This article was originally published by Quadrant Magazine here.
A referendum in which Western Australians vote decisively to leave the Commonwealth would confer democratic legitimacy upon the claim that the people of my state are entitled to determine their own political status. As I note in the just released second edition of my book, Secession by Western Australia, a people who possess the resources, institutions and civic maturity to govern themselves should have the right to decide if they remain indefinitely bound to a federal compact that no longer serves them. It is a question Australia has left unanswered since 1933.
It would not, by magic, erase every Commonwealth law at the moment the votes were counted. But if a constitutional order cannot respond honourably to a people’s clear withdrawal of consent, it has exposed a defect in itself. Such a referendum would settle the fundamental democratic question; negotiation would then concern the terms and orderly implementation of separation, not whether Canberra owns the decision.
This is not a new grievance. It is one of the oldest unresolved questions in Australian public life.
Professor William Coleman, in his foreword to Secession by Western Australia, describes Western Australia’s accession to Federation as “tainted in provenance, illegitimate in process, harmful in consequence, and soon regretted by even its partisans”.[1] That is not mere rhetoric. Western Australia’s delegates to the Australasian Federation Convention were not elected by the people. The Constitution Bill produced by that process was opposed by a majority of Western Australia’s own delegates, and a majority of John Forrest’s ministry was also publicly opposed to it.[2] Western Australia was pressured into a constitutional settlement written principally elsewhere for interests concentrated elsewhere.
The economic harm began almost immediately. Coleman points to the Commonwealth’s Customs Tariff Act 1902, by which Victoria made captive markets of the unindustrialised states, including Western Australia.[3] Even Walter James, once a zealous Federationist, later recalled that Western Australians had been told to trust the honour of the Federal Parliament. “For years past,” he said on the eve of the 1933 referendum, “we have seen how vain that trust has been.”[4]
The sentiment hardened quickly. In 1906 the Western Australian Parliament passed resolutions declaring that Federation had proved detrimental to the best interests of the State. F. C. Monger then introduced a Federation Referendum Bill to put secession to the people. The Bill was introduced in the Legislative Assembly and read a first time; its second reading was moved on November 16, but after adjournment the debate was not resumed, the Moore Government declining to provide time for what the Premier treated as “a question so contentious.”[5] The grievance had not merely appeared by 1906. It had already become sufficiently serious to generate a proposed referendum Bill.
Professor Augusto Zimmermann, also writing in the book’s opening materials, traces the same reluctance. Western Australians feared their economy would be crippled for the benefit of continental neighbours with whom they had little affinity. The colony had generated almost half its revenue from inter-colonial tariffs, and Federation threatened that revenue.[6] Western Australia joined only at the last moment, after pressure from the goldfields and after a special transitional arrangement preserving customs duties for five years.[7] When that protection ended, Western Australia’s fiscal position worsened. A 1921 State committee found that the State’s economic difficulties stemmed largely from federal policy; a Commonwealth Tariff Board later described Western Australia as being on the “road of serfdom” under tariff policy.[8]
The legal structure then compounded the injury. After Engineers in 1920, the High Court’s trajectory enlarged Commonwealth power at the expense of the States. After Victoria v Commonwealth in 1926, section 96 grants could be attached to conditions set by Canberra.[9] Thus Western Australia faced both sides of federal power: revenue removed, grants conditioned.
By 1933 the matter had become irresistible. Western Australia enacted the Secession Referendum Act 1932 and held its referendum on 8 April 1933. The result was decisive: 138,654 to 70,706 in favour of secession, about 68 per cent.[10] Yet the democratic decision was not implemented. The State petitioned the Imperial Parliament, seeking restoration as an independent self-governing colony. The British Parliament refused, not because Western Australia’s grievance was unreal, but because by then Imperial convention treated the matter as one requiring the “clearly expressed wish of the Australian people as a whole”.[11] In plain terms, Western Australians voted to leave; the constitutional machinery of empire and federation provided no practical path.
Almost a century later, the grievance persists. Since the book’s release on 1 March, our own site analytics record more than 18,300 visitors, mostly from Australia, while purchasers of the print and digital editions have been heavily concentrated in Western Australia. That is not proof of majority support for independence. It is proof that the question is not dead.
Why does it endure? Begin with money.
Western Australian Treasury estimates that in 2023–24 Western Australia made a net contribution of $39.022 billion to the Federation — $13,324 per person. New South Wales was the only other net contributor, and Western Australia’s per-capita contribution was nineteen times that of New South Wales. Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory were net recipients.[12] Treasury explains that the result is driven by high company and personal income tax derived from Western Australia, the state’s low GST grant share, and the low level of Commonwealth spending in Western Australia on personal benefits and services.[13]
Chapter 4 of the book develops the fiscal point. Western Australia generated nearly $46 billion in general government revenue in 2023 24, underpinned by $239 billion in mineral and petroleum sales, while contributing a net $39 billion to the rest of the country.[14] The Commonwealth, meanwhile, derived about $112 billion from Western Australia and spent about $73 billion for the State’s benefit.[15] These are estimates, and the methodology is not perfectly transparent. But they are the best official numbers presently available, and they reveal the scale of the imbalance.
