It is important to state at the outset that there is practically no evidence that the fathers of the Australian Commonwealth Constitution had any intention of making the people sovereign through the principle of one person, one vote – and what concern they did show was replaced more and more by a concern for technicalities at each succeeding Constitutional Convention of the 1890s. This reluctance to deal with the problem reflected the absence of a popular movement for Federation here, and the fact that it was finally voted in by a minority of the population.

At the first meeting of delegates at the Australasian Federal Conference in Melbourne in 1890, Sir Henry Parkes, the deus ex machina of the federal movement, noted that: ‘We are asked to decide whether there is such a wave of popular opinion throughout these colonies that it has removed the question [that is, of Federation] from the mere sentimental airiness in which it has existed for some years past and has brought it into the region of practical polities’.