A majority of the framers accepted that the autonomy and equality of the colonies was an unavoidable presupposition of Australian federation. Some, like Alfred Deakin and John Quick, saw it as a necessary concession, others as a normative principle, but they agreed that it meant that the states must be equally represented in one house of the Federal Parliament. It was only a minority of rigorous nationalists, such as H. B. Higgins, who started from the premise that the federation must be founded upon the ‘sovereign people’ of the entire nation and concluded that representation in both houses should be in proportion to population.

These basic perspectives led to diverging conclusions when it came to defining the structure of the federal government in more precise terms. As has been seen, if nationalists could not compromise the principle of equal representation in the Senate, they sought to qualify its powers – as a dictate of both national democracy and responsible government.