Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 The Citizenship Divide in Colonial Victoria
- 2 Under the Law: Aborigines and Islanders in Colonial Queensland
- 3 Is the Constitution to Blame?
- 4 The Commonwealth Defines the Australian Citizen (in association with Tom Clarke)
- 5 The States Confine the Aboriginal Non-citizen
- 6 The Slow Path to Civil Rights
- 7 From Civil to Indigenous Rights
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Is the Constitution to Blame?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 The Citizenship Divide in Colonial Victoria
- 2 Under the Law: Aborigines and Islanders in Colonial Queensland
- 3 Is the Constitution to Blame?
- 4 The Commonwealth Defines the Australian Citizen (in association with Tom Clarke)
- 5 The States Confine the Aboriginal Non-citizen
- 6 The Slow Path to Civil Rights
- 7 From Civil to Indigenous Rights
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The constitutional treatment of Australia's Aboriginal people is cryptic and enigmatic. The Commonwealth Constitution, which formally created the Australian nation and set up its federal system of government in 1901, mentioned Aboriginal people only twice in its 128 sections. Moreover, both instances were by way of exclusion: section 51 (26) excluded people of the Aboriginal race from the scope of the special race power given to the Commonwealth, while section 127 excluded Aboriginal natives from the census of national and State populations. The two sections read as follows:
s. 51. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to: …
(xxvi) The people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.
s. 127. In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.
What are we to make of such ‘negativism of the Constitution’, as Geoffrey Sawer termed it? For many today, as in 1967 when overwhelming majorities of more than 80 per cent of the people in every State voted in referendum to delete both exclusionary clauses from the Constitution, the original constitutional treatment of Aboriginal people seems surprising and even shocking.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Citizens without RightsAborigines and Australian Citizenship, pp. 58 - 83Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997