Advantages Of Australian Federation

During the 1850s, an idea of uniting Australia as one and forming a federation slowly emerged into the society. Many different opinions came up and at first but the idea didn’t appeal to many leading for it to be abandoned and left untouched for years. The communication and transport between nations was put behind the interests of the people as each colony thought that their own interests were more important and should be placed first. In the 1880’s though, people starting to give some serious thought on the idea of combining the nations that made up of Australia at that time and thoughts such as an uniform law system started to break the surfaces. On January 1st 1901, Federation was finally achieved and Australia was truly united as one.

Many believed that if Australia was to achieve an united defence force, then Australia would be better protected from the invaders. In the pacific, Russia was there, parts of New Guinea was also occupied by Germany, these surrounding forces surrounding Australia made them feel that Australia would be the next place that was going to be invaded and taken over by. Although each separate colony had their own defences, whether it be the army or the navy, there was no plan to unite altogether if Australia was ever under attack. Soon they began to realise that just by the colonies themselves, their powers were no where near powerful enough to protect the whole of the Australian coastline. The British Navy was employed to patrol Australian waters, but after all they were still not Australian and doubts were still held against them. A unified nation meant that there were better prepared to deal with matters of foreign policy, but also when New Guinea was claimed by Germany, Australia feared that they would be next to be claimed by the Germans. People believed that if Australia became unified sooner instead of the six colonies then New Guinea could have been claimed Australia. Other than the concern of foreign attack, the presence non-white immigrants in Australia also pushed people to support Federation. All of the colonies were keen to united in order to

People believed that the new parliament would be costly to set up to it would be too expensive, making taxes higher for the people. Others were only fond of people in their own colonies and not of others from a different colony. Similarly, people from smaller colonies were afraid that states such as New South Wales and Victoria would take over their trade relations and affect their trading routes. On the other side New South Wales and Victoria were also worried that if Australia was to become one then they would be burdened by the financial problems of the smaller colonies. Although some believed that Federation would help keep the non-white immigrants out of Australia, others believed that if Australia were to be united then the law would become looser on the non-white immigrants and it would allow more of them into Australia. People also became worried that when Australia was to be united then Melbourne would become the capital city of the Federation. As many different opinions of Federation was around the place, many figures of parliament also stepped in to express their view. Alfred Deakin who was Victorian Parliamentarian, supported Federation very much and was also the leader in his colony to convince others to support Federation as much as he did. Similarly, Maybanke Wolstenholme, one of the rare women who was involved in Federation also strongly supported Federation as she