FOR AND AGAINST: Different Views
Extra Document 4

On the grounds of Constitution
Albert Bathurst Piddington was a liberal who in 1920 was to chair the Royal Commission that recommended a 25% increase in the basic wage to give workers a 'living wage'. The full amount he recommended was not actually paid, but he was praised for establishing the principle that men ought to be able to earn enough to support themselves and a family.

REJECT THIS PRESENT BILL

I shall oppose the Bill, because a year's reflection has only made me more convinced that this is a measure which makes majority rule forever impossible in Australia. It denies to Australians the birthright of all men of British birth – the power of the purse. It puts heavy and needless burdens of taxation on the shoulders of those least able to bear them. It carries within it the germs of financial chaos and bitter heart-burnings between State and State in the demoralising scramble for the Federal surplus. It breathes the very spirit of provincialism and sets up a mockery of true nationhood. It makes responsible government impossible because it gives the Government two masters – the House and the Senate. As the final stroke of injustice to all Australians yet born and yet to be born, it denies to us the fundamental privilege of all free people, the right by majority vote to amend our Constitution according to our needs whenever, like every other human instrument, its faults become visible in the onward march of time ... We opponents of the Bill ask only that by its rejection the ground may be left clear for the wisdom and patriotism of Australians, starting next time from the bedrock of equal political rights, to set up a solid and safe edifice of government with room enough, air enough and light enough in it to be the impregnable fortress and the cherished home of Australian freedom ... It is by rejecting this present Bill that Australia will be free from the tyranny of a tight little oligarchy of senatorial grandees, based on the idea of a "States' rights" aristocracy, to block the will of the Australian nation.

A. B. Piddington speaking at a meeting at Tamworth re the Commonwealth Bill emerging from the 1899 Premiers' Conference. Tamworth Observer, New South Wales, 17 June 1899, in L. F. Crisp, Federation Prophets without Honour, pp. 23-4, cited in Raymond Evans et al., 1901 Our Future's Past, Macmillan, Sydney, 1997, p. 160.