Historically the voting rights of Australian Aborigines, or Indigenous Australians, had been restricted in Australian parliaments and local government bodies.
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Some Aboriginal people voted in the very first Commonwealth election. Point McLeay, a mission station near the mouth of the Murray River, got a polling station in the 1890s and Aboriginal men and women voted there in South Australian elections and voted for the first Commonwealth Parliament in 1901. However, it was not until 1983 that Indigenous Australians had equivalent voting rights to other Australians, that is compulsory voting at all Commonwealth elections. [1]
Section 41 of the Australian Constitution is designed to ensure the right to vote in Australian Commonwealth elections to those who have the right to vote in state elections. The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, provided that "No aboriginal native of Australia ... shall be entitled to have his name placed on an Electoral Roll unless so entitled under section forty-one of the Constitution". [2] However, Sir Robert Garran, the first Solicitor-General, interpreted section 41 to give Commonwealth voting rights only to those who were already State voters in 1902, limiting those rights to a theoretical maximum of only a few hundred Indigenous people.
Garran’s interpretation of section 41 was challenged in 1924 by Mitta Bullosh a Melbourne resident Indian who had been accepted as a voter by Victoria but rejected by the Commonwealth. He won his case in the District Court,[3] and the Commonwealth government later withdrew a High Court challenge to the magistrate's ruling. [4] The Electoral Act was subsequently amended. These developments were confined to British subjects of Asian origin resident in Australia. They had no effect on right to vote of Aboriginal people.
In 1949 the Chifley Labor government passed an Act to confirm that all those who could vote in their States could vote for the Commonwealth. This gave the right to vote to Aboriginal people in all states except Queensland and Western Australia.
In 1962 the Commonwealth Electoral Act was amended to give Indigenous people the right to enroll and vote in Commonwealth elections irrespective of their voting rights at the state level. If and only if they were enrolled, it was compulsory to vote. However, enrolment itself was not compulsory and it was illegal under Commonwealth legislation to encourage indigenous people to enrol to vote.
In 1983 the Act was amended to remove optional enrollment for Indigenous people, removing all discrimination based on race in the Australian electoral system. [5]
There is a common misconception that the 1967 referendum gave Aborigines the right to vote. However, this referendum gave the Commonwealth powers to make laws with respect to the Aboriginal people and counted them in the Census.[6]
Since the time of the 1856 New South Wales constitution, officially Aboriginal people had the same rights as other citizens. However from 1902, because they were denied the right to vote in Commonwealth elections, they were often also illegally denied the right to vote in NSW state elections.
In 1965 Aboriginal people were granted the right to vote in Queensland state elections.
Late in 1962 Aboriginal people were granted the right to vote in Western Australian state elections.