When the political leaders of the Australian colonies turned their minds to nation-building in the latter half of the nineteenth century, there was little doubt that a union of the colonies would have to be federal in form. The reasons for this were both practical and philosophical.

On the practical side, the colonies had enjoyed the benefits of local self-government and representative institutions since the 1850s. Having recently acquired such powers, local politicians and voters were not about to acquiesce in the loss of those rights to a consolidated national government. Samuel Griffith, then premier of the colony of Queensland, observed that the Australian colonies had been ‘accustomed for so long to self-government’ that they had ‘become practically almost sovereign states, a great deal more sovereign states, though not in name, than the separate States of America’. Josiah Symon, a prominent South Australian delegate to the federal convention of 1897‘8, similarly asserted: ‘We all represent what are really sovereign states – sovereign states in essence, if not in form.’

In this context, the formation of a unitary nation-state was neither possible nor thinkable. As Griffith put it, the ‘essential’ and ‘preliminary’ condition of federation would be that: