Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (4 June) . . Page.. 1863 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

But the referendum did not give Aboriginals the right to vote. They already had that. Legally, their rights go back to colonial times. When Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia framed their constitutions in the 1850s, they gave voting rights to all male British subjects over 21, which included Aboriginal men. In 1894, when South Australia gave women the right to vote and sit in parliament, Aboriginal women shared that right. Only Queensland and Western Australia barred Aboriginals from voting.

Very few Aboriginals at this time knew their rights, so very few voted. Some eventually did. Point McLeay, a mission station near the mouth of the Murray, received a polling station in the 1890s. Aboriginal men and women there voted in the South Australian elections and voted for the first Commonwealth parliament in 1901.

The first Commonwealth parliament was elected by state voters, but when it met it had to decide who should be entitled to vote for it in the future. Three groups attracted debate. Women and Aboriginal people had votes in some states but not in others. And there were some Chinese, Indian and other non-white people who had become permanent residents before the introduction of the white Australia immigration policy.

The debates reflected the racist temper of the times, with references to savages, slaves, cannibals, and Aboriginal lubras and gins. The Senate voted to let Aboriginals vote, but the House of Representatives defeated the proposal. The 1902 Franchise Act gave women a Commonwealth vote, but Aboriginal people and other coloured people were excluded unless entitled under section 41 of the Constitution.

Section 41 stated that anyone with a state vote must be allowed a Commonwealth vote. South Australia got that section into the Constitution to ensure that South Australian women would have Commonwealth votes, whether or not the Commonwealth parliament decided to enfranchise all Australian women. The Commonwealth did enfranchise all women, so they did not need section 41.

Section 41 did seem to guarantee that, except in Queensland and Western Australia, Aborigines would be able to vote for the Commonwealth because of their state rights. But did it mean that? The first Solicitor-General, Sir Robert Garran, interpreted it to give Commonwealth rights only to people who were already state voters in 1902, so no new Aboriginal voters could ever be enrolled and in due course the existing ones would die out. The joint Commonwealth/state electoral rolls adopted in the 1920s give some idea of the number of Aboriginals who voted for their state parliaments but were barred by the Commonwealth. The symbol "o" by a name meant "not entitled to vote for the Commonwealth" and almost always indicated an Aborigine.

Garran's interpretation of section 41 was first challenged in 1924, not by an Aboriginal but by an Indian who had recently been accepted to vote by Victoria but rejected by the Commonwealth. He went to court and won. The magistrate ruled that section 41 meant that people who acquired state votes at any date were entitled to a Commonwealth vote. Instead of obeying that ruling, the Commonwealth passed an act giving all Indians the vote (there were only 2,300 Indians at the time, and the immigration policy would see there were no more) but continued to reject Aborigines and other coloured applicants under its own interpretation of section 41.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .