In Search of Good Government

by Laura Tingle

  Phillip’s colony contained neither a governing class nor a group of land-owners. It comprised a governor with autocratic powers, his administration, such as it was – military officers doing things in a military fashion – and a labour force, which hardly saw itself as part of a commonweal. The First Fleet marine Watkin Tench described in his journal what we may call the new colony’s first institutions of government. The bureaucracy of the governor and commander-in-chief included a judge of the Admiralty Court and judge advocate of the settlement, a surveyor-general and a commissary of stores and provisions. There was also the military establishment – the ships of the fleet and four companies of marines.

  In the absence of the institutions of their home society, Phillip – and his successors up to Lachlan Macquarie – made up the rules by which the colony worked, not only for the convicts, who were their direct charges, but also for the increasing numbers of emancipists and, later, free immigrants. These were rules of justice and land entitlement, working hours and individual freedoms. The governor and his establishment ran everything and provided everything in the colony. Being at the mercy of the governor, and ultimately of the English monarch, put all the groups of the new community on a similar footing.

  These days the popular view of our earliest society remains one of downtrodden convicts being lashed and manacled in chain gangs under the control of tyrannical soldier guards. Yet the picture painted by historian John Hirst is much more complex. Hirst argues that perceptions of the colony of New South Wales were heavily influenced by its role as a pawn in political battles of ideas in Britain, including those fought on the abolition of slavery and prison reform. The colonists spent a good deal of the time and effort they dedicated to politics challenging these perceptions abroad – because they had such an influence on their rights and the future of the colony – rather than thinking about where they were headed at home. The political debates that mattered were the ones that took place in Westminster, and they were reported, belatedly, at length in the Australian papers.

  The advocates of abolition in England went to some lengths to portray the colony as a slave society. It is true that convict labour was forced labour: conditions were harsh in penal colonies such as Port Arthur and Norfolk Island. But for the majority of the convicts, in Sydney, their experience was built much more on the power relationships that flowed from an unquenchable demand for labour. “The masters of New South Wales had to struggle hard to get these people to work at all and it was they who forced the masters to settle for something much less than having good servants,” Hirst notes in Convict Society and Its Enemies. Even in the first couple of years of the colony, when it faced starvation, most of the convicts did not assist by working the land properly:

  They seemed totally irresponsible; they would rather consume rations from the store and live in idleness than work in the fields, and yet without more crops the store would soon be exhausted … This madness of a penal colony at the Antipodes was not of the convicts’ choosing. They could reckon that before Phillip and the officers would allow themselves or the convicts to starve something would be done. As indeed it was – the Sirius was sent to the Cape of Good Hope for supplies; to reduce the number of mouths to be fed some of the convicts were sent to Norfolk Island; fishing parties were instituted; the Supply sailed for Batavia. Not if they could help it, would the convicts be the settlers of Australia.

  The power of labour to set its terms, right back in those earliest days, saw official hours of employment set down, then rapidly restructured to account for the fact that overseers couldn’t keep convicts at their work all day. Convicts were allowed to earn private income when not at their government labours, so they had a particular incentive to get away from these as fast as possible. The basis of payment quickly became taskwork – finishing a job – rather than hours worked. Equally, convicts felt enough power to insist on being fed wheat rather than maize. Even on Norfolk Island, convicts refused to eat the potatoes they were given. These developments show how a significant part of the population quickly made pragmatic judgments about governance: what it would provide, and what they in turn must do, or not do, for themselves.

  Like so much of what happened in the new colony, the adoption of taskwork as the basis for pay – which would entrench a series of presumptions about labour and its rights – happened without any planning. But like a lot of the other rights the colonists gradually acquired, it also happened without much of a fight.

  The early malaise of the penal colony began to be transformed – socially and economically – by a class of enterprising emancipated convicts, who saw the opportunities open to them in a country where all the land and all the influence had not already been claimed. As we have seen, there was education for their children. The convicts, emancipists and eventually free immigrants also found themselves with rights they would not have possessed in England. An employer could not arbitrarily flog a convict worker (such things had to be approved by a court). Tench has described that convicts had the legal right to sue for damages, ignoring English laws under which convicts were unable to be witnesses, to bring actions or to own property. The press, as it developed, was freer than in England. The early twentieth-century historian Marion Phillips, in her book A Colonial Autocracy, described the colony’s military government as a curious and anomalous system of autocracy working through the forms of civil law.

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  So “Australia” started as an uncommon mixture of absolute power in government, held by a governor acting for an absent ruler, and pragmatic arrangements reached, and powers claimed, by a population that carried the negotiating clout of rare labour in a place where there was so much to be done. It wasn’t until Lachlan Macquarie arrived as governor in 1810 that the colony found itself under an autocrat (the last) who made a concerted effort to create some serious, permanent infrastructure and to look with fresh eyes at a society that was no longer just a penal settlement.

