2022 is the 120th anniversary of two key
pieces of legislation that underpin the practice of democracy in Australia: the
franchise and electoral Acts. The span of years makes Australia’s voting rights
appear unremarkable, yet this would be to overlook the intense political
discussions over voting rights in Australia, particularly for women and
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as well as the significant
practical challenges involved in enrolling voters and administering national
elections across the young country.
This paper provides the presentations from
the symposium held in Parliament House on
8 December 2022. The Parliamentary Library is grateful to the panellists:
- Panel Chair, Emeritus Professor Marian Sawer, ANU Public Policy
Fellow
- Professor Marilyn Lake, Honorary Professorial Fellow,
University of Melbourne
- Professor Tim Rowse, Australian National University
- Dr Benjamin Jones, Central Queensland University.
The full proceedings, including the
discussion session, is available from the Parliamentary
Library website.
The views expressed in the papers are those
of the authors.
Introduction
Marian Sawer
My thanks to the Parliamentary Library for
organising this symposium and recognising the significance of this anniversary.
Australia is often called the first nation
to invent itself through the ballot box – referring to the popular election of
Constitutional Convention delegates and popular referenda that helped bring the
new nation into being. It was a relatively democratic and peaceful beginning
compared to the birth of many other nations.
The new federal Constitution also had some
strikingly democratic features, such as the guarantee that there would be
direct elections for both houses of the new federal parliament and no plural
votes for property. The Constitution satisfied most of the 19th century
Chartist demands, including making provision for the payment of
parliamentarians. Even the provision for three-year parliamentary terms
reflected the Chartist belief that democracy required short parliaments
(although not the annual parliaments demanded in the Charter). Today three-year
parliamentary terms in Australia and New Zealand are very unusual in global
terms, with four- or five-year terms being more normal.
The democratic achievements enshrined in the
Constitution were followed up by the pioneering Acts celebrated today. The
Commonwealth Franchise Act (June 1902) enacted what was believed to be the most
inclusive and equal franchise in the world at the time, requiring residence in
Australia of only six months and with ‘no class of the community left out’
(Senator Richard Baker, 31 January 1902). However, the House of Representatives
amended the legislation to take away Indigenous voting rights, something
eventually accepted by the government as the price of passage, along with other
restrictions such as those relating to ‘aboriginal natives’ of Asia, Africa and
the Pacific.
But despite these flaws – to be discussed by
Professor Rowse – and unlike the franchise in other countries, there was
neither privileging of property nor disqualification of the propertyless.
Inmates of charitable institutions were explicitly excluded from the franchise
under most state electoral Acts but South Australia was an exception to this.
The new Commonwealth electoral and franchise provisions were largely based on
South Australia and so inmates of charitable institutions could vote in federal
elections.
The Commonwealth Franchise Act was also
remarkable in pioneering the political rights of women both to vote and to
stand for parliament at the national level, as we shall hear from Professor
Lake. We often have to remind our European colleagues of this fact, as they
remain convinced that it was Finland that was the pioneer of these combined
political rights. Of course, there was an important alliance between feminism
and Finnish nationalism and Finland proceeded to elect 19 women to its
parliament in 1907, while in Australia it took 41 years for the first women to
be elected to the federal parliament. Finland, like New Zealand, has also had
three women Prime Ministers, compared to Australia’s one.
A few months after the Commonwealth
Franchise Act came the Commonwealth Electoral Act of October 1902 – also a
pioneering piece of legislation. It provided for Commonwealth electoral
machinery separate from that of the states and enabling uniform electoral
administration throughout the country, so unlike the patchwork American system
that persists to this day, giving rise to narratives of ‘stolen’ elections. The
1902 Commonwealth Electoral Act laid out the structure of a Commonwealth
Electoral Officer for each State and a Divisional Returning Officer for each
division – the structure still in use today.
In one area the 1902 Act was in advance of
today’s Electoral Act – the regulation of the role of money in elections
through campaign expenditure limits. Permitted campaign expenses for candidates
were fixed at £250 for the Senate and £100 for the House and a list of
authorised objects of expenditure was included, such as distributing addresses
by the candidates, publicising meetings and hiring
halls for them. As the 1903 Labor Party manifesto proudly said: ‘Elaborate precautions
exist to prevent wealthy men practically purchasing seats.’
Unfortunately, the expenditure limits were
not indexed and were increased only once, in 1946, when they rose to £500 for
the Senate and £250 for the House. They also failed to cover the shift to
centralised expenditure by parties and so were increasingly regarded as
irrelevant. They were dispensed with in 1980. Campaign expenditure limits have
still not been reintroduced, making possible the huge interventions of
billionaire Clive Palmer in the 2019 and 2022 federal elections.
Aside from the question of campaign finance
regulation, the Commonwealth Electoral Act of 1902 enshrined the legacy of
William Boothby – the concept of the salaried and independent electoral
administrator, distanced from partisanship. This electoral administrator was
someone who took non-partisan and professional pride in ensuring an accurate
and comprehensive electoral roll and the most complete recording of the
opinions of all Australians. The Boothby legacy meant taking a census approach
to the construction of the roll and putting the onus on the state rather than
on the individual citizen to ensure it was comprehensive.
