Secretary of Interior—advocated compulsory voting. The rightful emphasis on
the Progressivist attraction to compulsory voting provides a hypothesis as to
why Australia introduced it and stuck with it: Progressivism never ended in
Australia. The‘up and doing’spirit; the belief that a‘common good’was
making its claims upon all at every point of life; and, above all, the‘triumph
of centralizing national consciousness over regional, state, and local identities’
(Milkis and Mileur 1999)—these phenomena are characteristic of both Ameri-
can Progressivism and Australian‘Deakinism’. But they had more stick in
Australia, and did not readily wilt in the aftermath of the First World War.
In Australia there was no debunking version of the war; no retreat from the
world; no spurning of the League of Nations; no halt to the expansion of the
central state; and prominent Progressivistfigures—such as George Swinburne,
Tom Bavin, G. S. Beeby, and Herbert Brookes (a‘devoted follower’of Alfred
Deakin, and stalwart of a Nationalist Party committed to compulsory
voting)—all continued to wend their way through the post-war world. The
fresh political talent, S. M. Bruce, seemed in quite their mould.^17
This continuity of‘Australian Progressivism’is seen in the minister respon-
sible for the introduction of compulsory voting, George Foster Pearce, whose
quarter-century-long ministerial career began with defence in 1908, and
ended with external affairs in 1937. His parliamentary activity also included
the advocacy of voting machines, and the launching of the Council for
Scientific and Industrial Research, in which he maintained an‘unflagged
interest’. In 1909 Pearce had overseen the introduction of compulsory military
training:‘Compulsory education, compulsory arbitration, compulsory mili-
tary service he had long believed were compatible with and, indeed, essential
to, democracy.’^18 And so compulsory voting.
Such a reliance on ideological stance to explain compulsory voting does beg
the question of how an unideological public could be reconciled to such an
impingement of their prerogatives.
One explanation would be that‘compulsory voting’isn’t actually compul-
sory. Free and easy Australia has never been reconciled with compulsory civic
virtue. So thefine for not voting is, at the federal level, less than the price of a
(^17) Clearly there was some shift in outlook in post-war Australia. Thus, Labor discarded a heavily
Progressivist mantle for a socialism of its own conception, and an obdurate Higgins could only
resign from the Arbitration Court after it had been reshaped by its former partisans.‘The belief in
human perfectibility died a glorious death in Alfred Deakin’, sighed Eggleston (quoted in Osmond
1985, p. 51). Yet the pages of hisReflectionsreveal how Eggleston kept the faith in the old creed,
both in specific articles (e.g. irrigation) and the general (e.g. the‘scientific approach’to social
problems). Tellingly, despite his complete frustration in dealing with a system of lawyer-
determined wage rates, Eggleston vaunts H. B. Higgins for establishing as imperative a‘logical
criteria 18 ’for determining wage rates (Eggleston 1953, p. 63).
‘Government could produce a near perfect electoral roll, and it could complete the job by
engineering a near perfect turnout. Government could do anything—even make apathetic men
and women into citizens’(Hirst 2002, p. 323).
William O. Coleman