  Macquarie restructured the administration and better organised some local sources of revenue that could supplement the funding from England. There were duties on the coal and timber trade from Newcastle, liquor licences and court fines, cattle-slaughtering dues, as well as the net profits of goods sold through the public store. The money from a police fund was used to build a jail, wharves, bridges and roads, and to pay a growing group of public servants. An orphan fund paid for the various charity schools. In a more creative form of private–public partnership, the governor allowed three businessmen to build a hospital, partly out of the profits of a rum monopoly. He also oversaw the establishment of a proper local currency. Within a few years of Macquarie’s departure, the colony would be financially self-sufficient.

  Macquarie, like his predecessors, governed with doubtful constitutional authority, and by the time he arrived, the governor’s position was under pressure both in the colony, where the locals were demanding a representative and accountable system of government, and in England, where the raison d’être of the penal settlement was being questioned.

  Despite restoring order and bringing considerable improvement to the colony, Macquarie was perhaps the first leader about whom Australians grizzled for doing both too much and too little. Having dispensed with the unpleasantness of the Rum Corps rebellion, he found himself in a society where tensions between the emancipists and others had built to the point of real conflict. Twenty-two years after the arrival of Phillip and the First Fleet, people were trying desperately to establish a social pecking order, a class system of their very own. This was a task made difficult by the fact that such a large proportion of the populace were emancipists – and wealthy emancipists, what’s more – whom both the military and free immigrants sought to exclude from “society.” To Macquarie’s credit he recognised the very different nature of this society and that people accustomed to the social order of England would need to adapt to one where wealthy didn’t necessarily mean of gentle stock and ex-convict didn’t mean social outcast. He invited former convicts to f
unctions at Government House. Politically, he backed the cause of emancipist lawyers against the military and judicial establishment.

  In 1819, the explorer, and later politician, William Charles Wentworth wrote his Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of New South Wales, with the ostensible aim of attracting potential settlers to the colony, instead of other prospects such as the United States and Canada. However, Wentworth, the son of a convict mother and a father with connections to the aristocracy at a time when lineage was important, also had a bigger cause in mind. Wentworth’s father, D’Arcy, was a central figure in Macquarie’s administration, and the son goes out of his way to praise the governor’s contributions (“Never was there a more humane and upright man”). He fumes nonetheless that:

  dignified feeling cannot exist in any society which is subject to the arbitrary will of an individual; and although the governor of this colony does not exactly possess the unlimited authority of an eastern despot, since he may be ultimately made accountable to his sovereign and the laws, for the abuse of the power delegated to him, I may be allowed to ask, should he invade the property, and violate the personal liberty of those whom he ought to govern with justice and impartiality, where are the oppressed to seek for retribution?

  He alludes to “outrages” carried out by governors, “of which the bare recital would fill the minds of a British jury with the liveliest sentiments of compassion and sympathy for the oppressed.” Wentworth called for the colony to have its own elected assembly with wide powers. Emancipists should be allowed to vote, he argued, but the right to vote should be based on property holdings. He wanted trial by jury, no taxation without parliamentary approval and free migration. Such reforms would help the colony rise “from the abject state of poverty, slavery, and degradation, to which she is so fast sinking, and to present her a constitution, which may gradually conduct her to freedom, prosperity, and happiness.”

  The importance of 1819 is that it marks the beginning of years of incremental change in our governance, questions of its legitimacy, and dissatisfaction with our leaders and politicians. The Bigge Commission of Inquiry, initiated in the same year, led to the 1823 New South Wales Act passing through parliament in England. The Act changed the central and autocratic power of the governor by establishing a legislative council, proper court system and the capacity to challenge the governor’s decisions. It also heralded a change in the way the colony perceived itself, and was perceived elsewhere, and saw the emergence of political leaders and advocates.

  Over the next twenty years, the governor’s powers were gradually eroded further, as “non-official” members of the legislative council were appointed, representing landed and wealthy interests. Simultaneously the colony started passing its own laws on everything from how the postal system worked to how money was collected for various services, and how government officials behaved. Many of our institutions became firmly entrenched, such as tax collectors, the police force, hospitals and schools.

  The development of a polity was an incremental, piecemeal process. Transportation of convicts to New South Wales effectively ended in 1840. Around this time there was a push for male suffrage based on property holdings. But this was opposed by free immigrants, because the property law not only didn’t keep former convicts from voting – many of them had now become wealthy landowners – but also excluded poorer free immigrants. The battle became largely irrelevant, however, with the gold rush, which began in 1851. Consequent inflation made the property qualification, which had been set on English prices, worthless. The rush also had as large a transformative effect on the population as anything that had come before it – and with no rules set down by governors or nascent parliaments to stop it.