So, following the passage of the Electoral
Act came the epic compilation in 1902/03 of the new Commonwealth electoral
roll. The Commonwealth paid for state police mounted on horseback as well foot
constables to travel to all corners of the continent and almost two million
names were entered on the roll – some 96% of the adult population. The
resulting roll was much more comprehensive than the existing state rolls and
was undoubtedly the most comprehensive enrolment of any nation up to that time
for the purposes of democracy. Subsequently, the employment of permanent
electoral staff was to make possible the development of continuous roll
maintenance through what was at first called canvassing, later ‘habitation
checks’.
The professionalism of those fulfilling the
new occupational role of electoral administrator was demonstrated at the first
conference of Commonwealth Electoral Officers in 1904. They expressed their
determination to cleanse the roll of some anomalies in two states, even
although it would cause a ‘slight reduction’ in that magical figure of 96%.
Such conferences of electoral officers helped develop professional standards
for electoral administration to be consistently applied across the country.
They constantly made suggestions for legislative and technical improvements,
including the suggestion of the 1904 conference for a ballot box adapted to
being carried on horseback for long distances – the famous half-moon ballot
box. As John Uhr has noted, the deliberative contribution of electoral
officials was of a different order from the partisan debates on electoral
matters that took place in parliament.[1]
In 1913 professional independence was once
more to the fore when the Minister of Home Affairs, King O’Malley attempted to
interfere with the appointment of election officials in his own electorate and
was stoutly rebuffed: ‘I must protest most strongly against the minister’s
endeavour to overrule my authority as Divisional Returning Officer. As such, I
think the only proper course for one to adopt is to see in ‘King O’Malley’ who
is nominated for election only the candidate, and not the Minister of Home
Affairs’.[2]
The 1902 Electoral Act laid the basis for
the non-partisan and independent nature of Australia’s electoral administration
and the high levels of public trust it enjoys, despite record levels of
distrust in politicians and political parties. In 2022, despite the innovation
of telephone voting for Covid-affected electors, not a single federal election
outcome was challenged in the Court of Disputed Returns. Not many democracies
can celebrate such a sustained record of achievement in electoral management,
upholding the Benthamite goal of the fullest registration of preferences as the
basis of good government.
Marian Sawer is Emeritus
Professor and ANU Public Policy Fellow at the ANU College of Arts and Social
Sciences. She is the Former Head of the Political Science Program, ANU and Head
of the Democratic Audit of Australia. She was made an Officer of the Order of
Australia in 1994, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia
in 1996 and awarded the Australian Political Studies Association Lifetime
Achievement Award in 2009.
Commonwealth
Franchise Act of 1902: ‘She votes in Australia’
Marilyn
Lake
The Act to provide for a Uniform Federal
Franchise was complicated in its provisions. It accorded white women the same
political rights as white men. It disqualified Indigenous Australians, Asian
people, African people and Pacific Islanders, except New Zealand Maori.
Citizenship in Australia, as in most other countries at this time was a
racialised condition, which also had implications for the kind of welfare state
Australians would implement. The Act also disqualified anyone convicted of
‘treason’. Some people under sentence or awaiting sentence were disqualified.
People of ‘unsound mind’ were disqualified.
My focus is on the world historic change
that occurred when Australian women were accorded ‘universal’ political rights,
allowed to vote and stand for election to the national parliament on the same
basis as men, a change that had profound domestic and international
significance. According to the contemporary American historian Ida Husted
Harper, the historian of the US movement that famously dated from 1848, Australian
women’s enfranchisement was ‘the most important event in the history of the
[world] movement toward woman suffrage’.[3]
The legislation was necessarily passed by
men, but it led to what one Australian suffragist called ‘a new element’ being
introduced into political life. As I explained in my history of feminism in
Australia, Getting Equal, published in 1999, suffragists expected that
women’s votes would make a difference to gender relations and the society more
broadly.[4]
Rose Scott, one of the leaders of the NSW
movement looked forward to the advent of ‘a mother-woman’s world with loving
heart and sheltering arms’, world in which women and children would be
protected by ‘sheltering arms’ from men’s violence. A world in which women
would enjoy economic independence and thus be better able to defend themselves
and their children from abuse, violence and exploitation. In 1903 she gave a
public lecture on ‘Economic Independence and the Married Woman’. Feminists
believed that the work of motherhood should be paid by the state. This was an
era of ‘state socialism’.[5]
Rose Scott believed in universal suffrage
rights. Campaigning for womanhood suffrage, she had argued against racial
exclusions, defending the enfranchisement of Aboriginal Australians on human
rights grounds:
They are human beings with an interest in their country and
its laws and on this same principle is there any logical reason for depriving
the women of the country of the same privilege?
… the accident of Race or Colour cannot interfere with the
principle involved in one man one vote and the right of the people to govern
themselves.
According to Scott, ‘self-government was a
basic human right; the sex of a human being [was] like Race or Colour a
secondary matter’. Similarly, Vida Goldstein denounced the racial exclusions of
the Maternity Allowance Act: ’It is the White Australia policy gone mad.
