Constitutional History of Australia - The Commonwealth Is Born

The Commonwealth Is Born

The establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia is commonly taken as the date of Australia's independence from the British, but matters are more complicated than that. The Constitution provided the Commonwealth with all the powers associated with a sovereign state, including the power to engage in foreign affairs and to raise its own army. But the United Kingdom still retained the power to engage in foreign affairs on behalf of Australia, and to make laws for it. In the early years Australia continued to be represented by the United Kingdom as part of the British Empire at international conferences.

The Constitution provided that the British monarch be represented in Australia by a Governor-General, who was originally appointed on the advice of the British, not the Australian, government, and was generally a British aristocrat. Finally, the Constitution provided that any law of the Australian Parliament could be disallowed within a year by the British monarch (acting on the advice of British ministers), though this power was never in fact exercised. In summary, the constitutional position of the Commonwealth as a whole in relation to the United Kingdom was, originally, the same as that of the individual colonies before Federation.