A radical legacy
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 19: Re-imagining Australia
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Geoff Gallop
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Like all great speeches, the Tenterfield Oration delivered on October 24, 1889 – the most significant speech in Australian history – was a call to action, a call to the Australian people to achieve by peace what the Americans had achieved by war. The time had come, Sir Henry Parkes said, for ‘an uprising in this fair land of a goodly fabric of free government' with ‘all great national questions of magnitude affecting the welfare of the colonies' disposed of by ‘a distinct executive and a distinct parliamentary power'.
Parkes was pointing to the need for a national system of government that embodied freedom. He was drawing upon the theories, insights and arguments of the British radical tradition – albeit modified by his experience of hard-edged parliamentary politics. This is the tradition of parliamentary and electoral reform, freedom of association and expression, national self-determination and social equality. From this tradition also emerged the argument for popular sovereignty, democracy and a republic. At a deeper level, the radicals recognised that good political systems weren't just important as means to an end, but were ends in themselves. To put it in contemporary terms, they saw people as ‘citizens' rather than ‘consumers'.
Australian radicalism came from people like Parkes and John Dunmore Lang – two of the most important intellectual founding fathers, who laid the base on which men like Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin and George Reid later built the nation.
When we think of founding fathers, we think of grey-haired, conservative old men who believe that the old ways are always best. Few Australians realise that our founding fathers were followers of, and sometimes proselytisers for, ideas that many of their contemporaries considered positively dangerous.
More than half a century before Federation, Parkes and Lang were calling for an end to transportation and the creation of a free society, federation, responsible parliamentary government with a bicameral legislature, equality of electoral districts and short, fixed parliamentary terms, universal manhood suffrage, a society without a privileged aristocracy or an impoverished working class, public education for all, and – at various times – an Australian republic.
This should sound familiar because, with the addition of votes for women, it is the Australia we gained in 1901 and live in today – enhanced, of course, by innovative social legislation and occasionally radical interpretations of the Constitution by the High Court.
It is important to remember that the time in which the radical social, political and constitutional demands were being formed – the 1840s and early 1850s – was a time of European revolution and political ferment in England. Parkes, Lang and others got their ideas from egalitarian interpretations of the Bible, writings of the American revolutionaries, radical liberals like Jeremy Bentham and British radicals and Chartists – whose ideas conservatives considered seditious and revolutionary; indeed, support for them could lead to transportation.
There were many other important intellectual, social and economic influences on the establishment of Australian democracy, but the founding principles of our democracy were laid in a time of European revolution by men soaked in radical political ideas.
While sharing many constitutional principles, Lang and Parkes were chalk and cheese when it came to their visions of the future. Lang wanted a radical revolution; Parkes – at least in his later years – wanted radical reform to head off even more radical revolution. But the practical effect of their agitation was the same: the establishment of a liberal democracy in the former colony of New South Wales.