Maternity is maternity whatever the race …’. [6]
The rights of mothers, in other words, were
universal. This emphasis on ‘the common status of motherhood’, in Ada Bromham’s
felicitous phrase, would be the distinctive message of post-suffrage non-party
feminists as expressed by the Women’s Political Association in Victoria, the
Victorian Women Citizen’s Movement, the Women’s Service Guilds in Western
Australia, the United Associations of Women in NSW, and the first national
body, the Australian Federation of Women Voters. It would also be the message
that brought feminists together across the settler colonial world, especially
across the Pacific, as we see below.
Although much emphasis is placed today on
Vida Goldstein’s career ambitions, her candidacy (along with two other women
often forgotten) for election to the federal parliament in 1903 (and four times
thereafter), it was not political careers for individual women that was the
founding feminists’ main goal. That would have seemed to them a very limited
and self-serving aim. Women, they believed, shared a distinctive perspective
born of distinctive experience that would shape the provision of collective
care in the new Commonwealth. Australian founding feminists were self-conscious
nation-builders and the inauguration of a new Commonwealth fired feminist ambition.
They hoped to realise their vision of ‘a
mother-woman’s world with loving heart and sheltering arms’ – it was the
protection of women and girls and a transformation in relations between men and
women that they desired. To this end, all post-suffrage organisations sought
and mostly achieved the appointment of women to all public offices, so that
vulnerable women and children need never fall into men’s hands: they secured the
appointment of women as doctors, lawyers, prison warders, magistrates, factory and
sanitary inspectors, and as police. Rose Scott’s Political and Educational
League listed the following measures as those they wished to see implemented:
the Girls’ Protection Bill, the Family Maintenance Act, registration of nurses,
hours of hospital nurses to be limited, equal pay for equal work, equal
ownership and guardianship of children by both parents, economic independence
of married woman, and the appointment of women sanitary inspectors,
boarding-out inspectors, school inspectors and truant officers,
Australia’s founding feminists engaged at
the beginning of a new century in forging a new kind of maternalist welfare
state. ‘In no other part of the world, as far as one can ascertain’, Labor
leader Lilian Locke-Burns declared, ‘is so much being done by the State in the
way of providing for mothers and children as in the Australian Commonwealth’.
She had in mind state ‘boarding out’ payments that enabled single mothers to
care for their children at home, age of consent legislation and the Labor government’s
Maternity Allowance, not a ‘baby bonus’ as its conservative detractors called
it, but a ‘mother citizen’s right’. Locke-Burns offered a manifesto for working
class mothers: ‘And yet how far we are still from a proper realisation of the
value of the child as an asset of the State, and how little we realise the true
position the mothers of the community would occupy in a properly organised
social system where the economic independence of women was fully recognised and
assured’.[7]
Bessie Rischbieth, the wealthy inaugural
president of the first national women’s organisation, the Australian Federation
of Women Voters agreed with this vision, stating she hoped to mobilise an ‘army
of Australian women organised thus to make the vote more effective by helping
to establish a human basis of welfare’. Working together women could ‘create
new channels whereby human welfare shall play the first and great part in our
social system’.[8] They wanted a welfare state, as they often said, not a warfare state; a state
committed to human welfare rather than the ‘Almighty Dollar’.[9]
Australian feminists took this message to
the world. In the year in which the Commonwealth Franchise Act was passed, Vida
Goldstein was appointed the Australasian delegate to the first International
Woman Suffrage Conference, which was held in the United States capital,
Washington DC, where she was greeted by other participants as a youthful
pioneer from a progressive land. After the conference, Goldstein embarked on an
extensive speaking tour, north up the east coast – to New York and Boston – and
then across the continent, all the while promoting Australia’s example in
extending political rights to women. When she arrived in New York, where she
was hosted by the formidable Carrie Chapman Catt, she found a reporter and
photographer waiting for her. She was unimpressed by the journalist’s ignorance
and insisted: ‘America can teach us a whole lot, but we feel we can show some
things to you that you would profit by adopting and one of these is women’s
suffrage’.[10]
In the United States, Goldstein realised
that although American women had not yet achieved political rights, the great
women’s movement in its very longevity had itself become an object of national
veneration and commemoration, already producing its own national mythologies,
celebrity leaders and multivolume history. The lack of historical commemoration
of the Australian suffrage movement and its leaders became an increasingly
painful source of disappointment for Goldstein, who chose in the end to leave
her papers to the Fawcett Library in London. Other activists such as Bessie
Rischbieth and Jessie Street put their rich collections in the NLA in the hope
that, as a result, they and the movements they fostered couldn’t be written out
of Australian political history.
In Boston, in 1902, Goldstein met more of
the American suffrage leaders. She addressed six different women’s groups
including the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government (or
BESAGG), warming to her theme of how woman suffrage led to better government, a
more moral community and the purification of politics. The secretary of the
group was young Maud Wood Park, a lobbyist for womanhood suffrage at the
national level in the US (whose papers later formed the basis for the famous
Schlesinger Library women’s history collection at Radcliffe College, Harvard.
Goldstein and Park became friends. In 1909,
Park responded to Goldstein’s invitation and embarked on a research trip to
Australia, accompanied by her friend Mabel Willard, to find out what Australian
women had done with the vote and their preferred political strategies; an
investigation unmentioned in most Australian political history, but documented
in my recent book, Progressive New World. Park wrote a long essay detailing
her experiences meeting Australian feminists (and other political leaders
including Andrew Fisher) in Melbourne and Sydney, a valuable historical
document for Australian political history, a copy of which can be found in the
Schlesinger Library.