Nor is the problem confined to GST. The Commonwealth has become a fiscal machine of enormous appetite. The book’s introduction describes Canberra as a distant power that treats Western Australia as a quarry and cash cow, while the major parties alternate in control of a federal apparatus increasingly remote from local consent.[16] It points to fiscal bloat and mounting debt, a resource regime that has allowed vast oil and gas wealth to flow with surprisingly little permanent national benefit, energy and housing pressures in a State rich in both land and resources, the collateral harms of centralised COVID-era governance, and the absence in the Commonwealth Constitution of the modern safeguards needed against party capture, executive overreach and resource extraction.[17]
One need not accept every phrase of that indictment to accept the core proposition. Western Australia has a rational, enduring and evidence-based grievance. It produces at world scale. It transfers at national scale. It receives comparatively little control over the use of its own wealth.
The legal landscape has also shifted since 1933. Then, Western Australia still looked to Westminster. Zimmermann notes that the State’s government chose the Imperial petition route because Australian constitutional amendment required a national double majority unlikely to be achieved and because Western Australians did not wish to sever ties with the United Kingdom.[18] That path closed decisively with the Australia Act 1986. No Act of the United Kingdom Parliament now extends to Australia, the Commonwealth, a State or a Territory as part of Australian law. Any resolution must be Australian.
Chapter 2 of the second edition therefore frames the question differently. A referendum would not be a polite request. It would confer democratic legitimacy upon the claim that Western Australians are entitled to determine their own political status. The “right to secede” is used in a defined sense: the democratic and constituent entitlement of a people who have clearly withdrawn consent to continued union. That does not assume the referendum is legally self executing. It denies the opposite error: that because the existing machinery is difficult, no right can exist.[19]
Western Australia’s position is distinctive. It is not named in the Preamble to the Commonwealth Constitution. It acceded after the other colonies had agreed to unite, through Covering Clause 3. Covering Clause 6 defines the States as those colonies “as for the time being are parts of the Commonwealth”. Those words do not prescribe withdrawal. But neither do they declare perpetual membership. The operative text contains no express prohibition on secession.[20]
The Canadian Supreme Court’s Secession Reference supplies the closest modern analogue. It held that a clear majority on a clear question would confer legitimacy upon Quebec’s demand for secession and impose an obligation upon the rest of Canada to acknowledge and negotiate in accordance with democracy, federalism, constitutionalism, the rule of law and minority rights. The case is not binding in Australia, but its central insight is powerful: a federation cannot invoke constitutional form to remain indifferent to a constituent people’s clear decision that they no longer wish to remain within it.[21]
International law should not be overstated. No international court has yet declared a general right for every region within a democratic State to secede unilaterally. But neither has international law resolved the modern question presented by Western Australia: whether a mature, geographically distinct, institutionally capable people may be compelled indefinitely to remain in a union after a decisive vote to leave, particularly where that union continues to divert a substantial share of the wealth generated in that territory. The decolonisation categories of the twentieth century are not necessarily the final word in a century where exploitation often operates through fiscal and institutional structures rather than formal empire.[22]
History also teaches caution against permanence. Political unions dissolve. Federations fracture. Empires collapse. The United States, Belgium, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Singapore, Bangladesh, Eritrea, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Montenegro, South Sudan and many others each travelled their own path to sovereignty. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia broke into multiple States. The decolonisation era remade the map of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.[23] Even now, Alberta’s independence question is not theoretical: Elections Alberta has reported that a citizen initiative petition relating to Alberta independence met the statutory signature requirement, though further steps remain subject to court proceedings.[24]
Western Australia would not be historically unique. It would be unusual only if, after all its history and endowment, it never again asked the question seriously.
Secession, however, cannot be only a legal argument. A people contemplating independence must show what independence will provide. That is why much of Secession by Western Australia is not about escape, but construction. Chapter 3 proposes a near-zero income-tax nation funded principally through a 20 per cent Universal Royalty Rate on resource sales. On FY2024 figures, that rate would yield just under $48 billion — more than Western Australia’s present general government revenue and well above present State expenses.[25] But the book does not pretend that this alone completes the fiscal task of nationhood. Chapter 4 treats the URR as the cornerstone of a broader fiscal model, since an independent Western Australia would also need to assume responsibilities now carried by the Commonwealth, including social security, defence and external affairs. The proposed answer is a leaner State, abolition of income tax, company tax, payroll tax and many federal imposts, supplemented where necessary by limited, non-distortionary revenue measures such as a reformed GST (WA) and land-value charge.[26]
The same vision includes constitutional rebirth: smaller government by constitutional design; resource sovereignty; strong anti-corruption institutions; enforceable rights; medical freedom; and the freedom to rebuild health and education systems around citizens rather than bureaucracies.[27] That is the deeper promise. Independence is not nostalgia. It is the rare chance to learn from a century of mistakes and build institutions fitted to the present age.
