What Did the 1967 Referendum Change—and What Did It Leave Unchanged?

Australia, One Record at a Time · Season One, Article 6

On 27 May 1967, Australian voters answered two referendum questions. The first, concerning the relationship between the numbers of members in the Senate and House of Representatives, was defeated. The second proposed removing two constitutional references concerning Aboriginal people. It received a Yes vote of 90.77 per cent and carried in all six states. It remains the largest affirmative vote in a federal referendum.

Such a decisive result readily becomes a simple story: Australians supposedly gave First Nations people the vote, admission to the Census or citizenship on that day. None of those propositions appeared in the legal text. The referendum deleted words from section 51(xxvi) and repealed section 127 of the Constitution. If symbolic meaning is substituted for legal content, commemoration replaces understanding. Yet to say that the vote “only changed two lines” would underestimate the institutional opening created by decades of political organisation.

Understanding the referendum requires two scales at once: what the ballot authorised precisely, and why campaigners invested that change with broader hopes.

The two constitutional changes

Section 51 lists subjects on which the Commonwealth Parliament may legislate. Paragraph (xxvi) permitted special laws for the people of a race but excluded “the aboriginal race in any State”. The 1967 amendment removed that exception, enabling the Commonwealth Parliament to make laws concerning Aboriginal people in the states.

Section 127 said that “aboriginal natives” should not be counted when reckoning the numbers of the Commonwealth, a state or another part of the Commonwealth. Its repeal ended a constitutional command to exclude Aboriginal people from population calculations used for matters including representation and federal finance.

The changes did not transfer all Aboriginal affairs from the states to the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth acquired concurrent, not exclusive, power, while states retained extensive responsibilities. Nor did the new power require legislation to benefit First Nations people. Section 51(xxvi) remained a power structured around race, and the direction of its use depended on Parliament, government, courts and political pressure.

“The Commonwealth may now act” is therefore different from “the Commonwealth must act”, and further still from “the problem has been solved”. Constitutional change altered the field of possibility and responsibility. Laws, budgets, agencies and implementation still had to alter daily life.

The referendum did not grant voting rights

The most familiar misconception is that Aboriginal people first obtained the federal vote in 1967. Parliament had legislated in 1962 to allow all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults to enrol for federal elections. Queensland became the last state to remove its restriction in 1965. The referendum did not amend voting provisions.

It also did not suddenly transform Aboriginal people from “flora and fauna” into citizens. No federal or state “Flora and Fauna Act” classified Aboriginal people as plants and animals. The story may seek to convey the dehumanising character of protection regimes, but it replaces real legal history with a memorable myth. In doing so, it obscures the specific laws and practices that controlled residence, wages, marriage, movement and children.

The referendum did not itself provide equal wages, social security, anti-discrimination law or land rights. Those changes have their own legislation, judgments and movements, reached at different times. Compressing all of them into 1967 removes both the people who won those changes and the struggles that continued after the vote.

Correcting the mythology does not diminish the referendum. It returns credit to an accurate history of action. A democratic event does not need an incorrect legal claim in order to matter.

Had Aboriginal people never been counted before?

The description that the referendum “allowed Aboriginal people to be counted in the Census” also needs care. Section 127 required exclusion from particular constitutional population calculations. It did not mean governments had never gathered demographic information about Aboriginal people. Early Censuses recorded some people according to administrative ideas of ancestry, while state governments, protection boards and missions carried out many other counts.

The issue is not merely whether a number existed, but what the number was for and how people were classified. A colonial administration could document a population in detail for the purpose of control while excluding that population from calculations of parliamentary representation and national membership. Recording and recognising are not the same act.

Repeal of section 127 had real legal and symbolic importance: the Constitution no longer ordered the nation to exclude Aboriginal people when reckoning “the people”. More complete population data still required Census design, self-identification, administrative cooperation and trust. Removing the clause could not automatically produce accurate statistics.

Where did 90.77 per cent come from?

The result did not appear automatically when society awakened. In the 1930s, William Cooper, Jack Patten, William Ferguson, Pearl Gibbs and other organisers had already made citizenship, Commonwealth responsibility and representation national questions. After the war, state organisations and Aboriginal leaders continued to petition, meet, publish and lobby. The Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, later FCAATSI, connected campaigns across regions from 1958. Faith Bandler, Joe McGinness and many others devoted years to organisation.

Federal voting reform in 1962, the Yirrkala bark petitions in 1963 and the Freedom Ride in 1965 made racial inequality harder to dismiss as a remote administrative matter. The major political parties supported the referendum. No official No case was prepared for the second question, while media and civic organisations promoted Yes. The large majority was produced through networks, persuasion and accumulated political work, not by a slogan acting alone.

This history explains why the referendum’s public meaning exceeded its technical provisions. Many voters were not making a finely differentiated judgment about constitutional powers. They were endorsing equality, national belonging and Commonwealth responsibility. Campaigners treated amendment as a means of breaking through state protection systems and compelling a national government to answer. The legal question was narrow; the political mandate was broad.

Broad expectations, however, do not write themselves into a Constitution. The government established the Council for Aboriginal Affairs and an Office of Aboriginal Affairs, and the Commonwealth role expanded. Practical change remained slow and contested. The power later supported different forms of Commonwealth action, including progressive measures and coercive or paternalistic ones. Empowering government is not the same as guaranteeing rights.

How the Yes case became an archive

Because the principal parliamentary parties supported the second proposal, no official No case was distributed to electors. The surviving Yes case, ballot papers, campaign leaflets, Cabinet files, electoral returns and activists’ papers allow us to compare the ways government and movement described the same amendment.

Official records often emphasised removal of an outdated discrimination and improved administrative coordination. Movement material spoke of equality, dignity, national responsibility and living conditions. Electoral returns supply precise numbers but cannot, by themselves, tell us what each voter understood. Campaign publications show what supporters wanted voters to understand but cannot prove that everyone voted for the same reason.

The archive has to be assembled. The legal text defines direct effect. Administrative files show what governments did with the authority. First Nations publications and personal accounts preserve who forced the change and whether their demands were realised. Any one source by itself produces a story too orderly for the event.

Change and continuity are not opposing answers

The referendum changed the Constitution. It removed two explicit exclusions, enabled Commonwealth legislation concerning Aboriginal people and ended constitutionally required population exclusion. It also demonstrated that an overwhelming majority of voters would reject an overt discrimination and accept First Nations affairs as a national political responsibility.

It did not confer the vote or citizenship, guarantee equal outcomes, recognise Indigenous sovereignty, establish land rights or a treaty, or create a constitutional protection against racial discrimination. First Nations people continued to confront unequal state systems, poverty, health disparities, child removal and policies designed without their control.

Both accounts are true. Institutional change often does not leap from absence to completion. It alters who may act, who must answer and where the next contest occurs. The referendum opened a door to Commonwealth action and national responsibility. It did not inscribe justice on everything that would pass through that door.

The best way to commemorate 1967 is therefore neither to repeat a comforting but inaccurate myth nor to declare the vote insignificant because it did not achieve everything. The ballot’s exact content, the movement’s expansive purpose and the uneven results of implementation belong in one account. Only then does the record Yes vote cease to be a full stop announcing that the nation solved the problem. It returns to what it was: a critical authorisation within a much longer struggle.

Primary record and further sources

• National Archives of Australia: the 1967 referendum fact sheet, provisions and record series
• Parliamentary Library: chronology of First Nations treaties, recognition and representation
• Parliamentary Education Office: the 1967 referendum
• AIATSIS: 1967 referendum sources and First Nations campaigners

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