Goldstein’s friendship with Maud Wood Park
offers important insight into the transpacific dynamics of the suffrage movement
(you can also trace these connections in the careers of Alice Henry and Miles
Franklin in their work with the National Women’s Trade Union League in
Chicago). Park’s essay also informs us about the development of post-suffrage
non-party feminist strategy in Australia. ‘The question is often asked’, wrote
Park, ‘”After woman suffrage, what?” Sometimes the asker means what methods of
organization will women employ; sometimes, what ends will they seek; sometimes,
what results will they obtain’. At a time when American (and British) suffragists
still campaigned for the vote, Australian women citizens were theorizing the
meaning of women’s citizenship (the need for economic independence and recognition
of the inviolability of women’s bodies) and experimenting with the
possibilities and potential of women’s political power to shape the public
domain.
In Melbourne and Sydney, Park and Willard interviewed
the leaders of the new post-suffrage political organisations and reported on
their aims and strategies. To cut a long story short, which I must, they
concluded in the end that they had gained a pretty definite idea of what women
wanted. They noted that despite class and political differences, the
similarities in women’s platforms were such as to give ‘a pretty definite idea
of what “women’s causes” were’. On all sides they were agreed on the importance
of protecting women and children, maternity and infancy. And the preferred
political strategy of most post-suffrage feminists was to avoid the lures of
the major parties and support independent ‘woman candidates’ such as Goldstein.
When Park returned to the US she led the
suffrage lobbying effort in DC (documented in her book Front Door Lobbyists),
and once victorious, she and her feminist co-workers formed the National League
of Women Voters, (NLWV) of which Park became inaugural president, to promote
‘women’s causes’, as the transpacific women’s movement understood them. The
first legislation for which the NLWV claimed credit was the Sheppard-Towner
Maternity and Infancy Act, passed in 1920, the first major American legislation
relating to women following their enfranchisement and an expression of the
maternalist politics of child protection accorded priority by the post-suffrage
transpacific women’s movement.
In conclusion
In Australia, the Maternity Allowance Act
had been passed eight years earlier in 1912, enacted by the Fisher Labor
government in response to lobbying by organised Labor women, who congratulated
the Prime Minister on his ‘noble and wise act’ in ‘conferring this instalment
of the mother’s maternal rights’. The political language had shifted
post-suffrage from the need for protection to the demand for ‘citizen rights’.[11] This shift in understanding had been encouraged by the enfranchisement of
women. In her report on her Australian visit, just one year before the election
of the Fisher government, Park had noted in particular ‘women’s equal standing
in the industrial and political organisation of the Labor party’. She further
suggested that because the Labor party had adopted many women’s objectives,
women’s aims would soon be achieved. The Labor party was voted into office in
1910 and many attributed its victory to the women’s vote. One headline in a US
newspaper noted ‘She Votes in Australia’. Or as Harper’s Weekly observed, not altogether sympathetically, Australia had fallen under ‘the
domination of the working man and the voting woman’.[12]
Soon, with the outbreak of war in Europe in
1914, Australians would also be at war when, alone among combatant countries,
Australia voted – twice – to reject the introduction of conscription for
overseas service. Anti-conscriptionist Cecilia John opened anti-war rallies
with the song ‘I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier’ which was deemed so
effective in the anti-conscription cause that it was banned under the War
Precautions Act. Alarmed at the likely impact of newly enfranchised women on
the outcome of the plebiscites on conscription, Prime Minister WM Hughes had
issued a special pamphlet addressed to women voters – ‘A Call to the Women of
Australia’ – warning them that their citizenship was now on trial. To no avail.
In 1916 and 1917 a majority of Australians voted NO.
Professor Marilyn Lake AO is Professorial Fellow in History at The University of Melbourne. She has published
fifteen books including transnational histories on the political history of
women, international campaigns against racism and the history of war.
The
Aboriginal franchise
Tim Rowse
The idea that Indigenous Australians can be
and should be voters is once again – in 2022 – up for discussion. Of course,
no-one would dare challenge the long-achieved reality that Indigenous
Australians have the right and the obligation to vote for federal, state and territory
legislators. What is now under discussion is whether the members of the
Indigenous Voice to Parliament should be directly elected by an enrolled
Indigenous electorate or chosen in some other way.
The final Report of the Co-Design process
(which I will refer to as the Calma-Langton Report, after its major authors
Professors Tom Calma and Marcia Langton) found a widespread view that members
of the National Voice should NOT be directly elected. Many of those consulted
in the co-design process preferred that the members of the national voice
should be chosen by the 35 proposed Local and Regional Indigenous Voices. And
the Local and Regional Voices themselves will not necessarily be chosen by
direct election by enrolled Indigenous voters. Rather, in the model proposed by
Calma and Langton the constitutions of each of the Local and Regional Voice
will be in accordance with the Indigenous political traditions of each region.
In short, the Calma and Langton report – the
only blueprint of the Indigenous Voice that has yet been made public – warned
us not to assume that the Voice would be chosen by an Indigenous electorate.
