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120th Anniversary of the 1902 Franchise and Electoral Acts: proceedings of a Parliamentary Library Symposium

24 March 2023

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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.

Contents

Introduction
Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902: ‘She votes in Australia’
The Aboriginal franchise
Expanding the Polis: the secret ballot and the Franchise Act 1902

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.

[1] See John Uhr, ‘Measuring Parliaments against the Spence Standard’, in Graeme Orr, Bryan Mercurio and George Williams (eds), Realising Democracy: Electoral Law in Australia (Sydney: Federation Press), 2003.

[2] See Marian Sawer, ‘Enrolling the People: Electoral Innovation in the New Australian Commonwealth’, in Graeme Orr, Bryan Mercurio and George Williams (eds), Realising Democracy: Electoral Law in Australia (Sydney: Federation Press), 2003.

[3] Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass) 2019), 3.

[4] Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The history of Australian feminism, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999), 49-59.

[5] Lake, 49,87; Lake Progressive New World, 6-8. 42-44.

[6] Lake, Getting Equal, 28, 76.

[7] Lake, Getting Equal, 91-2.

[8] Lake, Getting Equal, 51.

[9] Lake, Getting Equal, 49.

[10] Lake, Progressive New World, 136-40, 154.

[11] Marilyn Lake ‘State Socialism for Australian Mothers: Andrew Fisher’s Radical Maternalism in its International and Local Contexts’, Labor History, 102, 2012.

[12] Lake, Progressive New World, 158-162.

[13] Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Harvard University Press, 2020).

[14] Les Murray, Collected Poems (Black Incorporated, 2006), 433.

[15] Marian Sawer, ‘Peacemakers for the World’, in Marian Sawer ed., Elections: Full, Free, and Fair (Federation Press, 2001), 8.

[16] Terry Newman, ‘Tasmania and the Secret Ballot’, Australian Journal of Politics & History 49(1), 2003, 93-101.

[17] Edwin Jaggard, ‘Britain, Australia and the Secret Ballot Act of 1872’, History 104(360), 2019, 223.

[18] Marian Sawer, ‘Inventing the Nation Through the Ballot Box’, Papers on Parliament No. 37, November 2001. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/pops/pop37/sawer

[19] Audrey Oldfield, Women’s Suffrage in Australia: A gift or a struggle? (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10.

[20] ‘Voters and Voteless’, Australian Women’s Sphere, 1(2), October 1900, 1.

[21] Australia, House of Representatives, Debates, 24 April 1902, Historic Hansard. http://historichansard.net/hofreps/1902/19020424_reps_1_9/.

[22] Australian Woman’s Sphere 3(38), 10 October 1903, 358.

[23] (The Spectator; London Vol. 91, Iss. 3939, (Dec 26, 1903): 1118).

[24] Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World (Text Publishing, 2019); James Keating, Distant Sisters: Australasian women and the international struggle for the vote, 1880-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2020); Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Harvard University Press, 2020).

[25] ‘Women and the Vote’, Women’s Web. http://www.womensweb.com.au/Women&theVote.html

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