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The Select Committees of the New South Wales Legislative Council 1824-1856

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PARLIAMENT OF NEW SOUTH WALES Parliamentary Library ________________________________________ New South Wales Legislative Council 1824-1856 The Select Committees Compiled by R F Doust New South Wales Legislative Council 1824-1856 The Select Committees Compiled by R F Doust NEW SOUTH WALES PARLIAMENTARY LIBRARY New South Wales Parliamentary Library cataloguing-in-publication data: New South Wales. Parliament. Legislative Council New South Wales Legislative Council, 1824-1856: the select committees,.compiled by R.F. Doust. – [Partially revised edition published in electronic format, Sydney, N.S.W: NSW Parliamentary Library November 2011] ISBN 978 0 7313 1883 4 I. New South Wales. Parliament. Legislative Council. I. Title. II. Doust, R.F. (Russell Fletcher) III. New South Wales. Parliamentary Library. Note: Previously published in three parts--- Part I 1824-1843, Part II 1844-1848, Part III 1849-1856 © R F Doust 2011 The Select Committees of the New South Wales Legislative Council 1824-1856 The Select Committees is a work which identifies and describes the many committees of inquiry appointed by the first Legislative Council of the Colony of New South Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century. From the arrival of the first fleet bringing convicts to the Colony of New South Wales in 1788, supreme power was vested until 1824 in the Governor, acting in accordance with instructions from the Imperial Government in London. The first Legislative Council of New South Wales, appointed by His Majesty to advise the Governor, and consisting of five officials employed by the Crown, met for the first time on 24 August 1824. It had as a primary role the scrutiny of legislative measures proposed by the Governor. The Council was reconstituted in December 1825 with four government officials and three non-official members, and again in July 1829 with the Governor, seven government officials and seven non-officials, all appointed by the Crown. By 1843 the Council had 36 members, 12 nominated by the Crown and 24 elected by the wealthier inhabitants of the Colony. In 1851 the number was increased to 54, 36 elected and 18 nominated members. ―Responsible government‖, a bicameral Parliament consisting of a lower house called the Legislative Assembly, elected on the same limited franchise as the old Legislative Council, and a new Legislative Council, was introduced in 1856. The electoral divisions for the Assembly still represented interests rather than population and favoured the wealthy squatters; the members of the Council were all appointed by the Governor. The long-awaited bicameral Parliament was opened on 22 May 1856. It was, of course, inevitable, that a number of matters which had concerned the 1855 Council in its last days could not be reported on until the new Parliament was in session. An example is the request of the (then still extant) first Council, on 13 December 1855, for ―A Return describing the Contents of the Receiving Room Iron Chest, in the Colonial Treasury…‖ That Return was made to a Board of Inquiry, appointed by the Governor General, which was not able to report until the following year, 1856, (and to the new Legislative Assembly, not to the new Legislative Council). As for the relationship between the first Council and the Legislative Council of 1856, David Clune and Gareth Griffith write in Decision and Deliberation (Sydney, Federation Press, 2005) ―The post-1856 Council, constituted as an Upper House in a parliamentary system founded on responsible government, is legally distinct from its pre-1856 namesake. What they share is a name and an evolving, if not common, legal identity. The institutional successor to the pre-1856 Legislative Council is the supreme authority that replaced it—the NSW Parliament itself. Symbolically, it was the Assembly that inherited the old Council building. It was also the Assembly that seamlessly assumed many of the practices and traditions of the old pre-1856 Council, while the Upper House was starting anew in its role as a House of safeguard and review.‖ For further information on the first Legislative Council and its successors see New South Wales. Parliament: The Legislative Council of New South Wales [Sydney. Government Printer. 1 [1972?]; for a more extended account see C H Currey, The Legislative Council of New South Wales, 1843-1943, in Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society vol. 29 part 6, 1943. Although major reports of Committees and the Minutes of Evidence taken before them were ordered to be printed (and most survive), in many instances there is no printed report (and probably never was). Where a Report, often with Minutes of Evidence, was printed the entry in The Select Committees indicates where it may be found. Users should be aware that in some of the volumes in some (but by no means all) of the various sets of the printed consolidated volumes of the Votes and Proceedings from 1837-1855 in libraries in Australia, page numbers have been added by hand. However, in the present work the entries use the convention ‗1849/4‘, where 1849 is the year of the Session, and ‗4‘ is the sitting day according to its sequential numbering, or when there were two Sessions in a year ‗1851(2)/21‘ where ‗1851‘ is the year of the Session, ‗(2)‘ the second Session of the year and ‗21‘ the sitting day. Should it be thought that the Index might have been more useful had it included page numbers, it should be noted that the printed volumes were put together by the binder in a prescribed order (printed at the beginning of the volume), but the page numbers were never printed: some volumes have page numbers written in by hand, many others do not. That there must have been a master set with hand numbered pages is obvious, since the volumes for later years have printed indexes with page numbers (often with somewhat curious subject terminology); but unless a volume does have hand written-in page numbers this is of very limited use. If there is a printed index at the beginning of the volume and if the pagination happens to have been inserted, the user is in luck. If, not the approximate location (‗X appears after A and before C‘) will help to find the item, but bear in mind that the order in which Committee Reports and Minutes of Evidence, and other papers ordered to be printed such as correspondence, despatches, returns, petitions etc are bound after printing is certainly not alphabetical and often not apparently either logical or chronological. The Select Committees identifies each Committee by reference to the sitting day when it was appointed, and endeavours, where necessary, to explain the background to the matter. The terms of reference of each Committee; the membership of the Committee; the witnesses heard in evidence, and where known, their place in the local society and the relevance of their expertise as recorded in the Minutes of Evidence, are given. The conclusions reached by each Committee as shown in its Report are summarized, as is the action then taken by the Council if known. Again, caution should be exercised: the mere fact that a Committee Report was endorsed by the Council does not necessarily mean that the proposed action actually happened. [For an example of this see 1855/24, Report on the Management of the Botanic Gardens, where the Governor General declined to take the advice of the Council.] Users of this work should note that on a number of occasions the Council decided that instead of referring a matter to a Committee, it resolved to consider it sitting as a Committee of the Whole House. This could ensure (at least in theory) a quicker resolution. When the Council sat in Committee the normal rules of debate did not apply: for instance, a member could be heard more than once in a debate. No Reports of the Committees of the Whole were printed since all Members were (or should have been) present and therefore did not need to have a printed record of what a Select Committee had already considered, nor on the whole were there witnesses, or if there were they were heard at the Bar of the House by all Members present. 2 This work covers only the period from the first Council in 1824 up to its end in 1856. From 1856 onwards the Committees of the New South Wales Parliament are noted in Dietrich Borchardt‘s Checklist (Borchardt, D H. Checklist of Royal Commissions, Select Committees of Parliament and Boards of Inquiry Part IV New South Wales. Melbourne, La Trobe University, 1975). Lists of Committees since 1999 of both Houses of the New South Wales Parliament are on the Parliament‘s website, and for at least some of them the actual Reports can be downloaded. I should add that although all reasonable care has been exercised in the compilation of The Select Committees I am all too well aware that there may be errors, for which I take responsibility. My occasional comments about the Committees are mine alone, and users of the work are urged to go back to the original documents as may seem desirable. A particularly observant user may notice some changes in style which inevitably arose from the fact that the entire work was done over about seven years. Access to the Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council from its inception in 1824 to the end of that first Council in 1856 has now been greatly facilitated by the online publication by the Parliament (on its web-site) of scanned copies in PDF format. By their very nature the PDF files are slow to load, and cannot be copied or searched.
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