Australia Felix: Jeremy Bentham and Australian colonial democracy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jeremy Bentham considered that society should be ordered on the idea of the greatest happiness.From this foundation, he devised a democratic political system.Drawing on others' ideas, this included: the secret ballot; payment of members of parliament; equal electoral districts; one person one vote; universal adult male and female franchise; and annual elections.It also included: a single parliamentary chamber; law made by legislation, including codification of the common law; a strong but highly accountable executive; peaceful change; and eventual colonial independence.Bentham inspired several generations of radical reformers.Many of these reformers took an interest in the colonies as fields for political experiment and as cradles for democracy.Several played a direct role in implementing democratic reform in the colonies.They occupied influential positions in Australia and in London.They sought peaceful change, and looked towards the eventual independence of the colonies.This thesis traces the influence of Bentham, and those who followed his ideas, on democratic reform in the Australian colonies.It also examines the Benthamite input into the 1838 Charter in Britain, and relationships between the Charter and subsequent reform in Australia.The thesis notes ideas implemented in Australia that emerged from the experiences of other colonies, especially Canada.The Wakefield land and emigration system, and responsible government for the colonies, both saw their genesis in the Canadian experience, and both were theorised or taken up as causes by people who were members of the Benthamite circle. Some general observations on Australian histories and BenthamAustralian histories tend to refer to the Benthamite influence in Australia in a patchwork fashion.Bentham and his followers had a role in the development of Australian law, liberalism, democracy, economics, the anti-transportation campaign, the rum rebellion, education and colonial policy generally.Bentham's followers held high places in British government, in Australian governments, in the public service, and in legal office.Despite this, writings drawing attention to the Benthamite connection to Australian democratic and legal development are scattered and usually brief.Moreover, recognition of Bentham and his followers' role in Australian history is usually confined to the specialist journal or the technical book.Bentham rarely enters into the pages of more general histories.His role is almost entirely unknown to the Australian reading public.Where he does appear it is not unusual to have his and his followers' influence minimised or viewed negatively.This seems extraordinary ifCollins is correct and Australia can be cast as a Benthamite society.Gascoigne goes some way in providing an answer as to why Bentham's influence might have been largely overlooked.He points out that during the twentieth century 'the themes of British and European influence which had once so dominated the subject were, for a time, overshadowed'. 10 This overshadowing was in reaction to an excessively Anglocentric view of Australian history, but, he suggests, an examination of these themes and influences was now on the rise again.Gascoigne points to works
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it