Today is the fortieth anniversary of the biggest ever yes vote in an Australian Constitutional referendum. But what exactly were people voting for? One interesting argument of two recent books, a revised edition of The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution by Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, and Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public by Murray Goot and Tim Rowse, is that confusion was as common then as it is now.
In the 1960s, many people argued that Constitutional change was necessary to give Aboriginal Australians citizenship, and that’s the interpretation still being put on it today. On ABC TV’s Insiders this morning we were told:
As hard as it is to believe in retrospect, just four decades ago, Aborigines were not counted as citizens.
Hard to believe, indeed, as all Aborigines had been citizens since 1948, and many (the ‘half-castes’) much earlier. Yet the citizenship claim was also made in the opening few minutes of tonight’s SBS documentary Vote Yes for Aborigines (though contradicted later in the programme). The common belief that Aborigines were given the vote in the referendum isn’t right either, and even the idea that they weren’t counted in the census isn’t strictly correct – the Bureau of Statistics did count them, but the number was ignored for certain purposes.
So what did the referendum change? It gave the Commonwealth power to make ‘special laws’ for Aborigines, a power previously held only by the States, and removed the provision that Aborigines not be counted in ‘reckoning the number of the people of the Commonwealth or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth’.
That the referendum didn’t obviously represent any threat to the interests of white Australians presumably helps explain why nearly 91% of the electorate supported it. Only 4% of those polled in a Morgan survey of the time (reported in Divided Nation?) predicted any negative effects – including ‘drinking’; with far more seeing positives such as improved conditions, housing and education (38%) and ‘equal rights as citizens’ (22%).
In the common understanding of the referendum, both books point out that it sidestepped issues that have at other times created resistance in public opinion. In the post-war period, there was very little objection to Aborigines being part of the Australian political community as individuals, and the idea of formal legal equality of the races was widely supported by the 1960s. To the extent that the referendum was seen as correcting anomalies in this regard, it was uncontroversial. But as Divided Nation? makes clear, however, there is less support for proposals that distinguish Aborigines as a group permanently apart, such as land rights or a treaty.
Possibly the very success of campaigns based around the idea of racial equality has been an obstacle to later Indigenous campaigns, which are seen as advocating race-based laws. That’s not to say that it was a mistake to make this argument. The popularity of the idea of racial equality perhaps obscured understanding of the potential implications of giving the federal parliament power to make ‘special laws’ for Aboriginal Australians that might, if fully comprehended, have led to a lower ‘Yes’ vote.