Voting Rights
If you ask any Australian aborigines when they received the right to vote, they would say 1967 which was the year of the Referendum. The Referendum gave aborigines the right to be counted in the censes and among other things, but it did not give the aborigines the right to vote. They actually already had the right to vote. The right to vote dates back to 1895 where all aboriginal men and women over the age of 21 were able to vote. This was the case throughout all of Australia with the exception of Queensland and Western Australia. Commonwealth officials got very tough. They came to believe that no Aborigines had Commonwealth voting rights. Besides refusing new enrollments, they began, illegally, to take away the rights of people who had been enrolled since the first election in 1901. It was not until the 1940s that anyone began to battle for aborigines' political rights. Various lobby groups took up their cause and in 1949 the Chifley Labor government passed an act to confirm that all those who could vote in their States could vote for the Commonwealth.