  In 1858, an Electoral Reform Act abolished the property requirement and gave the right to vote – and to vote in secret – to almost every adult male in New South Wales. This included most workers, such as the miners who had flocked to the colonies for the gold rush. The franchise became wide by accident and, as a result, there was a change in the nature of our politicians that set the scene for a long history of contempt.

  The rapid move to democracy, Hirst argues in The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy, saw the rich find it hard to get elected and they “were forced to retreat to the upper houses”:

  Poor men of little education replaced them. Members heaped vulgar abuse on each other and some were only in parliament to benefit themselves.

  Parliamentarians still dressed as gentlemen and hoped to be treated as gentlemen, but now there was an implosion: no-one believed that parliamentarians were gentlemen …

  Rich and educated people now regarded politicians as a low class bunch of incompetents. They made fun of those who could not speak or write properly, who had done lowly work before they became MPs and who had wives who could never be accepted into good society. If a rich and well-educated man did get into parliament, he was always apologizing for keeping such low company. It did give him a lot of good stories to shock and amuse his friends.

  These very ordinary politicians had been elected by the votes of ordinary people. Their votes gave them the opportunity to show that they did not want parliamentarians to be just the rich and the well-educated. They elected parliamentarians who could not look down on them and whom they did not have to look up to. But they had not got rid of the idea that parliament was a place they should be able to respect. By their votes they had produced parliaments that they too despised.

  Does this sound familiar?

  There are individual politicians in our history whom we have come to respect, or at least regard affectionately. But Hirst shows us that the roots of our longstanding contempt for politicians is not just part of a recent worldwide trend:

  A vicious cycle had set in. Parliament was despised, but voters continued to elect men who kept its reputation low.

  In recent years, it is said, the reputation of politicians has fallen. If this is true, the change has been very small compared to the catastrophic collapse that can be dated precisely to the introduction of democracy in the 1850s …

  So these are the inauspicious beginnings: a democracy ashamed to speak its name run by politicians who are held in contempt.

  The speed with which we became a democracy was dazzling. It occurred over decades rather than centuries, given the absence of long-held titles to land that in England had brought with them instant entrées to political power and influence. We gloried in our prosperity and good fortune. We glorified our economic gain and physical hard work. But we fought relatively little for rights, since so many of these came as part of our British inheritance. The sort of rights that would be fought for, such as those that led to the establishment of the labour movement towards the end of the nineteenth century, occurred after many of our democratic structures had been settled.

  During the 1850s, gold exports suddenly exceeded the wool trade, which had shaped the economic development of the colonies up until that time. As the former Reserve Bank deputy governor Ric Battellino noted in a February 2010 speech, at its peak in 1852 gold mining comprised 35 per cent of GDP (compared with less than 6 per cent for mining today). “This created tremendous upheavals in the economy at the time … Labour flowed strongly to the gold states, particularly Victoria, and Melbourne became the largest city in Australia,” he said. The population shifts were extraordinary. Immigration trebled the national population in ten years. Yet the demand for labour meant wages still rose sharply: between 1850 and 1853, wages in Victoria rose 250 per cent.

  The massive expansion of the population increased the demands on young colonial governments for services. The colonies were not sufficiently large to produce individuals wealthy enough to build infrastructure, so it was up to governments to provide roads and, later, railways – at a time when the physical expansion of the country was at its height. Governments became big employers, particularly during the downturns of an economy that shifted violently between growth and contraction with changes in the internation
al demand for wool and gold. Men would commonly march on government buildings demanding work when things were difficult, and politicians would oblige. At the same time, the colonial governments passed legislation to provide free, compulsory and secular elementary education for all children at schools operated by the state, abolishing state funding to the many schools that had been established by religious groups. All this was accomplished without the need for income taxes. While there were import duties and liquor licences, the really big source of revenue was land, and the sale of land seemed to provide an almost unending source of funds.

  The next decades saw the rise of the labour movement and the push for federation, the point at which most people start examining federal politics. But the problem with starting a survey of our politics, governance and institutions in 1901 is that we overlook how much of our governance was already entrenched, which federation would not change. The way we viewed our politicians had been set. White male suffrage had been established, and white women in some colonies had begun to get voting rights. The bureaucracies that delivered many of our government services had been installed. Many of the laws that determined how we lived, our rights, even our rail gauges, had been passed. A strong expectation that governments would ultimately look after us and provide us with work had firmly taken root, along with our cynicism about politicians.

  Mark Twain visited Australia in 1896. His wonderful and sharp observations of Sydney society show how the once all-powerful role of the governor had been hollowed out, yet how we still clung to what he represented – government and authority – as the centre of our world.