During the debates in the Australian federation conventions of 1891 and 1897–8, Canadian experience was usually cited to indicate practices to be avoided rather than emulated. J. W. Hackett, addressing the 1891 convention as a representative of Western Australia, which was then the least populous of the Australian colonies, stressed the need of a strong senate whose function it would be to convert the popular will into the federal will. From the viewpoint of a defender of the interest of the smaller colonies, the weakening of the prestige of the senate, through the cabinet's being responsible in practice to the lower house, made responsible government a threat which Hackett was ready to attack. He questioned whether responsible government could be successful under any conditions. The experiment of the Canadian Dominion was hardly a success. “It was begun … in bribery and is continued by subsidies.” Pointing to the agitation for home rule in Ireland, he suggested that responsible government was a failure in Britain itself. “If that is the responsible government which they wish to graft into our federation,” he asserted, “there will be one of two alternatives—either responsible government will kill federation, or federation, in the form in which we shall, I hope, be prepared to accept it, will kill responsible government.” Responsible government has, in fact, proved rather deadly to Hackett's idea of federalism. Nevertheless, in Australia, as in Canada, the cabinet itself has been federalized, although the process in Australia has not been recognized by the quantity of academic and popular commentary which has marked its Canadian counterpart.