Among the reasons for this warning were three that I will highlight today:
- There are ongoing disputes about who is Indigenous and thus about
who would be entitled to vote.
- There is a persistent tendency among Indigenous Australians of
under-enrolment to vote.
- There is a persistent pattern of low turn-out among Indigenous
Australians enrolled to vote. This was evident in the elections conducted by
ATSIC.
In combination, these three problems
associated with direct election of the National Voice would have a tendency to
weaken the legitimacy of the Indigenous Voice. Calma and Langton recommend that
the members of the National Voice be selected by Local and Regional Voices.
I have started my talk today by considering
the Calma-Langton Report as an exercise in Indigenous Australian political
thought. All political thought profits from the consideration of history’s
experiments in institutional design. The idea that Indigenous Australians can
and should be voters in elections is one such experiment. Let me remind you of
the following steps in this experiment:
- 1902 – The Commonwealth Franchise Act excluded from the federal
franchise persons classified by a State as ‘Aboriginal’ and forbidden from
voting in that State’s elections. This meant that Aboriginal people in Western
Australia, Queensland and (after 1911) the Northern Territory could not vote in
elections administered by a State or by the Commonwealth.
- 1949 – The Commonwealth amended the Act to allow an Aboriginal
person to vote if he or she was then or had ever been a member of the Defence
force.
- 1961 – The Commonwealth Parliament appointed a select committee
to consider extending the right to vote to the estimated 30,000 adults in
Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory excluded from
enrolling to vote in federal elections. The select committee recommended that
these Indigenous Australians be allowed to enrol to vote but that they not be
compelled to enrol.
- 1962 – The Commonwealth legislated what the Select Committee
recommended. Western Australia amended its laws similarly in this year.
- 1964 – In the Northern Territory people classified as ‘wards’
were entitled to vote (for an Assembly with only advisory powers until
self-government in 1978).
- 1965 – Queensland amended its electoral laws to enfranchise all
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults, but made enrolment optional and
made it an offence to persuade such persons to enrol.
We should note the decision to make it
optional for Indigenous Australians to enrol to vote. This departed from an
Australian citizenship ideal that all enfranchised persons have a duty to vote.
Voting in federal elections had been compulsory since 1924 and by 1941 all
States had made voting compulsory. So why were Indigenous Australians given the
option not to enrol and thus not to vote? In the early 1960s some Aboriginal
people in remote regions had had so little exposure to non-Indigenous
institutions that it would have been futile to compel them to exercise any
right of citizenship. As well, the Select Committee hearings and other
ethnographic research in the 1950s had found evidence of Aboriginal ambivalence
about voting.
So, as well as recognising and upholding
Indigenous Australians’ right to vote, Australian governments have had to
cultivate Indigenous Australians’ ability and willingness to exercise that
right. In 1979, the Fraser government initiated an Aboriginal Electoral Education
Program in the remote north and centre of Australia. In 1983 the Commonwealth
made it compulsory for Indigenous Australians to enrol as voters and to vote.
This standardisation of the obligation to vote led to further educational
effort by the national government – the Aboriginal Electoral Information
Service, commencing in 1986 and directed to all Indigenous Australians.
At the same time as Australian governments
were introducing Indigenous Australians to the mainstream voting system – by
these changes in laws and by educational programs – governments were also
experimenting with parallel Indigenous representative institutions that gave
Indigenous Australians an opportunity to vote. These were:
- 1973-77 – The National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC,
with 41 members).
- 1977-85 – The National Aboriginal Conference (NAC, with 36
members).
- 1989-2005 – The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission
(ATSIC, 60 regions, reduced to 36 regions in 1993).
These bodies differed in structure and powers.
The NACC and the NAC were like parliaments – composed of members elected from
single member electorates. The NACC and NAC had no programs; they simply
advised. ATSIC was made up of regional councils to which members were elected
by voters in each region. ATSIC was both an advisory body and responsible for
administering certain programs.
All three bodies shared the characteristic
that each was made up of members who identified as Indigenous and who were
elected by voters who identified as Indigenous. It was not compulsory for
Indigenous Australians to vote in NACC, NAC and ATSIC elections. The Australian
Electoral Commission did not create a distinct Indigenous electoral roll.
Because there was no Indigenous electoral
roll we can’t know precisely what proportion of Indigenous persons entitled to
vote for these three institutions did actually vote.
However, a 1994 sample survey of Indigenous
Australians (the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey, NATSIS)
found that 39.4% of Indigenous adults (roughly 2 out of every five) had voted
in the 1993 ATSIC elections. A later study used census data and came up with a
lower figure for voter turn-out in ATSIC’s elections: voters were 23-24% of the
Indigenous population of voting age in the 1993, 1996 and 1999 ATSIC elections.
ATSIC’s fourth election was in October 2002. The then chair of ATSIC, Geoff
Clark, said that he respected Indigenous adults’ choice not to vote, but he
urged them to vote. He was worried that continuing low voter turn-out damaged ATSIC’s
claim to be representative of all Indigenous Australians. Within two years both
Labor and the Coalition agreed that ATSIC should be terminated.
