810 THE FEDERATIONS AND THE UNION [PART 1v 
nor in any case yet has the state been overriden by the 
Commonwealth. Moreover, in matters of state concern, as 
will have been seen above, the states are invited to Imperial 
Conferences! and the states have their Agents-General in 
England fully recognized by the Colonial Office. 
This is not, however, to say that the view taken of the 
matter by the Imperial Government in the cases of the 
Vondel and the Imperial Conference is wrong. It would 
indeed be absurd to make any such claim ; the truth is that 
the federation is deliberately an incomplete one, and that 
its relations must be chaotic and incomplete unless and until 
it is desired by the Commonwealth and states to make them 
consistent and perfect. 
The same position reappears in regard to the question of 
the position of State Governor. It has been laid down in 
the most convincing manner by the High Court of the 
Commonwealth that the Governor of a state, even while he 
is performing an act enjoined upon him by a Commonwealth 
statute, is none the less not liable to a mandamus by the 
Commonwealth High Court, and that as head of the state 
he is exempt from such a proceeding. That was decided in 
the case of The King v. The Governor of the State of South 
Australia ® in 1907, when it was sought by Mr. Vardon, one of 
the candidates for election as Member of the Senate for 
that state, to establish his right to have an election held to 
fill up a vacancy caused by the order of the Court on a dis- 
puted election in 1906. He claimed that instead of the 
appointment being made by the two Houses sitting together, 
as the Governor had been advised to do by his Ministry, 
and as had been done, the appointment was one to be made 
by the ordinary electorate, a view afterwards confirmed by 
the High Court. But the High Court would not grant a 
mandamus, and declared that it could not take such action 
against a State Governor who was the political head of the 
state. In a subsequent case, Horwitz v. Connor 2 it also refused 
! e.g. the Surveyors’ Conference of 1911; see Parl. Pap., Cd. 5273. 
pp. 124 seq. 
24 C. L R. 1497. 
s 6C. L. R. 39.