Sir John Quick Lecture 2024

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

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 Sir John 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.

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