Outline

In 2006 New South Wales will celebrate 150 years of responsible government. The Government has appointed a committee to undertake and fund scholarly research on the passage of those years.

The project is not only a commemoration of the culminating enactments which took effect in 1856. The broad aim is to examine the consequences of the creation of a bicameral legislature, a Cabinet drawn from the Parliament and requiring the confidence of the Legislative Assembly, then to continue our work through all the years since as the franchise broadened and the assumptions of government evolved.

The project will obviously concern itself with a history of the NSW Parliament, the institutions the Parliament created and scholarly works of relevance to the history of the political development of this State. It will be a project, in addition, which examines the mechanisms and associations by which the people expressed their representation, the Constitution and the governance of the State.