The value of a vote

Many things in life can leave a person disillusioned – the loss of a loved one, the breakdown of a relationship, losing a job, losing a child are all traumas with which most people can empathize; but the disillusionment that comes from realizing that the democracy in which you live is a veneer papering the surface of a fractured substrate with a progressively worsening stability is perhaps one of the greater upheavals to confront as an adult.

One of my vivid memories, so vivid that to this day I can see, feel and hear it, is of sitting on my father’s shoulders. From this vantage point I saw the world not only as it should be, but as I believed it to be until well into my adult years, a place where everyone is welcomed. Ethnicity, colour, gender, race, all were irrelevant. The vision splendid that this small girl saw almost 40 years ago is not the reality I see today.

I am not the only one who has seen this democratic dream, where “all men are created equal”, nor am I the only one to see the dream give way to reality, but I am perhaps one of the more disillusioned women of British heritage in this country because of what I have seen, heard and read in the past several years. In Melbourne’s western suburbs I was considered fortunate to be from a stable home where English was the only language spoken and ESL (English as a Second Language) classes were the norm. By the sheer luck of being born into a Christian, white household, I fell within the centre, even when I was the oddity in a school populated by the children of immigrants. I have never feared for my safety due my race or colour and whilst I wish we were not limited by national boundaries I nevertheless call myself Australian, although I still identify with my British and Irish heritage.

There’s a stark contrast between my experiences and those of Ms. King, Lucinda McMillan, Sally Glass and many others. The children of Aborigines, some removed from their families simply because of the colour of their skin, were branded at birth, taken by government officials who believed that a black parent could not raise a child to be a responsible, independent, socially well-adjusted adult; taken because a white child of a black parent could be assimilated into the European population. Eventually the black population would die out and Australia would be left with a homogeneous society of robots, all of whom looked the same, thought the same. Until 1967, Indigenous Australians had no right to vote in federal elections. They were not allowed to share a beer with a white mate in many bars or to eat at the same restaurants. Whatever other measure you may apply, by denying Aborigines the right to vote they were in effect non-people in the eyes of the Commonwealth, a populace whose opinions did not matter. Implicit in being granted the vote was the assumption that Australia’s Indigenous people are equal and hence, entitled to the same opportunities as non-Indigenous Australians.

The Freedom Rides that rose out of Sydney University in 1965 led by such suffragists as Arrente man Charles Perkins and former New South Wales Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Spigelman, set in place the events that would lead to what they must have assumed would be the last major hurdle in achieving equality between the white man and his black compatriot:

Captured on tape was the vice-president of the Walgett Returned Service League Club who said he would never allow an Aboriginal to become a member. Such evidence was beamed into the living rooms of Australians with the evening news. It exposed an endemic racism. Film footage shocked city viewers, adding to the mounting pressure on the government.

Forty-seven years later, Australia seems no better off for the altruistic motives of Perkins and the like. Ms King, indecently assaulted by the Inquisitor in public at Canberra’s Waldorf Café in 2005, remains a victim denied justice because of the colour of her skin. The non-Indigenous thug who assaulted her, due to a fleeting moment of glory claims the mantel of hero, when in reality he cowers behind the influence of others who have corrupted their own claims to greatness by protecting him. Similarly Lucinda McMillan, also assaulted in a public venue, has been ignored. In both cases the women attempted to report the assaults to the Australian Federal Police on more than one occasion through alternate channels and both were either ignored or threatened by the police themselves. Aware of his protected status, the Inquisitor has been emboldened and enabled to repeat his attacks, the true number of his victims incalculable.

Allowing such racist and sexist behaviour sets in place a culture that undermines a community’s trust in its law enforcement and leadership. Add to these events the seemingly endless list of sexual assault cases arising out of the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra, to which the Australian Federal Police (AFP) as the arbiters of jurisdictional law enforcement, must have turned a blind eye. I can never again walk through the streets of our national capital and be completely sure that I am safe. This small territory that is little more than a country town like Walgett in 1965, seems to have become the seat of racial and misogynistic narrow-mindedness from which the most influential arm of Australian diplomacy extends – the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Defence Force Academy. These are the people we send to serve and protect the women of countries struggling to find their own democracy. God, Allah, Buddha and Shiva help them!

Underpinning the premise of the women’s suffragist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the Freedom Rides of the 1960s was the concept that everyone has the right to express an opinion, to be treated with respect and to be afforded the protection and benefits of an impartial rule of law. Here at the start of the twenty-first century I am distressed to discover that our forebears have failed. The vision my father painted for me is a faded original in desperate need of restoration and revival. I have learned that all votes are not worth the same, for the vote does not carry with it the same implied entitlements. Some votes are, quite simply, worthless.

The Indigenous people of this country, the women of this country need the rest of us to stand up and claim for them their rights. It is time for a new suffragist movement, one that takes to the heart what this country proclaims to be its truth – equality of race, colour, gender and creed. It is time that this country put its money where its mouth is and set the rights of both women and Indigenous Australians in the concrete of the rule of law that underpins our democracy. It is time that the full franchise of democracy was paid to each and every Australian and that those who have undermined the tenets of this nation were held to account.

Perhaps it’s time for a new Freedom Ride.