Higgins was gazetted as a suburb on 6 June 1968.
The suburb is named after Henry Bournes (H.B.) Higgins (1851-1929), politician and judge, famous for his ruling which established the principle of a basic wage. Read more about the great man below.
Due to H.B.'s legacy, streets in Higgins are named after Judges. Find out who your street is named after on the ACT Planning website.
Higgins is 10.5km from the Canberra GPO and 12.2km from Parliament House (as the cockatoo flies). It has the honour of being one of the most affordable suburbs in Canberra, with a mean property price in 2008 of $385,000. It possibly also has the highest density of government housing of any Canberra suburb...although this is yet to be confirmed. Celebrities that choose to call Higgins their home include Hugh Jackman, Tony Barber and Max Bygraves. It is also rumoured that Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban are currently looking to invest in the suburb.
Join the rising chorus to make 30 June "Higgins Day" - a public holiday for Higgins residents to stop, reflect and celebrate the birth of the great H.B. Higgins.
A politician and judge, H.B. Higgins, came to Australia from Ireland with his family in 1870, and is remembered as a great friend of the labour movement, the Irish-Australian community and liberal and progressive causes generally.
As
an MLA in Victoria in the 1890's H.B. spoke out on issues such as
greater protection for workers, government investment in industry, and
votes for women. He was part of the convention that wrote the
Australian Constitution, personally ensuring that it contained a
guarantee of religious freedom, and also a provision giving the
Commonwealth the power to arbitrate industrial disputes. He was also an
anti-war activist.
In 1901, when federation under the new constitution came into effect, H.B. was elected to the first House of Representatives for the working-class electorate of Northern Melbourne. He stood as a Protectionist, but the Labor Party did not oppose him, regarding him as a supporter of the labour movement. In fact, in 1904 he was offered the post of Attorney-General in the first federal Labor government. He is the only person to have held office in a Federal Labor government without being a member of the Labor Party.
In 1906 he became Justice of the High Court of Australia (some say this was to get him out of politics because he was such a trouble maker!). In 1907 he was also appointed President of the newly created Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, created to arbitrate disputes between trades unions and employers, something H.B. had long advocated. He continued to support the labour movement, although he was strongly opposed to militant unions who abused the strike weapon and ignored his rulings.
In 1908 H.B. delivered a judgment which became famous in Australian history, known as the "Harvester Judgement". The case involved one of Australia's largest employers, Hugh McKay, a manufacturer of agricultural machinery. H.B. ruled that Mackay was obliged to pay his employees a wage that guaranteed them a standard of living which was reasonable for "a human being in a civilised community," regardless of his capacity to pay. This gave rise to the legal requirement for a basic wage, which dominated Australian economic life for the next 80 years.*
"Higgins Day" - (now wouldn't that boost property prices!)
*source - edited extract from Wikipaedia. Google Henry Bournes Higgins for lots more info about the great man.
