation Applied to Party Government, G. Robertson, Melbourne, 1900, p.178 Curiously, there was less contemporary objection to the commonplace violation by general ticket voting of the democratic sentiment that the successful candidates in any multi-candidate election should approximately reflect the range of opinion amongst voters. Experience has shown general ticket voting can grossly over-reward the largest single segment of opinion in the electorate, and a simple example of 100 voters deciding 10 vacancies brings this out: if 51 voters select candidates A through J, and the remaining 49 voters select candidates K through T, then the "position type" of the 51 voters wins all ten vacancies. The operation of this phenomenon was evident enough in Victoria in 1897. Thus the candidates sponsored by both the Age and the Trades Hall won only 41 per cent of the votes, but 70 percent of the vacancies. Correspondingly, the candidates sponsored by the Argus, but not by the Age, won 24.7 percent of the vote, but none of the vacancies.William Coleman,Their Fiery Cross of Union. A Retelling of the Creation of the Australian Federation, 1889-1914, Connor Court, Queensland, 2021, p.140. Similar results occurred in South Australia and New South Wales. Campaign The campaigns were brief, there being less than two weeks, in South Australia for example, between the close of nominations and the elections. Candidates ran as individuals, and only loosely co-operated with one another. But newspapers, pressure groups, and the nascent Labor party (or Trades Hall) promoted 'lists', 'bunches' or 'tickets' of the ten candidates they favoured. These tended to reflect political divisions of the day. In Victoria the most prominent sponsors of such tickets were the protectionist Age, the free-trade Argus, and the Trades Hall. In South Australia the most prominent were the Liberal Union (protectionist), the Australian National League (free trade inclined) and Labor. In New South Wales Labor also ran a ticket, but the most influential tickets were United Protestant (organised by Church of England and Methodist clergy), and Orange (organised by the Loyal Orange Lodge). These tickets were precipitated by the candidacy of Cardinal Francis Moran, the Catholic Bishop of Sydney, who insisted he was standing only in an individual capacity, but who, declaimed the Rev. George McInnes, was "no true citizen of this country, no true subject of Her Majesty".William Coleman,Their Fiery Cross of Union. A Retelling of the Creation of the Australian Federation, 1889-1914, Connor Court, Queensland, 2021, p.142. Tickets appear to have been distinctly influential, except in Tasmania where 'tickets', according to the press, 'as a rule were held cheap' .William Coleman,Their Fiery Cross of Union. A Retelling of the Creation of the Australian Federation, 1889-1914, Connor Court, Queensland, 2021, p.141. Results Direct elections The table records the votes of the forty successful candidates in the colonies where delegates were directly elected: + Votes received by successful candidatesColin Hughes and B.D. Graham,Voting for the Australian House of Representatives, 1901 to 1964, Australian National University, Canberra, 1974. New South Wales votes Victoria votes South Australia votes Tasmania votesEdmund Barton98,540George Turner84,048Charles Kingston24,682Philip Fysh5,439George Reid84,678John Quick72,352Frederick Holder24,320Edward Braddon5,219Joseph Carruthers82,758Alfred Deakin62,654John Cockburn23,095Henry Dobson4,491William McMillan79 866Alexander Peacock61,941Richard Baker22,003John Henry4,264William Lyne75,402Isaac Isaacs56,981John Gordon21,958Elliott Lewis3,598James Brunker72,036William Trenwith55,693Josiah Symon21,281Nicholas Brown3,578Richard O'Connor69,217Graham Berry52,664John Downer20,426Charles Grant3,534Joseph P. Abbott60,691Simon Fraser49,886Patrick Glynn20,390Adye Douglas3,522James T. Walker54,248William Zeal48,119James Howe19,741William Moore3,399Bernhard Wise53,325H. B. Higgins44,105Vaiben Louis Solomon18,463Matthew Clarke3,300Remaining candidates667,959Remaining candidates402,643Remaining candidates197,498Remaining candidates36,071 Indirect elections In Western Australia, a parliamentary vote was held on 13 March 1897 to elect delegates to the Convention, with Premier John Forrest stating it would be impractical and costly to hold a direct vote due to the colony's large size and remoteness of population centres. A total of 32 nominations were received, with one being disqualified for an irregular nomination and George Throssell withdrawing his nomination. There was no requirement for nominees to be members of parliament, but 21 of the 32 candidates were sitting MPs and another five were either former MPs or candidates at the 1897 general election. Each member of the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council was to select ten delegates. Of the 54 members of parliament, 47 voted in the election with one MP lodging an informal vote.Geoffrey Bolton The Western Australians: A silent majority The New Federalist 57-62 1 http://murdoch.edu.au/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/The-Western-Australians-A-silent-majority/991005544826507891 1998 Candidate Votes Percentage John Forrest 45 97.8% James Lee Steere 43 93.5% George Leake 40 87.0% Frederick Piesse 38 82.6% Winthrop Hackett 37 80.4% William Loton 33 71.7% Walter James 30 65.2% Albert Hassell 27 58.7% Robert Sholl 23 50.0% John Howard Taylor 17 37.0% Loton, Piesse, Sholl and Taylor resigned from the delegation after the Adelaide session of the Convention. A second parliamentary vote was held on 26 August 1897, with Harry Venn, Henry Briggs, Frederick Crowder and Andrew Henning elected as replacement delegates. Aftermath H.B. Higgins, of the Age ticket, who won the tenth spot in Victoria, wrote to the eleventh-placed Henry Wrixon, of the Argus ticket, expressing his commiserations at Wrixon's failure. All successful candidates were duly sworn in at the first session of the Convention, which commenced proceedings on 22 March 1897. References Category:1897 elections in Australia Australia Federation of Australia Australia