Australians often speak warmly of self-determination, democracy and consent. But do we mean those ideas, or merely admire them at a distance? Western Australians have petitioned. They have waited. They have watched Canberra grow larger, more indebted and more dependent upon money raised from elsewhere. Common sense now points back to the question our predecessors asked too soon after Federation to be heard, and again in 1933 with overwhelming clarity: who should govern Western Australia?
Institutions are human arrangements. They deserve respect when they serve the people who empower them. They require restructuring when they cease to do so. Federation may have served the eastern colonies well. It has not served Western Australia on equal terms. Worse, the Commonwealth now threatens the quality of life of Australians generally by outgrowing its own fiscal legitimacy. Put more sharply, a political arrangement that lives by extracting from its most productive limb eventually endangers the patient.
Western Australia is better endowed than any other State to show a different path. It has the resources, the people, the ports, the energy, the trading relationships and the civic confidence to govern itself. The question is whether it still has the self-respect to test that proposition democratically.
The closing line of the revised Chapter 2 states the point plainly: “No doctrine should be permitted to reduce popular sovereignty to a principle invoked only when the people choose to remain within institutions they have decisively chosen to leave.”
Secession by Western Australia is now in its second edition, with a substantially refined Chapter 2 examining Western Australia’s constitutional and legal pathway to independence. The full digital edition is available free, with paperback and hardcover editions also available, at www.secessionwabook.shop.
References
[1] William Coleman, ‘Tainted, Illegitimate, Harmful (and Soon Regretted): The Accession of Western Australia to the 1901 Federation’, Foreword to Secession by Western Australia. Coleman states that his sources for quotations and quantitative statements are in William Coleman, Their Fiery Cross of Union: A Retelling of the Creation of the Australian Federation, 1889–1914 (Connor Court, 2021) 160, 218, 256–62, 271, 306–7, 423.
[2] Coleman, above n 1.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, quoting West Australian (6 April 1933).
[5] Western Australia, Parliamentary Debates, Sixth Parliament, Second Session, vol XXX, Index, 1906, “Federation and its Results” and “Federation Referendum Bill”; The West Australian (Perth), 17 October 1906, “West Australia and ‘Secession’”, Trove; The West Australian (Perth), 19 October 1906, “Secession: Mr Monger’s Little Bill”, Trove; The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney), 10 December 1906, “Racial Purity”, section “Secession Referendum”, Trove.
[6] Augusto Zimmermann, ‘Secession by Western Australia: Is it Constitutionally Possible?’, Foreword to Secession by Western Australia, citing T Musgrave, ‘The Western Australian Secessionist Movement’ (2003) 3 Macquarie Law Journal 95; A Shaw, The Story of Australia (Faber and Faber, 1961) 195; Commonwealth Constitution s 92.
[7] Zimmermann, above n 6, citing C Besant, ‘Two Nations, Two Destinies: A Reflection on the Significance of the Western Australian Secessionist Movement to Australia, Canada, and the British Empire’ (1990) 20 University of Western Australian Law Review 209, 226.
[8] Zimmermann, above n 6.
[9] Zimmermann, above n 6, citing Amalgamated Society of Engineers v Adelaide Steamship Co Ltd (1920) 28 CLR 129 and Victoria v Commonwealth (1926) 38 CLR 399.
[10] Zimmermann, above n 6.
[11] Zimmermann, above n 6, citing H G P Colebatch, Steadfast Knight: A Life of Sir Hal Colebatch (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2004) 174; Musgrave, above n 6, 120–22.
[12] Government of Western Australia, 2025–26 Budget: Economic and Fiscal Outlook, Budget Paper No 3, Appendix 11.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Secession by Western Australia, ch 4, ‘Fiscal Feasibility In Independent Western Australia’.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Secession by Western Australia, Introduction.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Zimmermann, above n 6.
[19] Secession by Western Australia, ch 2, ‘The Case for Secession: The Law’.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Reference re Secession of Quebec [1998] 2 SCR 217; Secession by Western Australia, ch 2.
[22] Secession by Western Australia, ch 2.
[23] Julian Gillespie, ‘History Shows Nations Leave Unions’, Secession by Western Australia (Substack, 14 April 2026).
[24] Elections Alberta, ‘Citizen Initiative Petition Verification Completed, Results Announced’ (24 July 2026).
[25] Secession by Western Australia, ch 3, ‘Hello, New Western Australia’; ch 4, ‘Fiscal Feasibility In Independent Western Australia’.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Secession by Western Australia, Introduction; ch 15, ‘A New Nation’s Constitution’.
