Crises, Deadlocks and Dissolutions: A Constitutional and Parliamentary History of Queensland 1859 to 1922 , livre ebook

Crises, Deadlocks and Dissolutions: A Constitutional and Parliamentary History of Queensland 1859 to 1922
Justin Harding
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-11-29
Crises, Deadlocks and Dissolutions: A Constitutional and Parliamentary History of Queensland 1859 to 1922 About The Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgement Foreword Chapter One From Seven Shillings Sixpence to Eleven Pence in the Bob The Bowen Era 1859-1866 Chapter Two Deadlocks and Dissolutions 1867-1874 Chapter Three A Tale of Two Chambers Bicameralism 1860-1885 Chapter Four Prerogative Powers and Parties 1874-1890 Chapter Five Fusions and Fissures 1890-1909 Ideology or Expediency? The Abolition of the Queensland Legislative Council 1915-22 The Passing Show By Oriel Afterword Bibliography
About The Author
Justin Harding was born in Townsville, North Queensland, in 1963. He holds first-class honours and doctoral degrees in political science and constitutional history and has worked as a public servant, academic and policy adviser. Now semi-retired, Dr Harding has an online research, writing and editorial consultancy, and is active in Tasmanian politics. His great loves are dogs, cooking, halfway decent Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, electoral systems and constitutions based on Westminster.
Dedication
For my mother, Margaret Mary Harding. Love you and miss you, Mum. And for my sisters, Kerrie Patricia Tuite, Jennifer Anne Harding, Marisa Valentine Harding and Althea Majella Harding. So often you have been my lifeline into the light.
Copyright Information ©
Justin Harding (2019)
The right of Justin Harding to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788231053 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781788231060 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781528953092 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
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Acknowledgement
The author wishes to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the late Doctor Kett Howard Kennedy; the late Doctor Diane Menghetti; and the staff of the National Library of Australia, the Queensland State Archives, the Queensland State Library – particularly, the John Oxley Library – the James Cook University Library, and the University of Queensland Central Library.
Foreword
Abstract
The history is structured in six chapters with an afterword and bibliography. An essentially chronological approach is used throughout, although this is departed from to a certain extent in Chapter Three which deals with relations between the Houses during the first twenty-five years. Methodologically, I have attempted to combine the rigid case analysis and attention to detail exemplified by Eugene A. Forsey’s The Royal Power of Dissolution in the British Commonwealth , with a more descriptive, narrative approach.
It was originally intended that this work would cover the period from the establishment of Queensland in 1859 to the end of the first term of the Goss ALP Government in 1992. However, the sheer bulk of the primary source material and considerations of a practicable timeframe for completion necessitated that it be truncated with the abolition of the Legislative Council in 1922. In any case, Queensland could hardly be cited as an example of dynamism and innovation in the area of constitutional development over the last 97 years.
The title was chosen advisedly. Readers will not find an exhaustive list of either constitutional statutes or changes to parliamentary Standing Orders, as these are readily obtainable in Bernays’ various works, as well as Hughes and Graham’s A Handbook of Australian Government and Politics 1890-1964 . Rather, this study seeks to examine the application of the vice-regal prerogative, and the dynamics of parliamentary forces which made and unmade Governments, and which eventually unmade the state’s Upper House, the Legislative Council. With the exception of the final chapter, I have made little reference to the external organisations of political parties, mainly because they were largely irrelevant to the subject before 1915, and only slightly more so afterwards.
Aims and Objectives
This is a work of empiricism and revisionism. It has two objectives. The first is to tell the history of relations between the Governor, the Cabinet and the Parliament between 1859 and 1922. The second is to offer new and different interpretations of the more important episodes in Queensland’s constitutional history. It is not intended to draw profound conclusions on the nature of so-called “Westminster” or “responsible” government: legion others have already observed that it tends to produce an elective dictatorship with the Cabinet parasitically sustaining itself on a supine, irrelevant Parliament, and it is pointless to repeat at length what has already been conclusively demonstrated 1 .
The rationale underpinning the work is simple: it has not been done before. Indeed, apart from the histories of C. A. Bernays and Clem Lack – which are in essence anecdotal rather than analytical – much of the scholarship in this field has tended to be of a biographical nature. As such, it is inadequate to a proper understanding of constitutional episodes. Thus, decades after its first publication, D. J. Murphy and R. B. Joyce’s Queensland Political Portraits 2 remains a standard work for students of this period, notwithstanding its many shortcomings.
Research and Sources
Most of the research was conducted at the National Library of Australia, the John Oxley Library and the James Cook University Library. The National Library was chosen in preference to the Queensland State Archives because it possesses one of only two complete collections of Colonial Office material microfilmed by the Australian Joint Copying Project. The layout of this material makes it far easier to deal with, as each despatch from the Governor to the Secretary of State for the Colonies is reproduced with all the other relevant documentation. The various letter books contained in the Queensland State Archives are discrete, and it is necessary to consult several different volumes in order to acquire the facts of one particular case. I have not included a list of abbreviations. All are either explained in parentheses or listed in full in the bibliography. The Courier-Mail , which was the principal newspaper consulted, is referred to throughout simply as the Courier , that being the distinguishing feature of its various titles since 1846 3 .
Every despatch from the Governor to the Colonial Office was examined during the course of the research, as well as every volume of Queensland Hansard from its inception in 1864 through to 1932. Together with parliamentary journals and papers, these form the basis of the material upon which the history rests. Certain private papers were also consulted, including the A. C. V. Melbourne Collection in the Thatcher Library, University of Queensland and the Philp Collection in the John Oxley Library.
The release of Crises, Deadlocks and Dissolutions represents the conclusion of a journey that began in 1992-93 with my honours dissertation, through the doctoral thesis that followed, and several years of agonising and re-writing before finally submitting the work for publication. I thank my publisher, Austin Macauley, for their patience and support, without which this project would never have achieved fruition.
Dr John William Justin Harding BA (Hons) PhD
Launceston,
Tasmania
11 September 2019

