Voting Rights of Australian Aborigines

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.