A central motivation of the framers of the Australian Constitution was the hope that federation might ‘enlarge the powers of self-government of the people’. But for most of them this did not mean that the ‘seat of sovereignty’ was now to rest simply with the people of the entire nation, considered as a whole and without regard to the states into which they were organised. Having recently acquired powers of self-governance, the people of the Australian colonies were not about to acquiesce in the loss of those rights to a consolidated national government. The abiding concern remained one of local self-government, which meant the selfgovernment of each state vis-à-vis the federation, as well as the selfgovernment of the federation vis-à-vis the empire. There was even a hint that it might also mean the self-government of regions and localities within the states.

In strictly legal terms, local self-government did not mean selfconstitution or autochthony. The colonies had derived their legal powers from the empire and the federation would come into being by force of an imperial statute. But just as federation represented an opportunity to enlarge Australian powers of local self-government, it also presented an opportunity to move towards a greater degree of constitutional selfdetermination through the acquisition of local powers of constitutional alteration.