Voting Rights and the Image of the Nomad.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 January 1998
• Author: Ambrose, Kurt

Introduction

It is a feature of the literature surrounding Aboriginal identity that Aboriginal agency is most obvious and most easily detected in the period since 1967. For reasons of opportunism and imported practices and influences, the political possibilities since 1967 lend themselves to mobilisation around identity. It is often asserted that before 1967 Aboriginal politics was more concerned with issues of citizenship and the status and rights that citizenship entails. So before 1967, the story proceeds, Aborigines were either careful not to, or did not have the ideological means at their disposal to, challenge the nation-state and its ideological practices of assimilation.(1)

At first glance, the issue of voting rights fits neatly into this narrative surrounding Aboriginal identity. It is ostensibly concerned with the entry of Aborigines into the nation and endowing them with formal political rights. For all intents and purposes it can be cast as an assimilationist strategy of the nation-state. To be sure, this is how it was conceived by the state. But the debates and the inquiry into voting rights yield more than this. The ambiguous existence of Aborigines within the nation-state meant that the state's conception of voting rights did not go unchallenged, and because of this voting rights become the terrain for the intersection of assimilation, citizenship and identity discourses.

The aim of this paper is to examine the debates surrounding the Select Committee on Voting Rights of Aborigines and the evidence gathered by that committee in order to demonstrate how Aborigines were able to subvert the dominant discourses of assimilation and citizenship through which voting rights were debated. As it will be shown, voting rights were conceived of by the Commonwealth Government from within the discourse of assimilation--the discourse it used to mediate its relationship with Aborigines. Citizenship discourse posed a challenge to the policy of assimilation. While assimilation promised equality of rights after `upliftment', arguments conceived within the discourse of citizenship premised on free and equal individuals demanded it immediately. These discourses, while standing in contradistinction to one another, formed the dialectic through which voting rights were construed. The problem, however, is that they did not allow for Aboriginal identity on its own terms. Assimilation created its own version of the `aboriginal' while citizenship discourse silenced difference.

The image of the `nomad'(2) is incorporated into the discourse of assimilation. Assimilation discourse reduces Aboriginality to the regressive image of the primitive, childlike, unsophisticated, illiterate, communal, yet cunning, Aboriginal subject which needs uplifting from the primitive state before it can be granted formal equality in Australian society. Aboriginality is thus juxtaposed to the progressive, modern, individuated European subject who embodies the Australian nation. Aborigines, so constructed, had to divest themselves of the vestiges of their culture (real or imagined) and conform to the particularities of the dominant national culture. Citizenship was reserved for those who it was deemed qualified in this regard. Assimilation thus held out the promise of the universal right of citizenship but it was withheld.

Because voting rights in regards to Aborigines were conceived by the state in assimilation discourse, Aborigines had to be assessed as to their abilities to appreciate this privilege. A Select Committee on Voting Rights of Aborigines (hereafter Select Committee) was established, and even though part of its terms of reference allowed for no conditions and qualification to be placed upon the right, the very fact that there needed to be an inquiry presupposed at least a degree Aboriginal inability. But `nomads' pushed beyond the purview of the state could not be interviewed. Instead, the image of the `nomad', the quintessential Aboriginal `other', shadowed the debate on voting rights and the evidence collected by the Select Committee.

Citizenship discourse presupposes an equality of status between individuals, and between those individuals vis a vis the state. It usually denotes belonging to a national community in which individuals share the same legal obligations and rights. This discourse of rights was at the disposal of those individuals and organisations opposed to the assimilation policies of the Commonwealth and State Governments. I am not alluding here to the specific category of citizenship operating in Australia;(3) I am suggesting, however, that citizenship discourse and the language and imagery it invokes were an attractive and effective framework in which to couch arguments against the Government's assimilation stance. Citizenship discourse challenged assimilation because it cannot settle for discriminatory practices but, as it presupposes a racially/culturally `neutral' subject, it does not provide a space for identity. In citizenship discourse Aboriginality is either ignored or relegated to temporary circumstantial disadvantages which are shared by members of the dominant community. So how then are Aborigines able to talk of identity and difference?