Such anxiety about ATSIC’s legitimacy has
been carried forward to the present day. The report by Professors Calma and
Langton discusses the tests of legitimacy that the Indigenous Voice might have
to face.
If and when the Australian Parliament
legislates the Indigenous Voice, it should consider carefully the results of
Australia’s experiments in improving the representation of Indigenous
Australians in politics. I suggest that we draw the following contrast. On the
one hand, most Indigenous Australians who are entitled to vote do vote in
elections for the national, State and Territory legislatures. On the other
hand, most Indigenous Australians who are entitled to vote have not voted in
elections conducted by special Indigenous-only representative institutions.
We should not conclude from this that
Indigenous Australians do value the legislatures and do not value the
Indigenous-only representative institutions. Voting is not the only meaningful
form of political participation.
Recent political activity by Indigenous
Australians has demonstrated how committed they are to increasing their
influence in Australia’s politics. Here I refer to the series of twelve First
Nations Regional Dialogues in 2016 and 2017 that culminated in the national
Indigenous assembly at Uluru in May 2017.
That admirable Indigenous political process
was a further Indigenous experiment in political representation. Let’s remember
how those assemblies were constituted. Unlike the NACC, the NAC and ATSIC, the
membership of these assemblies was not determined by voting but by
consultations among Indigenous organisations within each region.
These consultations were guided by the
following formula: 60% of each assembly had to come from First
Nations/traditional owner groups, 20% from community organisations and 20%
‘involving key individuals.’
The designers of these Indigenous assemblies
also drew on the non-Indigenous heritage. As the Referendum Council Report
explains, the assemblies were ‘modelled partly on the Constitutional Centenary
Foundation framework utilised through the 1990s to encourage debate on
constitutional issues in local communities and schools.’
The result was a deliberative process
involving ‘1200 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates – an average of
100 delegates from each Dialogue – out of a population of approximately 600,000
people nationally.’ The Referendum Council makes the following claim:
This is the most proportionately significant consultation
process that has ever been undertaken with First Peoples. Indeed, it engaged a
greater proportion of the relevant population than the constitutional
convention debates of the 1800s, from which First Peoples were excluded.
In short, if we care to notice it,
Indigenous Australians have recently been conducting a further experiment in
democratic process, and they may well be teaching the rest of us a lesson in
democracy. One of those lessons is that voting is not the only way that
Indigenous Australians wish to choose their representatives.
In conclusion, we are right to celebrate the
sixtieth anniversary of opening the Commonwealth voting process to Indigenous
Australians. And it is certainly in all our interests to value and defend the
voting system that we have. But let us not make the mistake of thinking that
voting is the only democratic way to choose representatives. When the
Australian Parliament sits down to design and legislate an Indigenous Voice, it
must bear in mind the very recent heritage of Indigenous experiments in
democratic process. The Final Report of the Indigenous Voice Co-Design process
draws on this heritage, and it invites us to consider options beyond the
conventional idea of Indigenous voters directly electing the members of the
national Voice.
We should take note. It is 60 years since
the Commonwealth Parliament legislated to end the exclusion of some Indigenous
Australians from voting in federal elections.
Timothy Rowse is Professor at
the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences and is a historian working
principally in the field of
Australian Indigenous Studies. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy
of Humanities and the Australian Social Science Academy, and a member of the
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. In 2003,
received a Centenary Medal for his work in Indigenous Studies.
Expanding
the Polis: the secret ballot and the Franchise Act 1902
Ben Jones
Good afternoon colleagues, it’s wonderful to
speak with you on beautiful Ngunawal and Ngambri country. I’d like to thank the
Australian Politics Studies Centre at the ANU who are currently hosting me as a
Visiting Fellow and the Parliamentary Library for hosting this great event. It
really is such a pleasure to share a panel with three distinguished political
historians whom I respect enormously and have learned a great deal from over
the years and continue to do so today. I was a bit daunted, however, when I
received the invitation about what exactly I could add to this discussion. The
two most prominent features of the 1902 Franchise Act are that it was an enormous
expansion of the electorate but even as it functioned to include women, its sad
corollary was to exclude First Nations people and I saw in the blurbs that
Professor Lake would be talking about female suffrage and Professor Rowse on
Indigenous suffrage and I certainly defer to both on those topics.
So what I’d like to do with my time is link
this, the 120th anniversary of the franchise act, to another piece of
legislation celebrating its 150th anniversary this year: the UK’s Ballot Act of
1872. And what I’d like to suggest is that the secret ballot and the franchise
act are connected in two ways. Firstly, because the secret ballot was seen as a
way of civilizing elections and stamping out the violence which was synonymous
with open or viva voca voting in the nineteenth century. This in turn,
at a time when even many advocates for women’s suffrage accepted gender
binaries and the concept of men and women’s spheres, was crucial in reimagining
elections as an event where men and women can take part.
