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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (4 June) . . Page.. 1855 ..

MS GALLAGHER (continuing):

indigenous parliamentarian, and Marion Scrymour was elected to the Northern Territory parliament last year.

The history of the right to vote highlights the many ways indigenous Australians were locked out of meaningful political participation. In remembering 18 June as the 40th anniversary of the right to vote being granted universally to indigenous Australians, we can celebrate the beginning of indigenous Australians and non-indigenous Australians coming together as equal participants in democracy. At the same time, we should reflect on the struggle that was required before this basic right was extended to indigenous Australians and recognise how far we still have to go.

MR HUMPHRIES (Leader of the Opposition) (4.06): Ms Gallagher describes this as a significant but relatively obscure anniversary on the Australian political calendar, and I suppose that is true. It is a day which perhaps is more significant in its acknowledgment today than it would have been many years ago. Certainly, one wonders what publicity the passage of the legislation by the Menzies government in 1962 had at the time-whether it was reported at all, whether it was reported positively or whether it was treated with a little bit of indignation in some quarters of the media or by the popular commentators of the day.

As Ms Gallagher notes, this was a significant event, because for the first time it provided a right for all indigenous people in this country to vote in Commonwealth elections. As Ms Gallagher points out, it was not by this act that all Aboriginal people were entitled to vote in the state elections. As I understand it, in 1902 the Commonwealth passed its first Electoral Act, which specifically excluded indigenous people from the right to vote, and then in 1949 the Commonwealth granted indigenous Australians who had a right to vote at state level the right to vote also in Commonwealth parliamentary elections and referendums.

As of 1949, this included Aboriginal people who lived in New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania. It also included those Aboriginal people who had completed military service. As of 1962, approximately half of the Australian Aboriginal population were entitled to cast a vote at state elections, and at Commonwealth elections if they had the right to vote at state elections. But in other states that was not yet the case.

During 1962, the year in which legislation was passed to provide the right for Aboriginal people to vote in Commonwealth elections, two other jurisdictions-namely, Western Australia and the Northern Territory-extended state voting rights to indigenous Australians. It was not, however, until 1965, three years later, that Queensland granted indigenous people the right to vote in state elections.

Ironically, according to my research, by 1965 there was no impediment to Aboriginal people voting anywhere in Australia except the Australian Capital Territory, where, as far as I can see, there was no provision for them to vote. I am not sure when that problem was rectified. Certainly by 1949 it had been rectified in approximately half the states of Australia and by 1965 in all the others, except for the Australian Capital Territory.

At that stage it was not compulsory for Aboriginal people to vote in federal elections or state elections. There was only an entitlement to register and to vote if they so chose to do. I think today the voluntariness inherent in this and another provision which I will

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