her good friend, Caroline Emily Clark, was a niece of Thomas Rowland Hill.
But her principles in the decade she embarked on her cause were also conson-
ant with the individualist underpinning of Hare’s case. She derided the radical
Berry government in Victoria, opposed paying salaries to members of parlia-
ment, and, like Hare, was against the secret ballot. Her 1861Plea for Pure
Democracy: Mr. Hare’s Reform Bill Applied to South Australiapresented Hare’s
scheme as‘a means of ensuring representation of minorities by men of virtue,
learning and intelligence’(Eade 1976). Consistent with this posture, the
only immediate attraction in Australia to PR was shown by the (appointed)
Upper House of NSW.^9 The Lower House—newly elected on universal male
suffrage—rebuffed the Upper House’s attempt to introduce the discordant
notes of a minority into the chorus of the majority.
The man of‘virtue, learning and intelligence’who actually brought PR to
Australia was Andrew Inglis Clark (1848–1907). Clark was also, like Hill and
Spence, of a Dissenting background. In 1874 he complained in a journal of
ideas he edited that the‘representation of minorities is...totally unknown in
Tasmania’(Clark 1874a, p. 71). In a later issue he declared the need for
parliaments to be a‘reflex of opinion’—an obvious echo of Hill—and advo-
cates Hare’s scheme (Clark 1874b, p. 249). But such thoughts seem to have
then lain dormant for two decades until quickened by American Progressiv-
ism, with which Clark keenly sympathized. In 1890, he visited the USA,‘saw
much of the leading“progressives”...and for the rest of his life maintained a
correspondence with these leaders of advanced liberal thought’, especially
Oliver Wendell Holmes (Reynolds 1958, p. 62). Clark was forging these ties
just as PR was beginning to chime with Progressive schemes of electoral
reform that targeted the political machines that throve on mass franchises.
Thus, in 1896, John R. Commons, also raised in a Dissenting household,
declared in his book,Proportional Representation, that‘The decay of represen-
tative bodies has come about through universal suffrage’(Commons 1896,
p. 318). In 1896, Clark, after repeated attempts,finally secured the establish-
ment of the Hare system as the method for electing the Tasmanian Legislative
Assembly. Sadly, its introduction revealed that not all minorities are elevated:
a disgraced politician managed to scrape a quota by exploiting the patriotic
flurry of the Boer War, and the scheme was temporarily abandoned in dismay.
But it was soon revived, and has remained in place ever since.
PR in Australia presents this puzzle: how could an electoral scheme of such
an anti-majoritarian timbre ever take root in such a collectivist culture? Cul-
ture, it seems, was less important than chance: since it was chance that threw
up circumstances that conferred on one party an at least passing advantage
(^9) See Sir Roger Therry’sReminiscences(1863) for one forceful advocacy of PR as a remedy for
democracy.
Australia’s Electoral Idiosyncrasies