When Aboriginal witnesses to the Select Committee did speak, they were invited to speak through the dominant discourses. Aborigines, however, did not always keep within the parameters of these discourses when speaking of their circumstances and their difference. When Aboriginal witnesses speak, I will contend, they speak from within the dualism between the Australian nation and the image of the `other' posited by assimilation discourse, but the ambiguity and ambivalence of this position allows for a challenge to the state's and dominant culture's autonomy over their creation. As will be explained, the very act of speaking from the shadow cast by the image of the unreachable and unassimilable nomad is a challenge to this discursive space created by the discourse of assimilation.

This paper will illustrate how the two dominant discourses used in the voting rights debates and inquiry, namely assimilation and citizenship discourses, dealt with Aboriginal identity and Aboriginality, before it demonstrates how some Aboriginal witnesses were able to speak outside of the parameters of these discourses and, in so doing, challenge their dominance and silencing strategies.

Origins of the Select Committee on Voting Rights of Aborigines

The Select Committee on Voting Rights of Aborigines was set up in April 1961 to complement a review of the Commonwealth Electoral Act (1918-1953). The Menzies government had decided to make minor amendments to the postal voting procedures and the ordering of candidates on the ballot paper as part of the review of the legislation. Although pressured by the Labor Opposition, it had refused to amend the section pertaining to Aboriginal enrolment, but decided instead to establish a Select Committee to look into the matter. The section the Labor Party wanted amended or struck down was section 39(5) of the Act, which read:

(aa) An Aboriginal native of Australia is not entitled to enrolment ... unless he- (I) is entitled under the law of the State in which he resides to be enrolled as an elector of that State and, upon enrolment, to vote at elections for the more numerous House of the Parliament of that State or, if there is only one House of the Parliament of that State, for that House; or (II) is or has been a member of the Defence force. This section was inserted by the Chifley government in 1949 after it was brought to the attention of the parliament in 1946 that Aborigines in Victoria

... although educated, entitled to exercise a vote at State elections, and liable to municipal taxes, are not eligible to vote at Commonwealth Elections.(4) Prior to amendment in 1949, section 39 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act read:

No aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or islands of the Pacific, except New Zealand, shall be entitled to have his name placed on the electoral roll, unless so entitled under section 41 of the Constitution.(5) The original section 39 represented a compromise worked out by the first Parliament which divided over whether to keep the franchise uniform, and thus allow all Aborigines to vote and in so doing enfranchising those in states where they were not so entitled, or limit the franchise to those who already had it. The reliance on section 41 of the Constitution was suggested by the then member for North Melbourne, Henry Bourne Higgins. Section 41, according to the work of Stretton and Finnimore, was originally in the Constitution to guarantee the vote for women who were so entitled in South Australia before federation. It was feared that South Australian women would vote against federating if their right was not guaranteed and, in so doing, endanger that state's chances of joining the federation. Section 41 hence reads:

No adult person who has or acquires the right to vote at elections for the more numerous House of the Parliament of a State shall, while the right continues, be prevented by any law of the Commonwealth from voting at elections for either House of the Parliament of the Commonwealth. At first glance this seems to be what the Commonwealth Government enshrined in its legislation in 1949. This perception, however, could not be further from the real story. As the member for Balaclava had found in 1946, and as Stretton and Finnimore uncovered, the interpretation of this section of the Constitution by pre-eminent public servants charged with its administration was to systematically disenfranchise Aborigines before 1949 in those states were they had the state franchise. According to Robert Garran, the solicitor-general in 1916, only those Aborigines who had acquired the right before the Commonwealth established its franchise in 1902 qualified under section 41. This did not extend to Aborigines as a class of...