The Royal Commission on the Constitution, 1927–1929

ABSTRACT The Royal Commission on the Constitution (1927–1929) is a little‐remembered event in Australian political, policy and legal history, which produced—in the words of the constitutional law scholar Geoffrey Sawer—‘a useful student's textbook and a minor alteration in the Judiciary Act ’. It came at the end of a turbulent decade in federal relations, which saw a series of inquiries and royal commissions examining the Navigation Act and the federal tariff, as well as the financial disabilities suffered by Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania as result of Federation. Prime Minister S.M. Bruce had hoped the Royal Commission on the Constitution would resolve issues that had bedevilled the Federation since 1901, between the Commonwealth and the states over financial arrangements, and between the more populous and industrialised south‐eastern, mainland states and outlier states about the unequal effects of the Commonwealth tariff. Yet, the composition of the commission meant that its final report mostly replicated existing divisions. The report also suffered from being released just as the Scullin Labor government came to power and the Great Depression began. These circumstances, which saw the Royal Commission on the Constitution ‘sink without a trace’, in the words of the journalist and historian Gavin Souter, have deprived historians of valuable insight into the workings of the Australian Federation during its first three decades. Its 1700 folio‐sized pages of public evidence, the result of extensive consultation, provide unique insight into how the surviving Federationists regarded the system they had designed from the vantage of nearly 30 years. They also reveal contemporary attitudes about how the nation should be governed, from support for a Commonwealth‐provided health service to the belief that the Commonwealth should have a larger role in the determination of policy towards Indigenous Australians. Ultimately, I will argue that the failure of the Royal Commission on the Constitution to resolve ongoing federal tensions combined with the circumstances of the Depression to lead to the Federation's most serious reckoning—the Western Australian secessionist movement of the early 1930s.