The best recent exposition on the subject is David Hamer’s, Can Responsible Government Survive in Australia (Canberra, 1994). ↩︎
Updated and republished as D. J. Murphy, R. B. Joyce and Margaret Bridson Cribb, The Premiers of Queensland (St. Lucia, 1991). ↩︎
The Moreton Bay Courier became The Courier on 14 May 1861, then the Brisbane Courier on 11 April 1864, and finally the Courier-Mail on 28 August 1933 after merging with the Daily-Mail. ↩︎
Chapter One

From Seven Shillings Sixpence to Eleven Pence in the Bob The Bowen Era 1859-1866
At Brisbane on 10 December 1859, with the grand sum of seven and a half shillings in the Colonial Treasury, and amidst “tears of joy and shouts of ‘God Save the Queen’” by proclamation of an Imperial Order in Council and Letters Patent dated 6 June previous, the first Governor of the British Empire’s newest province formally severed the constitutional funiculus umbilicalis connecting the Moreton Bay districts to their parent colony of New South Wales. Having taken the usual oaths of office before the only resident judge, Alfred James Peter Lutwyche (‘robed and in an awful wig’ 1 ), Sir George Ferguson Bowen 2 , late of Oxford by way of the Ionian Islands, informed the assembled throng of four thousand that the nascent polity would bear the appellation ‘Queensland’ as a result of a ‘happy and spontaneous’ determination on the part of Queen Victoria herself 3 . So commenced not only the existence of a separate, self-governing colony north of the Tweed River, but also the eight-year term of an individual who remains, even to this day, the most distinctive occupant of the vice-regal office in the history of parliamentary government in Queensland.
Crown Colony to Responsible Government
Bowen was an interventionist Governor, even by the standard of the times, which presupposed a far more active role for the Crown’s representative than would be considered consistent