What was george reid famous for

His 3, received votes were more than the eminent sitting Premier, Henry Parkes , who also contested and was re-elected to East Sydney. Upon his election, Reid reportedly declared that:. His almost 20 years of service in the New South Wales Parliament included roles as Minister for Public Instruction — , Treasurer and Premier — , and a short time as Attorney-General in Even as Leader of the Opposition no additional allowance was provided, and so he was frequently absent from parliament in order to attend to his legal practice.

George Reid was prime minister for 10 months and 17 days. Reid attended school at the Melbourne Academy later called Scotch College. In he obtained a position as assistant accountant at the Colonial Treasury, where he worked for the next 14 years. Reid studied law while working and became a barrister in Reid was also a leading advocate of free trade, opposing federation at the time of the first Federal Convention in March , believing it would force New South Wales to surrender its free trade policies.

Reid married Flora Brumby in , and they had three children. Having switched to the King electorate, Reid led the Free Trade group to electoral victory on 17 July He then served as both Premier and Treasurer for the next five years. Having reconsidered his views on Federation, in August he suggested the formation of a second Federal Convention to other colonial premiers. In January the premiers met in Adelaide and decided to conduct a second Federal Convention.

Beginning in , the second Federal Convention met three times and completed drafting a federal constitution in On 3—4 June referenda in South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria returned votes in favour of accepting the constitution, but in New South Wales the majority was insufficient for acceptance.

From 29 January to 3 February Reid convened a meeting of premiers which negotiated six amendments to the draft constitution to make it acceptable to New South Wales.

Today, we celebrate the fact the Australian economy has enjoyed 27 consecutive years of economic growth — a record which no other nation has managed to achieve. The consensus of leading commentators is this is the legacy of the Keating reforms. And so it may be. But the Keating reforms themselves were — whether Keating knew it or not — the legacy of the economic philosophies of Sir George Reid. Far from being the caricature which so many poorly informed Australian historians and political scientists had made of Reid, as an arch-conservative out of step with his times, with the passage of the years and the discrediting of Deakinite economic philosophies we now recognise Reid as a man ahead of his time.

It was Reid, not Deakin, who was the true custodian of economic liberalism and, in that sense, a truer custodian of Gladstonian liberal values. However, it took three-quarters of a century for economic liberalism to assert itself as both the conventional wisdom of economists and the dominant philosophy of the Liberal Party — just as it took all that time for Sydney to overtake Melbourne as the heartland of the Australian economy — and of Australian liberalism. So, in addition to his many achievements as a colonial legislator, politician and diplomat, we should acknowledge, in particular, Sir George Reid's importance as a thinker: as Australia's most important early champion of economic liberalism and, in that sense, the progenitor of the ideas — once controversial, indeed disregarded; now conventional, indeed canonical — upon which modern Australia's prosperity is based.

Skip to navigation Skip to content Skip to footer Help using this website - Accessibility statement. Opinion Print article. Sep 16, — This, however, only had the effect of uniting the party more solidly behind him.

His real problem lay with the Legislative Council which mutilated several important measures, including a coal mines regulation bill. The council became increasingly hostile to the government's direct taxation bills, intended to reform colonial finances, and in June provoked a constitutional crisis by rejecting the land and income tax assessment bill.

Reid went to the country on a programme which included Upper House reform as well as affirmation of the rejected financial proposals. Parkes, who challenged him in Sydney-King, a new single-member constituency, was heavily defeated; Reid was confirmed in his control of the assembly. Nine new council appointments which he then obtained from the acting-governor in no sense involved 'swamping'; they confirmed his determination to get his finance bills passed but, by their modest number, invoked co-operation rather than confrontation between the Houses.

When the council persisted in its obstruction he finally threatened to ask for more nominations, and with some minor amendments the bills went through. By the end of Reid had revolutionized the colony's fiscal arrangements.

By he secured a series of other reforms including a long overdue Public Service Act Satisfied with the substance of victory, and in the face of strong opposition, he relinquished his proposals to reconstruct the council. Some conservative free traders, including McMillan, were inclined to be critical, particularly of his financial management, while Labor doctrinaires were offended by his compromises on details to secure essentials.

In the long run such attitudes were to erode his position, but in five years as premier he accomplished more than any of his predecessors.

Perhaps Reid's greatest, and certainly his most misunderstood and controversial, achievement was in the cause of Federation. At the end of he steered through the Australian Federation Enabling Act he had undertaken at the Hobart conference to introduce; he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Queensland to join in the movement; and he was elected second of the ten New South Wales delegates to the Australasian Federal Convention which met in Adelaide in March But, though he chaired the convention's finance committee, and though he brought back from London, where he attended the Diamond Jubilee celebrations and the Colonial Conference, the Colonial Office's confidential views on the draft constitution, he saw himself less as a 'founding father' than as an advocate of his own colony's interests and of a more democratic instrument than the draft.

