"We want no paternal Government to tell us what we ought to hear, do or say; we want no paternal press to decide for us what we would not like to hear, and what consequently we had better not hear. Where the people is the governing power, it must, like all other governing powers, occasionally hear what it does not like. We are not children to be coaxed and managed, but men and women fit to think and judge for ourselves."

- Catherine Helen Spence, September 1895

Catherine Helen Spence 1825 - 1910
Writer, Teacher, Social & Political Reformer

"I maintained that the fundamental necessity of a democratic Constitution such as we hoped would evolve from the combined efforts of the ablest men in the Australian States was a just system of representation; and it was as the advocate of effective voting that
I took my stand.

...We (The Women's Land Reform League in SA) foresaw, and prophesied what has actually occurred--the
monopoly of representation by one party in the Senate, and the consequent disfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters throughout the Commonwealth."
CHS 1897 Autobiography p80-81