The second link is that both Acts were the
result of a transnational network of ideas, particularly but not exclusively in
the English speaking world, and that while Australia put both secret voting and
white female suffrage in place decades before the UK, they were not so much
national achievements as progressive thinkers finding fertile soil in Australia
for democratic experiments that could then be used as an example for Britain,
the United States and the world. There is an image from a 1911 booklet with an
international and particularly British audience in mind that proudly notes that
part of the kindness of Australia is ‘suffrage for the adult’. So there
certainly was an element of national pride that Australia was the second
country to grant women the vote and the first to allow the right to stand for
parliament and this was perhaps enhanced because the campaign ran concurrently
with the campaign for Federation and the nationalist sentiment that accompanied
it but the intellectual tradition that Australian campaigners drew from
certainly had roots in the British world, and as Professor Lake demonstrates
convincingly in her book, Progressive New World, there was a vibrant
exchange of ideas, tactics, and indeed people with the US also.[13]
Concerns and criticisms of British elections
go back a long way. One painting from a four-part series by William Hogarth finished
in 1755 is simply titled ‘An Election’. A stinging critique of British
elections, Hogarth depicts them as corrupt, violent, inebriated affairs and in
this particular painting the infirmed, the insane and even the dead are being
brought forth to vote while a symbolic coach representing Britannia falls apart
in the background – not a particularly subtle metaphor. This contrasts sharply
with an image from Melbourne: though actually from the Victorian election of
1880, it is a good visual of the key features of the Australian version of
secret voting which was introduced in Victoria in 1856.
Secret voting certainly didn’t begin in
Australia, it goes back at least to ancient Athens, but the Australian version
of secret voting had two distinct features which are today ubiquitous in the
democratic world: first that the government would provide an official ballot
paper, and second that some kind of private compartment was provided for the
voter. These innovations were credited with severely limiting, if not ending,
the practice of ‘treating’, where voters were bribed with alcohol to vote a
certain way, as well as coercion from employers or from violent mobs when a
voter’s intentions were made public. In 1996 the poet Les Murray published a
work called My Ancestors and the Secret Ballot and it outlines the problems
with open voting in the early nineteenth century and finishes with the line, ‘The
polling booth will be a closet of prayer’.[14] That is quite appropriate imagery as many of the advocates of secret voting
spoke in almost religious terms of the sacredness of the vote. After its
introduction in Victoria one Irish observer noted the contrast with Britain:
there he said, an elector would run ‘a desperate gauntlet through corruption,
drunkenness, violence and uproar’. Here, he suggested, a voter walks ‘though a
smooth, private avenue’.[15]
So
these two innovations, today generally taken for granted, are what
differentiate the Australian version of secret voting and this is the version
that was pioneered in Victoria in 1856, hence rising to international fame as
the Victorian or Australian ballot – and there are records in the US of it
being called Kangaroo voting which I think is quite cute. Due to some fabulous
scholarship by Terry Newman, we now know that Tasmania also introduced it in
1856.[16] South Australia legislated it in 1856 but didn’t have a secret ballot election
until the following year and New South Wales followed suit in 1858. Queensland
had it in place from the start, separating from NSW in 1859.
So why was the development of the Australian
ballot significant for the passage of the Franchise Act nearly half a century
later? First, it changed the way elections were imagined. In the UK, the
Liberal MP for Bristol Francis Berkeley, took up the cause with incredible
persistence and put it forward unsuccessfully every year from 1847 to 1867. And
the language of his opponents almost always included the term ‘unmanly’. There
was a palpable, gendered dimension and the idealised Englishman was seen as
someone who openly states who he supports, and there was sometimes a sectarian
element also, with the private voting booth compared to a Catholic
confessional. After the success of the secret ballot in Australia, however,
attitudes began to shift across the political divide. Although Gladstone’s
Liberal government brought it in in the UK in 1872, support from Conservatives
was crucial. In a significant report, the Tasmanian governor, Charles Du Cane
who had been the Tory MP for North Essex and consistently voted against
Berkeley’s bill changed his mind based on his experience in Australia and
suggested that the ballot had transformed occasions of drunken violence to
‘perfect order and tranquillity’.[17] Or to use our chair, Professor Sawer’s term, they went from ‘free beer to
family festival’.[18]
Both the secret ballot and women’s suffrage
movements in Australia have long roots in the Enlightenment and have links to
the British radical tradition. Jeremy Bentham, the intellectual leader of the
philosophical radicals was a strong supporter of both; so too James Mill. The
latter’s famous son John Stuart Mill was also outspoken on women’s rights.
Following the wide extension of the franchise after the Reform Act of 1832,
there were enough calls to let women vote that parliament for the first time
felt the need to use the term ‘male persons’ to specifically exclude women.
This led to the first petition to parliament for women’s suffrage presented by
the radical MP Henry Hunt on behalf of Yorkshire woman Mary Smith and other
women who met the property qualification to vote. A postcard from 1908 depicts
the Peterloo Massacre. Hunt played a prominent role in Peterloo, arguing for
parliamentary reform, so the implication is that British women were still in
that same struggle 90 years later. Finally, it’s significant that the Chartist
movement of the 1840s included women and initially called for universal
suffrage along with secret ballot voting and other demands but ultimately
changed the call to just male suffrage, as a calculated political decision; but
certainly many Chartists supported both and in turn influenced debates in
Australia.