He worked indefatigably for these ends but left the third and final Melbourne session in March profoundly disappointed. The powers over money bills given to a Senate with equal rather than population-based State representation, combined with the provisions for the resolution of deadlocks—particularly the need for a three-fifths majority to carry a bill at a joint sitting—to his mind fell short of the democratic ideal; he saw the finance clauses as likely to impose unfair burdens on New South Wales, and some of the trade and commerce provisions as equally burdensome.

Reid was in a dilemma. He recognized the inevitability of Federation, and his prominence in the movement since would make outright opposition to ratification of the Constitution seem like a betrayal. At Sydney Town Hall on 28 March, in a speech later repeated in substance at three country centres, he detailed his objections. He did not ask his hearers to vote against ratification but rather urged them to judge for themselves.

He himself could not 'become a deserter from the cause': he would vote for it. The result of the 'Yes-No speech' was arguably to give Australia a better Constitution. The bill failed to get the necessary minimum affirmative vote in New South Wales though it was adopted in the other colonies. After the July election in which the referendum issues were refought, Reid persuaded the premiers to undertake further negotiations.

These resulted in substantial amendments, notably removal of the three-fifths majority clause and the placing of a time limit on the 'Braddon Clause', the most objectionable of the finance provisions. A second referendum in June ratified the amended bill.

For Reid the affair was disastrous. He won no friends among the many committed opponents of the bill, and only furious condemnation from the Federationists, who attempted to defeat him at the election, Barton even standing against him. Although he won his own seat comfortably, the distortion of party alignments caused by the Federation question had cut his majority heavily.

Reid could now carry on only with Labor support, and was faced by an Opposition, led by Barton, which was determined to destroy him. Moreover, when he unequivocally supported the Constitution bill at the second referendum, a group of anti-billite free traders led by John Fegan was outraged. In this situation some Labor members, notably Billy Hughes and William Holman , concluded that they could get more from the Opposition than from Reid, particularly as he refused to adopt their hard line on the early closing of shops.

The result was a complex and mysterious series of intrigues involving Labor, the Opposition and Fegan's 'party of revenge'. Barton, unacceptable to Labor, stood aside for Sir William Lyne. A pretext for a motion of censure was found in Reid's payment of expenses, in anticipation of parliamentary approval, to John Neild in connexion with his report on old-age pensions, and the government was defeated by a bizarre combination of the Labor Party, protectionists, Federation enthusiasts and die-hard anti-Federation free traders.

Refused a dissolution by the inexperienced, scatter-brained and probably prejudiced governor, Lord Beauchamp , Reid resigned on 13 September As it was widely believed that the premier of New South Wales would be invited to form the first Commonwealth ministry, the motive of at least some of the participants in the intrigue was probably to deprive him of the honour to which his work in giving Australia a viable Constitution richly entitled him of being its first prime minister.

As the logical leader of the Federal Opposition, Reid still was faced with great practical difficulties. Labor was increasing its hold on working-class voters, and his liberal 'middle ground' was now apparently occupied by men whom Barton, with the advantage of the prime ministership, was able to gather round him.

Reid found much of his support coming from conservatives and, even more embarrassingly, as a consequence of Cardinal Patrick Moran 's growing sympathy for Labor, from militant Protestants like Rev.

William Dill Macky , so that he was unable to avoid any longer the uncongenial entanglements of sectarianism which he had avoided successfully hitherto. In the years which followed Reid committed serious blunders in the handling of this issue. Moreover, though his supporters called themselves the Free Trade Party, there was no practical possibility of basing Federal finances on the policy of free trade and direct taxation he had instituted in New South Wales: the best that could be hoped for was a moderate revenue tariff with a 'free breakfast table'.

Under the circumstances he did remarkably well in the first Federal election, easily winning East Sydney while his party won 26 seats to the government's 33 and Labor's Reid also had a serious personal problem. Consequently he was unable to give much time to his duties as leader of the Opposition. Despite his frequent absences he was, however, quite effective. Dependent though he was on conservative support he remained committed to the liberal philosophy which had underlain his politics from the beginning.

He demonstrated this dramatically in August when he resigned his seat and challenged the government to oppose his re-election on the issue of its refusal to accept a system of equal electoral districts. Before almost anyone else, he predicted that the rise of Labor would radically alter the structure of Australian politics, which would resolve itself into a division between Labor and non-Labor, and he argued that Labor's doctrinaire, 'socialist' views and tight discipline made it an enemy of liberal ideas.

The government, now led by Alfred Deakin , did not yet share this perception.