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May it please Your Excellency,
We, Her Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, the members of the Legislative Council of New South Wales, in Council assembled, beg respectfully to request that your Excellency will be pleased to communicate to Her Majesty's Government, that this Council is of opinion:
(1). That the erection of Port Phillip into a new province may be effected without any fundamental change in the constitution of this colony.
(2). That the principle that local affairs should be managed by local authorities though obviously true, as between the colonies and the mother country, and as regards the regulation of the affairs of large towns, cannot safely be extended to the relation between the central Government of this colony and its rural districts.
(3). That it is from the utter inability of the rural districts to bear the expenses of District Councils, and not from any desire on the part of the Legislative Council to monopolize all the powers of the colonial state, that the one part of the constitution intended for the colony, has been brought into operation, while the other has remained in abeyance.
(4). That any scheme of District Councils, involving powers of local assessment for local purposes, would operate as a virtual confiscation of the lands already alienated; would create endless discord and confusion; and by simultaneously introducing a federal and local system of government, render that government at once ruinously expensive and miserably inefficient.
(5). That grievous as this Council would esteem it, to see any system of delegated election imposed upon the colony, the disfranchisement of the present constituencies in order to confer the elective right upon these justly obnoxious corporations, would render this invasion of public liberty still more intolerable.
(6). That this Council cannot acquiesce in any plan for an inter-colonial assembly in which the superior wealth and population of New South Wales, as compared with the other colonies of the Australian group, both individually and collectively, shall not be fully recognized as the basis of representation.
(7). That this Council cannot forbear expressing its strong sense of the indignity with which the people of this colony are treated, by the announcement that a measure so seriously influencing their destiny for good or for evil, will be introduced into Parliament, without affording them an opportunity of previously expressing their sentiments upon it.
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