Posted 17/02/2022 by Dr Dianne Heriot and Jonathan Curtis
With much focus on the upcoming Federal and state
elections this year, it’s worth recalling that it is 120 years since Parliament
created the legislative framework of our federal electoral system.
It’s a big year for elections in Australia, with the Federal
election forecast for the first half of 2022, as well as elections in South
Australia on 19 March and Victoria on 26 November. However, it’s easy to take
for granted the important rules that govern how elections are conducted and who
gets to vote in them.
For the first Commonwealth Parliament, these were important
and contentious issues: the Australian
Constitution only provides that members of Parliament are ‘directly
chosen by the people’[1]
– it left making the detailed rules to Parliament.
Australia’s first federal election in 1901 took place as six
separate elections held according to the legislation in place in each of the
states ‘for
the more numerous House of the Parliament’, with significant
differences in electoral procedure and
franchise across the country. The Review
of Reviews observed that:
Perhaps there never was a more
distracted election. The issue in each State was different … again, each State
followed its own electoral method, and the result was the strangest patchwork
of suffrages and of systems …
For example, while most colonial parliaments had established
federal electoral divisions, Tasmania and South Australia voted as a single electorate.
Women had the vote only in South Australia and Western Australia, while a property-based
franchise effectively denied most Indigenous Australians the vote in Western
Australia and Queensland. In some states, individuals of ‘unsound mind’,
drunkards, those sentenced for treason or felony, or in receipt of charitable
aid, police, or members of the armed forces were also denied the vote.[2]
In April 1902, Senator
Richard O’Connor introduced a Bill to establish a uniform
franchise for the Commonwealth[3]
proposing a universal adult franchise to anyone resident in Australia for six
months who is a ‘natural born or naturalized subject of the King’ (s. 3), as:
we do not want to have any proportion of our community
disfranchised and in a position of political inferiority, having no right to a
voice in the making of the laws. It would be a great mistake from every point
of view to have any portion of the community in such a position that, while it
had to obey the laws, it would have no right to vote in the election of those
who had to make the laws.[4]
This didn’t win support in Parliament:
although female suffrage was accepted after lengthy debate, the idea of
extending the vote to Indigenous Australians or persons from Asia, Africa or
the Pacific provoked vociferous opposition. The Commonwealth
Franchise Act 1902 as amended instead provided that:
No aboriginal native of Australia Asia Africa or the Islands
of the Pacific except New Zealand[5]
shall be entitled to have his name placed on an Electoral Roll unless so
entitled under section forty-one of the Constitution (section 4).
(While s. 41 of the Constitution provides that no one entitled
to vote in state elections should be excluded from the Commonwealth electoral
roll, in practice this was narrowly interpreted). As a result of a court
challenge, a 1925
amendment extended Commonwealth franchise to all naturalised Australians
regardless of their race.[6]
Not until 1949 did Amendments
give Indigenous Australians the right to vote at Commonwealth elections if they
were enfranchised under a state law or had served in the Defence Forces.[7] The full right to vote finally
extended to all Indigenous Australians in 1962, though not until 1984 would enrolment
and voting become compulsory.[8]
The Commonwealth
Electoral Act 1902 (and the later Electoral Divisions Act 1903) established the machinery for federal
elections. The Electoral Bill had a difficult passage, with significant amendments
made during debate (including the defeat of the Government’s proposals for
optional preferential voting).[9]
Many of the Act’s key elements remain
familiar today, including single-member electorates for the House of
Representatives (although the first elections used the ‘first past the post’
voting system in which the candidate with the greatest number of votes is
elected).
Setting electoral boundaries was a matter
for the Electoral Commissioner in each state, but the distributions had to be
approved by both Houses of Parliament. This inherent conflict of interest
remained until 1983, with the creation of the modern independent Australian
Electoral Commission.
Postal voting was available for voters more
than five miles from a polling place on polling day, and the High Court was
designated as the Court of Disputed Returns.
The federal elections were to be run by an ‘Electoral
Branch’ established in the Department of Home Affairs. A first job for the
acting Chief Electoral Officer, George Lewis, was
to compile the new Commonwealth electoral roll and in the end, 1,893,000
electors were enrolled, largely by police going from house to house across the
country.[10]
There was controversy over the proposed new
Electoral divisions—particularly the balance between urban and rural
constituencies—and only the divisions proposed for South Australia and Tasmania
received Parliamentary approval. NSW MP and future Prime Minister George
Reid dramatically resigned in protest at Parliament’s rejection of a proposed
additional Sydney seat (although he was back only two weeks later, having been
comfortably re-elected in a by-election).
Australia votes (a second time)
The new rules were put to use in Australia’s second Federal
election, held on Wednesday 16 December 1903. Because the Parliament had negatived
most of the proposed electoral divisions, candidates in all states except South
Australia and Tasmania stood for the electorates made by state parliaments for
the 1901 election. The election cost £46,119.[11]
Voting was still voluntary; voter turnout across the country
was around 50% for the House of Representatives and 47% for the Senate.[12]
As in 1901, no one party gained a majority in the House of
Representatives. In the end, Prime Minister Deakin governed with the continuing
support of the Protectionists and the Labour party until 27 April 1904.
The 1903 election was the first in which women (or those
women who qualified for the franchise) enjoyed the right to vote and to stand
for Parliament. Three women (Vida Goldstein,
Nellie
Martel, and Mary
Ann Moore Bentley) campaigned for Senate seats and one (Selina
Anderson) for the House of Representatives seat of Dalley (NSW). None were
successful and it would be another 40 years before women entered the Federal
Parliament, with Enid Lyons
elected in 1943 to the House of Representatives for the Tasmanian seat of
Darwin and Dorothy
Tangney becoming a Senator for Western Australia (via a casual vacancy) in the
same year.
Parliament House will hold an exhibition on women’s
suffrage, commencing in late May 2022.
Image credit: A border Polling Booth at the recent Commonwealth Elections at Jennings, NSW, near Tenterfield Town and Country Journal, 11 May 1901, p. 26
[1] Commonwealth
of Australia Constitution, sections 7 and 24.
[2]
J Summers, ‘The
Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia and Indigenous Peoples 1901–1967’,
Research Paper series, 2000-01, Parliamentary
Library, October 2000. See also J Norberry & G Williams, ‘Voters
and the Franchise: The Federal Story’, Research Paper series, 2001-02,
Parliamentary Library, 2002.
[3]
Senator O’Connor, ‘Commonwealth
Franchise Bill: Second Reading Speech’, Senate, Debates, 9 April
1902, p. 11450.
[4]
Ibid., p. 11453.
[5]
Maori were represented in the NZ Parliament, and their enfranchisement in
Australia was at least in part to avoid creating obstacles to New Zealand one
day joining the Federation. See R O’Connor, ‘Commonwealth
Franchise Bill’, Senate, Debates, 29 May 1902, p. 13010.
[6]
Commonwealth
Electoral Act 1925
[7]
Commonwealth
Electoral Act 1949
[8]
Commonwealth
Electoral Act 1962
[9]
J Uhr, ‘Rules
for Representation: Parliament and the Design of the Australian Electoral System’,
in Geoffrey J Lindell & RL Bennett, eds, Parliament: The Vision in
Hindsight, Federation Press, Annandale, 2001, p. 266 [p.11 of extract].
[10]
House of Representatives, Report
from the Select Committee on Electoral Act Administration, October
1904, p. 2.
[11]
Costs
of elections and referendums, Australian Electoral Commission website,
accessed 16 February 2022.
[12]
Voter
Turnout 1901–-Present, Australian Electoral Commission website, accessed 4
February 2018.