Australia’s independence ought to be dated to 11 December 1931, when the Statute of Westminster took effect, finally devolving legislative power to the country as well as the sister dominions of Canada, the Irish Free State, New Zealand, and South Africa. Diplomatic sovereignty had been granted in 1923, followed by the 1926 and 1930 release of executive powers (i.e., disallowance, reservation, annulment of the Colonial Laws Validity Act) and the assignment of governors-general as responsible to national ministries. Notwithstanding continuing anomalies, the substance of facts make 1930 sufficient.

1901’s federation established the potential for independence but not its lawful basis. Though newly united, Australia hadn’t fully separated from the United Kingdom; the states remained bound to the crown; and the governor general remained responsible to the king, in the tradition of English government as the sovereign’s government.

The transition was driven by Canada, Ireland, and South Africa, running contrary to the Australian political will and transpiring with little public appreciation. Four elements fueled interest in imperial continuity: defense, race (culture), economy (loans from London), and status (British hegemony). Neither the Canadians nor the South Africans depended on British security; both the Canadians and the Irish (given the same status in the 1921 agreement) objected to their inability to amend their own constitutions; the Irish rejected personal union under the king. Whereas through the 1920s, Aussie leaders tended to be born in the UK. Only the New Zealanders sided with Australia on defense; but the British had been withdrawing from the ‘far East’ since before World War I, save for the 1923 construction of Singapore’s naval base. There was no practical means of international cooperation within the Commonwealth because there was no prior imperial body, only Whitehall.

At the 1923 imperial conference the UK determined to allow the dominions to make international treaties: paradoxically, external affairs preceded domestic matters. Executive independence emerged from the 1926 conference, as a political bargain between the ‘radical’ dominions which aimed to appease domestic nationalists and the UK’s wish for equivocation on the crown’s role and the continuing projection of imperial unity. The Balfour formulation established that: ‘[The Dominions] are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations’. (p. 93) The radicals then focused on autonomy, the Australians on common allegiance. (Newfoundland was also a dominion but too small to wield influence.)

By 1929/30, disallowance and reservation of dominion legislation as well as Colonial Laws Validity Act were to be jettisoned; but the Canadians and the Irish technically had to ask the UK to revise their constitutions, so the Westminster statute was promulgated. The Australians insisted on proactively adopting the statute, and delayed doing so: opposition party leader John Latham provoked the states to protest to UK on the spurious grounds of Canberra’s intrusion into their matters. Then James Scullin’s Labor government fell, and though Robert Menzies proposed adopting Westminster in 1935 and 1936, it wasn’t established until 1942 under John Curtin, largely to facilitate the trans-shipment of war material, there being no public pressure nor motivation for politicians. The states didn’t sever from the UK until the 1986 Australia Act.