Satisfied, Reid resubmitted the question of federation to the people of NSW, with much more satisfactory results. This time, the vote was 107 420 to 82 741 in favour of federation. The people of Victoria were even more overwhelmingly supportive of the proposed constitution, with 152 563 in favour compared with just 9805 against. The people of Queensland were asked for their views for the first time, and they approved of federation by 38 488 votes to 30 996. When the people of Western Australia also approved, by 44 800 votes to 19 691, the federal project was nearing its completion. Turner had played a key role in this, and he deserves to have his name remembered as one of the fathers of federation.
The Kingmaker
Australia’s federal parliamentary democracy got off to a rocky start due to a particularly poor judgement call by Australia’s first governor-general. John Adrian Louis Hope, the seventh earl of Hopetoun, should have known better. Although an English aristocrat, he was no stranger to Australian politics, having been appointed governor of Victoria in 1889, at the age of twenty-nine. He had been an active, popular governor, showing considerable compassion and generosity towards those affected by the bank crashes and depression of the 1890s. Hopetoun was also a politician—in-between his tenures in Australia he had held a relatively minor office in the Salisbury administration in the United Kingdom.
The new governor-general’s first and most important task was to appoint Australia’s first prime minister, in advance of the federal election that would follow. The new prime minister would, in turn, appoint a Cabinet to oversee preparations for the election and to make other early decisions on behalf of the Commonwealth. Although the prime minister might well be replaced by someone who commanded a majority in the House of Representatives after the election, the widely (and correctly) held view was that the incumbent would have a significant advantage and would more than likely be able to continue in office indefinitely.
Hopetoun did not have long to make his decision. He arrived in Sydney on 15 December 1900, and the prime minister and Cabinet were to be sworn in on 1 January 1901, in Sydney’s Centennial Park. Hopetoun wasn’t at his best either. He had come down with a serious stomach ailment during the long sea voyage to take up office, and he was still sick and weak when he arrived in Sydney.
His decision need not have been a hard one. It was widely anticipated that the governor-general would commission the man who had led the constitutional conventions and broader federation movement—the popular NSW politician Edmund Barton. But Barton did not turn out to be Hopetoun’s choice. Instead, after consulting with the chief justice of NSW, Sir Frederick Darley, and the man recently deposed as premier, George Reid, Hopetoun decided to recognise NSW’s primacy as the largest and oldest colony by inviting its current premier, Sir William Lyne, to be the new nation’s first prime minister. Hopetoun’s appointment may have succeeded if a more respected and popular politician than Lyne had been chosen, but as someone who had actively lobbied against federation, Lyne was unlikely to receive support from those who had worked so hard to bring it about. Deakin, for example, was excoriating in his view of Lyne, whom he described as ‘weak and obstinate, stubborn and plastic, cunning but slow … this drab, doleful, monotonous premier’.23
Deakin and Turner would become the two key figures in thwarting the viceroy’s choice of prime minister. The view of the premier of the second-largest colony would be vital in determining whether the premier of the largest would be successful in his quest to become Australia’s first prime minister.
Deakin was in Melbourne anticipating a telegram from Barton with the good news that he had been commissioned as prime minister when a disappointing message reached him. Barton was economical with his words: ‘It is Lyne. I have declined to join him.’24
Barton’s understandable refusal to join the Cabinet meant that it was imperative than Lyne entice enough men of suitable gravitas to join instead. Deakin quickly worked out that Turner would be the key player in this. If Turner agreed to join Lyne’s Cabinet, others would follow suit and Lyne would become a viable prime minister. If Turner refused, however, it would be difficult for Lyne to be regarded as a serious prospect. So Deakin travelled to Turner’s office in the Victorian Parliament and told him that Barton had been passed over. He got the response from Turner he was hoping for, noting that the premier ‘had agreed not to join’.25
Deakin replied to Barton on 19 December:
My dear Barton,
Your telegram upsets our house of cards. Who would have believed that Hopetoun would make such a blunder? To choose the anti-federalist of New South Wales and the least effective member of the convention in place of yourself … Turner and myself will act together if overtures are made.
Turner and the premier of South Australia, Sir Frederick Holder, subsequently travelled to Sydney to see Lyne in an attempt to dissuade him from accepting Hopetoun’s commission. It was hard going, and Turner cabled Deakin after his first meeting with Lyne to report the lack of progress: ‘So far absolutely unsuccessful.’ But on 23 December there appeared to be a breakthrough. Turner sent Deakin a telegram which simply read: ‘Meet my office morning, highly satisfactory.’26
When they met, Turner gave Deakin an encouraging report, but he then went on to issue a remarkable public statement on behalf of both Holder and himself. Any chance Lyne had of forming an administration was made non-existent by this polite but unmistakeably strong and clear press release:
We went to Sydney at the request of Sir
