Thank you to the University for the opportunity to give the inaugural Barton Lecture.

While more than 100 years separate us, as the Members for Hunter, Sir Edmund and I share a common bond.

I think it’s appropriate to consider what Barton might make of the Australian political scene today. Barton fought very hard for a Commonwealth of Australia. Of course there were many players and many advocates dating right back to the 1840’s, at the time that Canada united it’s provinces with the sanction and support of the British Colonial Office.

But it took time and much persuasion. The initial persuasion required was here at home. The six states needed to agree on a basis for a Commonwealth constitution and the 1891 and 1897 convention delegates were from a varied range of backgrounds and politics.

The same arguments that prevail today, carried forward to the 1897 convention which Barton was to Chair. Arguments about a fair share of Commonwealth excises and duties and how they are shared among the states. This debate is almost identical to the current arguments about sharing the GST revenues.

Debate about control of the Murray-Darling and the responsibilities of the States versus the Commonwealth. I think Sir Edmund would not be surprised that these issues have continued on for over a century. He dealt with it first hand in several cases as a Justice of the High Court. It would be fair to say Barton must have been a very persuasive politician to achieve what he did in getting all six states to ultimately agree.

One responsibility which was very clear from the outset was the Commonwealth’s role in defence. In November 1900 Barton drew up a list of  legislative priorities of a federal government. Number one on that list was: “An adequate Defence Force”. It is important to remember the enormous job that confronted Barton. In January 1901 there was no parliament, no public service and no Commonwealth infrastructure.

I posit that Barton would be very surprised if he took a stroll around the inner circle of Canberra and walked through the range of government offices, departments and agencies that exist today. I doubt though that he would be surprised that the government doesn’t have control of the Senate, or that we have a Labor government.

He formed the first government with 17 Labor members, but did not have control of the Senate, where George Reid’s supporters outnumbered him 17 to 11.

At the time Barton also had troops fighting on foreign soil. The Boer War in South Africa had ground down into guerrilla warfare. In 1899 Barton fully supported the Australian troops who were volunteering to fight with the British. On forming government the Boer war served as a test of the Commonwealth’s role in the defence arena. In December 1901 when Canada and New Zealand offered to send reinforcements, the Victorian parliament passed a resolution in favour of further recruitment. This was a provocative act that required a stern response from Barton, coming after he had earlier been required to rebuke the Queensland Premier for offering more troops. Barton had to make it very clear that any such action was usurping Commonwealth powers. I don’t think Sir Edmund would be surprised at all that Australian forces are engaged today on several theatres, but he would probably be confused by the enemy and their motivations.

Barton selected as his first Defence Minister Sir James Dickson a man described as “singularly unmilitary” and who, according to one Barton biographer, Geoffrey Bolton, died of “excitement and diabetes” nine days later. This led to Sir John Forrest moving to the defence portfolio. The defence ministry certainly got off to an interesting start with ten different ministers in ten years. In fact, Forrest told parliament that he had taken office with the hope ‘that the Department would not give me a great deal of work or trouble’. According to the Oxford Companion to Australian History: Defence was not a popular issue in the first federal parliament, because of the expense that it represented. The original Defence Act, presented in 1901, was thrown out and was only enacted, in much modified form in 1903. The post-Federation army suffered from a lack of resources and confusion in administration and structure, and became the subject of intense public and parliamentary criticism.

The major problem for Barton in this first parliament was the budget (some things will never change). In 1902 Forrest accompanies Barton to the Imperial conference as defence was, according to correspondence inviting delegates “the prime item on the agenda”. Despite the prevailing mood at the time that the Commonwealth government act as responsible economic managers (another recurrent theme), Forrest got his defence budget through the House of Representatives of nearly £1 million, though only by arguing that he was asking for no more than the pervious combined expenditure of the six States, promising to reduce the figure next year, and leaving it to Sir George Turner to fight for the cuts with the commandant of land forces, while he went of to the Imperial Conference. What would Forrest and Barton think of todays $30 billion defence budget and a commitment to 3% growth per annum?

Barton also had a domestic defence issue running the whole of his parliamentary term. A significant number of Australians and their parliamentarians wanted an Australian Navy. The Commonwealth had inherited a commitment to pay the British Admiralty £106,000 annually towards the upkeep of the Royal Navy squadron in the Pacific, and an increase on this was likely. However, both Barton and Forrest felt the current arrangement to be very cost effective. According to Bolton (2000) Barton’s brief in London therefore was to accept the Admiralty’s request for a subsidy, bargaining as well as he could for the lowest possible sum and exploring the possibility of training a locally controlled naval reserve. The negotiations meant that the Admiralty could send the naval vessels well away from Australia to India or China and still comply with the agreement. This was the real concern, combined with Britain’s alliance with Japan, which many saw as a real threat to Australia, particularly at a time when the White Australia debate and policy approach was dominating parliamentary proceedings. In return the Admiralty promised to provide vessels for training 700 men and 25 officers as a branch of the Royal Naval Reserve. The Australian subsidy was fixed at £200,000. Barton arrived back in Australia 16 October 1902, with the political reality that he had to sell the naval agreement to both his colleagues and the public. He defended the agreement as estimates indicated that it would cost £2.5 million to build and £1 million per annum to operate, even the modest navy proposed. On 7 July 1903 the Naval agreement passed both Houses despite some fairly robust debate on the establishment of an independent Australian Navy. This debate continued after Barton moved to High Court leading to the establishment of an Australian Navy. The British fleet was completely replaced in 1913.

Barton, whilst having a relatively short tenure as Prime Minister, maintained a strong interest in defence issues. When the war started in 1914 he argued strongly that Australian officers should play a significant role in the shaping of military policy and deployment, particularly with respect to Australian forces. This view was shortly confirmed by Gallipoli. This underlying belief that Australians could and should be responsible for their own destiny is clearly displayed in Barton’s view of the Australian High Court.  Also, when the Labor party split over conscription it has been suggested that the idea of a referendum came from Justices Barton and Griffith.

Barton’s major task was to form the machinery of government. While defence was a key role of the new commonwealth, he was very constrained by the economics of defence, particularly when he needed to focus on national infrastructure. Barton adopted the most economic approach, which was to maintain the existing arrangements with Britain, in this he really had no choice. I suggest that if Barton had access to the resource base we have today, he would have moved quickly to create and operate a national defence force and moved fairly quickly to sever at least the control of Australian military activity held by Britain at the time. If this had happened, I believe Gallipoli and the Western Front would have been a very different story for the ANZACS.

Before I move forward 100 years to talk about current issues shaping our defence policy, I would like to refer to a case Barton dealt with on the High Court, which is a bit closer to home, and reinforces that many issues have continued to repeat through the century. In August 1912 it was seen as a victory for conservatism when Griffith, Barton and O’Connor overturned a judgement by Isaacs convicting the coal vend – an alliance of coal and shipping companies in the Newcastle district of NSW – of forming an illegal monopoly; the court found insufficient evidence that the Coal Vend had been motivated by a desire to act against the public interest, under the 1906 legislation.

Turning now to the issues that confront the current Defence Minister, who unlike Forrest, is keen for the portfolio to keep me very busy.