It certainly wasn’t a one-way street, as
radical ideas from Australia went back and influenced the metropole. Nor was it
a mere two-way street, as there was an active exchange of radical ideas and
intellectual material throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. As
Audrey Oldfield writes, ‘Ideas moved freely between America and Britain and the
yeast of feminist thought was fermenting in British intellectual society’.[19]
In Australia, the secret ballot and the
Franchise Act were attempts at expanding the polis and allowing more citizens
to take part in public life but this was accompanied by the drive to explicitly
exclude First Nations people. In 1900 Vida Goldstein used her popular journal, The
Australian Woman's Sphere, to argue for women’s votes at the federal level.
This had already been achieved in South Australia and Western Australia and the
assumption was that the federal vote would oblige the other four states to follow
suit. The October issue included a racist cartoon titled ‘Voters and Voteless’.[20]
The image was very much aimed at the male
lawmakers who would eventually draft the Franchise Act. It includes depictions
of various men who all have the vote: a drunk, a drug addict, a wife beater,
the homeless and the ignorant and also crude racial caricatures of a Chinese
man with an opium pipe and a shirtless, shoeless Aboriginal man holding a
boomerang and a bottle of alcohol. These men are contrasted with the educated
young white woman in the middle, book in hand, stating ‘but I may not be
trusted with the vote’. There is some parallel perhaps with the way the
Chartists dropped women’s suffrage for fear that it would jeopardise their
other goals and Australian campaigners for women’s suffrage seeking to assure
the public that they do not intend to include First Nations men or women.
The women’s movement had some supporters but
were ultimately unable to get the franchise included in the constitution. The
next goal then, was to have men elected who were sympathetic to their cause and
likely to pass a bill giving them the vote. But a particular concern was that
if voting rights were simply given to all adult British subjects, that would
include First Nations. Even supporters of women’s suffrage like William Lyne
stressed in parliament that the wording must, and I quote, ‘prevent the
franchise being given to a number of aborigines who are not, to say the least
of it, of the highest intelligence’.[21] There was particular opposition to First Nations getting the vote from
Queensland and Western Australian MPs and there was a sexist as well as racist
dimension as the prospect of First Nations women voting seemed to particularly
terrify the first parliament. If you read through the debates on the
Commonwealth Franchise Bill, it is littered with gendered, racial slurs. The
result, of course, was a special disqualification for ‘Aboriginal natives of
Australia’.
Passing the Franchise Act was part of the
struggle; the next step was proving the doubters wrong at an election and
showing that the sky would not fall in. In the lead up to the second federal
election, Goldstein highlights the importance of a secret vote. She wrote in
1903:
We should … do our utmost to make the women’s vote a power
for good. We would earnestly entreat all women to keep clear for the present
from party politics, to avoid all political organisations and machines offered
and managed solely by men, and to preserve as far as possible to the secrecy of
the ballot. The more ignorant men are as to how our votes will be cast, the
more chance is there that we can secure pledged support for just measures in
the interest not only of women and children, but also of the whole community …
as we vote so shall we reap.[22]
Early advocates for secret voting thought it
was needed to stop employers from coercing workers, and later conservative
supporters thought it was needed to stop powerful trade unions from pushing a
certain agenda, but in the aftermath of the Franchise Act was also seen as a
benefit for women to keep their voting intensions secret from male dominated
political parties. In Tasmania, Queensland, and Victoria women got the vote
after the Franchise Act so the 1903 election was an important experiment of
sorts. (Marian Sawer, Women and government in Australia).
Just as the successful implementation of
secret voting assuaged many of the fears in Britain about its implementation,
the success of the 1903 election in Australia was a powerful tool for British
suffragettes. There was an expectation in England that the Australian
experiment would produce radical results. As the Spectator noted in
1903, ‘At the time of the creation of the Australian Commonwealth it was noted
by many observers that the Federal Parliament would in all likelihood prove
more radical than any State government’.[23] While the nascent Labour Party saw significant gains, the election result was
hardly a radical parliament and as Clare Wright, James Keating, Marilyn Lake
and others have noted, Australians campaigners took an active role in the
movement in the UK and US and elsewhere.[24]
In 1902, Vida Goldstein attended the
International Woman Suffrage Conference in Washington and had the rather
surreal experience of leaving before the Franchise Act was passed and returning
after it was in place. She reflected on what it meant to be enfranchised and
wrote an open letter to her American sisters, that again highlights the
transnational character of the movement, the open exchange of ideas and the degree
to which the Franchise Act was a shared achievement. And again, I think there
is a precedent in secret voting, which was quickly passed in the Australian
colonies and then adopted in rapid succession in New Zealand in 1870, the UK in
1872, Canada in 1874 and most of the United States in the 1880s and 90s. It
seems clear that Goldstein and other Australian campaigners were both motivated
by their own success and conscious of the debt of gratitude they owed to
campaigners in various parts of the English speaking world. So I will give the
final word to Vida.
She wrote, ‘because we women in the Land of
the Southern Cross are reaping what England and America has sown, we are all
the more eager to help our English sisters and American cousins in their
struggle for freedom’.[25]
Dr Benjamin Jones: is
Senior Lecturer in History at the School of Education and the Arts, Central
Queensland University and Visiting Fellow at the Australian Politics Studies
Centre at the ANU. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Foundation
Fellow of the Australian Studies Institute, and has served as National
Secretary of the Australian Historical Association.