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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (4 June) . . Page.. 1853 ..

MS GALLAGHER (continuing):

It has been a consistent theme of colonisation to impose certain values on an indigenous population without granting the basic civic rights that should accompany those values. Sadly, the first few decades of the federation were an exercise in limiting what democratic rights indigenous Australians had accumulated.

In the 1850s, when the individual colonies framed their constitutions, Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia gave voting rights to all male British subjects over 21. This included Aboriginal men. In 1894 South Australia extended this vote to women, including indigenous women. However, few Aborigines voted as many were unaware of their rights and, as the colonies drew closer to federation, those votes were threatened.

The Constitution, which federated Australia, did not explicitly extend the vote to indigenous people or women, though section 41 legislated for those who were entitled to vote at a state level to vote in a federal election. This technically meant that Aboriginal people who had a state vote also had a federal vote. Paradoxically, the Constitution also excluded native Australians from the census and thus from being effectively represented.

In 1902 the new Commonwealth parliament passed the Commonwealth Franchise Act, which was progressive in that it extended the vote to adult women, but it also deliberately excluded indigenous Australians, stating:

No Aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific ... shall be entitled to have his name on the electoral roll unless so entitled under section 41 of the Constitution.

This became an even bigger problem when the first Solicitor-General, Sir Robert Garran, interpreted section 41 to give federal voting rights to people who were enrolled on state electoral rolls before 1902. Thus indigenous people who enrolled to vote in state elections after that time were not entitled to vote in federal elections.

The extent that the federal government went to in order to avoid extending the vote to indigenous people nationally is appalling and deserves to be remembered. The blatant manipulations of the law to deny indigenous people basic democratic rights must be recognised as part of a prevailing racist attitude and, sadly, it must be recognised that that attitude was woven into the beginnings of Australian federation.

One such example of the shameful conduct of the Commonwealth in manipulating the situation to keep Aborigines without a vote arose in the 1920s when an Indian man who had gained the right to vote in a Victorian state election challenged the Commonwealth's interpretation of section 41. He went to court and won. The magistrate ruled that section 41 meant that people who acquired a state vote at any time were entitled to a Commonwealth vote. Rather than accepting the reasoning of the magistrate, which would have also enabled indigenous people with a state vote to exercise a Commonwealth vote, the Commonwealth went out of its way to pass an act giving all Indians the vote while continuing to reject indigenous and other coloured applicants. After all, there were only 2,300 Indians in Australia at the time, and the white Australia policy ensured that there would be no more.

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