Chapter XXII: Political Party in Australia

Although the Constitution says no word about political parties, the fact that it contemplates a party system is written over it in bold characters. The sages of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 neither intended nor expected that the scheme they devised would fall into the hands of parties. Indeed they had a touching faith, dispelled as soon as Washington retired from the scene, that the electors who were to be chosen to elect the President would select the best man in the nation irrespective of his political ties. The Swiss, strange as it may seem to men of English or Anglo-American race, have succeeded in keeping their Executive, elected though it is by the Chambers, out of party politics altogether, nor do parties dominate the legislature and colour the public life of the nation as in America and England. But Government of the English ‘Cabinet type’ is essentially party Government, that is to say, it has been so hitherto both in England and wherever else it has been tried, and no one has yet shown how it can be made to work otherwise.

In America the great parties are younger than the Constitution, which may be said to have created them. In England they are older than Cabinet Government proper, being practically contemporaneous in their rise with that very rudimentary form of the Cabinet which began to emerge in the time of King Charles II. In Australia every colony has had such active and skilfully-organized parties that no one doubts but what the Federal Legislature will find its first Ministry forthwith provided with a competent Opposition. It is generally believed that the tariff will furnish the first, and for some time the main, ground of party division, for the new Government must begin by providing itself with an adequate revenue; the chief part of that revenue must be raised by indirect taxation, and the issue of Free Trade _versus_ Protection has for years past been a burning one in the largest Colonies.

I have observed that the Australian scheme contemplates a party system to work it. But what sort of a party system? Obviously one in which there are two parties only, each cohesive, each prepared to replace its antagonist in the Executive. Such was the party system of England till the present generation. Such has been the party system of the United States. Exceptions indeed there have been, such as the Know-Nothing party in 1852, the Greenback party in 1876, the Populist party which arose in 1889, and is not quite extinct now (February 1901). In the United States the power of the two great organizations is so vast, and the cost of creating a new party so deterrent, that a third organization seldom appears, and if it appears, presently disappears. But in France there have been and are several parliamentary groups, which frequently change their attitude towards one another, sometimes combining to support a Ministry, sometimes falling asunder and leaving it to perish, because one group alone was not sufficient to sustain it. Hence the lives of Cabinets have been short, and would have been still shorter but for the fact that an imminent peril to republican government itself has sometimes compelled the various republican groups to hold together. In Britain the same difficulty became acute from 1880 onwards, as the Irish Nationalists consolidated themselves in a distinct Third Party; and it may at any moment create serious embarrassment. It exists in Germany also, and in the Reichsrath of the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Now in several of the Australian Colonial Parliaments a Labour party has recently arisen, which, keeping itself independent of the two older parties, can throw its weight on one or the other side and endanger the stability of Cabinets. Should this phenomenon reappear in the Parliament of the Commonwealth, it will complicate still further a position which the co-ordinate powers of Senate and House make complicated enough already[233].

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Footnote 233:

Since these lines were written, the phenomenon has reappeared, for at
the first elections, held in the spring of 1901, of the Senate and
House, the Labour party obtained more than one-fifth of the seats in
each House.

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