wages, and even in providing—at the government’s request—work for the
unemployed in a time of recession.
That Australia was a leader in providing free and compulsory and secular
education was partly a result of the ultra-democratic parliaments. Victoria
passed thefirst of these reforms in 1872, when it was the most populous
Australian colony, and NSW soon copied Victoria. The steady move away
from government subsidy for fee-paying denominational schools, towards
the total governmentfinancing of free secular schools, was, in effect, the
nationalizing of the largest sector of the education system in every colony.
Only the Catholics objected emphatically. Henceforth, until the 1960s, they
paid for their own primary schools—afinancial burden for those numerous
Catholic families who stood near the bottom of the income ladder.
The ultra-democratic parliaments—especially in NSW, Victoria, and South
Australia—affected economic and social life in other ways, whether spectacu-
larly or quietly. Even before 1900 they initiated the compulsory arbitration of
industrial disputes; they initiated the setting of a minimum wage in certain
industries; they permitted shorter working hours in certain major industries;
and they tended to favour the small landholder at the expense of the large.
They provided fertile ground for the rise of trade unions, and for the rise of a
Labor Party which became perhaps thefirst in the world to hold the reins of
government. Labor held office for one week in the colony of Queensland in
1899 and won itsfirst, if brief, federal term in 1904; thefirst national Labor
government anywhere. Here was a triumph in exceptionalism.
2.8 After the Panic
Australia, from 1851 to 1890, passed through an exceptional phase of achieve-
ment. Then came depression and an unpredicted era of economic setbacks.
It has been customary to view Australia’s depression of the 1890s as essen-
tially the effect of the speculative boom and the economic hysteria of the late
1880s. Without doubt, the‘property bubble’of the 1880s and the cracks
already visible in the banking system were dangerous and ultimately dam-
aging (Maddock 2015, pp. 272–4). Add to these weaknesses the global decline
in the prices of wool, the country’s main export. These, however, were not the
cause. The depression was made deeper by the liquidity crisis of 1893 and the
absence, in every Australian colony, of that mechanism available in London,
Washington, Vienna, and many other capital cities for speedily halting a run
on the banks. The mechanism was simply to declare that bank notes were
temporarily the legal tender. Through overconfidence, however, the various
Australian banking laws had no such provision.
Geoffrey Blainey