Voting Rights Of Australian Aborigines
The acquisition of voting rights by Indigenous Australians began in the mid-19th century but was not completed in every jurisdiction until the mid-20th century. Under Australia's Federal system, restrictions on Aborigines voting in State and Federal elections varied until the 1960s, during which decade all remaining restrictions were eradicated.
In 1962, the Menzies Government (1949-1966) amended the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to enable all Aboriginal Australians to enrol to vote in Australian Federal Elections. In 1965, Queensland became the last state to remove restrictions on Aborigines voting in state elections. The Holt Government's 1967 Referendum overwhelmingly endorsed automatic inclusion of Aboriginal people in the national census.
Indigenous Australians had first begun to acquire voting rights along with other adults living in Britain's Australian colonies from the mid-19th Century. Other than in Queensland and Western Australia, Aboriginal men were not excluded from voting alongside their non-indigenous counterparts in the Australian colonies and in South Australia Aboriginal women also acquired the vote from 1895 onward. Following Federation in 1901 however, new legislation restricted Aboriginal voting rights in Federal elections. For a time Aborigines could vote in some states and not in others, though from 1949, Aborigines could vote if they were ex-servicmen and by 1967 Aborigines had equal rights in all states and territories. In 1971, Neville Bonner became the first Aboriginal to sit in the Federal Parliament. In 1984, compulsory enrolment and voting in Commonwealth elections for Indigenous Australians came into effect.
Read more about Voting Rights Of Australian Aborigines: Commonwealth Elections, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words voting, rights, australian and/or aborigines:
“Common sense should tell us that reading is the ultimate weapon—destroying ignorance, poverty and despair before they can destroy us. A nation that doesn’t read much doesn’t know much. And a nation that doesn’t know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box and the voting booth...The challenge, therefore, is to convince future generations of children that carrying a book is more rewarding than carrying guns.”
—Jim Trelease (20th century)
“I argued that the chastity of women was of much more consequence than that of men, as the property and rights of families depend upon it.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“Beyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work—the only thing, after all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.”
—Vance Palmer (1885–1959)
“These are not the artificial forests of an English king,—a royal preserve merely. Here prevail no forest laws but those of nature. The aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)