A Living Democracy: How Well Has Australian Democracy Responded to a Changing Society?

Sir John Quick has an honoured place in the history of Australian democracy, arising from his key role in the design, in 1893, of a democratic pathway to the achievement of Federation. He was also co-author, with Robert Garran, of the foundational study of the federal movement and constitution. Yet Quick’s career also reminds us of the racially restrictive features of Australia’s emerging democracy in the nineteenth century.

As a young politician in 1880, he had initiated a bill to restrict the voting rights of Chinese migrants in Victorian elections – ‘a vindictive proceeding’, said the Bendigo Advertiser. This lecture will explore some aspects of the past and present of Australian democracy by examining its double-sidedness as a system designed by and for white British men that nonetheless provided openings for wider participation and influence by marginalised groups. While much has changed since Quick’s time, similar tensions and possibilities remain at the heart of our democracy – a system that ostensibly welcomes wide participation while still imposing formal and informal restrictions that undermine its quality.

This event is followed by networking and refreshments.

Speaker: Professor Frank Bongiorno AM

Frank Bongiorno AM (born in Nhill, Victoria, 1969) is Professor of History at the Australian National University where he was previously Head of the School of History. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University, and formerly Senior Lecturer at King’s College London and Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge. 

His books include The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition 1875-1914 (1996), Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia (2022) and A Little History of the Australian Labor Party (co-authored with Nick Dyrenfurth: second edition, 2024). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Australian Academy of Humanities, and is President of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.