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Thousands of Indigenous prisoner’s lose the right to vote
Issue 97 - 26 Jan 2006
NATIONAL: Under new laws introduced to parliament in December and likely to come into force in the coming months, nearly 15,000 sentenced prisoners will be stripped of the right to vote.
Aboriginal Australians make up around 3,000 of that number, at 22 percent of the national prison population.
The new rules come in a package of changes to the federal electoral laws that will make it harder for people to enrol to vote and encourage donations to political parties.
But the move to disenfranchise prisoners, which has caused barely a ripple on the political landscape, has outraged their friends on the outside. Justice Action, a small prisoner advocacy outfit in Sydney, is vowing to launch a High Court challenge to the laws once they are passed, but it is unlikely to hold water.
In Australia, voting rights are not enshrined in the constitution or a bill of rights, said Dr Graeme Orr, an expert on electoral law at Griffith University in Queensland.
“It’s one area where the High Court has always followed the parliamentary sovereignty line,” he said.
But a court case would raise the profile of the issue regardless of the outcome.
Once the laws are passed, prisoners are unlikely to win back their voting privileges in a hurry.
“It’s part of Labor Party policy to enfranchise prisoners ... (but) I can't see a Beazley government going to war on this,” Dr Orr said.
Justice Action will nonetheless flood parliamentarians next month with letters demanding a rethink.
“There is no evidence that disenfranchising prisoners deters crime or assists in rehabilitation,” spokesman Brett Collins said.
“It is more likely to increase alienation and disengagement from mainstream society and any sense of civic responsibility.”
Most of Australia’s 20,000 prisoners serving sentences, who can currently vote if they are in for less than three years, will be released before a standard political term ends, Mr Collins argues.
In June last year, there were 25,400 prisoners in Australia, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). But more than 5,000 of these were on remand and would not be affected by the changes.
Indigenous people and men are grossly over-represented in the prison population.
The imprisonment rate among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is 13 times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous Australians.
These anomalies could form a likely basis for a legal challenge to the government’s laws.
Dr Orr said the changes could be seen to indirectly discriminate against Indigenous people, who make up 22 percent of prison population.
“It’s a symbolic issue. It just seems very petty to deny prisoners a vote,” he said.
But advocates of the plan say it’s not radical.
“If the community... has judged an individual to have so offended against society’s laws that they should forfeit their... freedom... then it seems strange that they should retain their right to vote,” former Special Minister of State Eric Abetz said in October. - AAP
 
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