Deputation of bush workers voting rights.

*THE WORKER*

BRISBANE APRIL 20, 1895.

The Editorial Mill.

Our Motto: “Socialism in our time.”

The deputation of bush workers might just as well plead with a wolf to let go the throat of a stricken lamb as ask Premier Nelson to grant a privilege which will result in the Premiership and £1300 a year passing into other and more impartial hands. Mr. Nelson is the president of the lately resuscitated Patriotic League, the aims of which are to prevent both bush and town workers from obtaining the franchise. Mr. Nelson is a prominent ex-pastoralist and associate of pastoralists. He is a money-lender with all the virtues of his usurious class. He it was who a year ago suggested to the squatters that they that they should reduce the wages of their employ'es; and less than a year ago formulated a scheme whereby the pastoralists in combination could so arrange station work that instead of over 6000 men being required, 2000 would be able to do the work. The remaining 4000 would then compete with the 2000 for employment, and thus lower wages to a freedom of contract level likely to find favour in the eyes of King Greed.

Mr. Nelson has only one political virtue in our opinion, and that is he is an open enemy who tells the workers in straight, plain language that he has no sympathy with them, that he knows if they had votes they would use them against him and his party, and that so long as it is in his power he will keep them political outlaws. If, after assuming this candid if inebriated attitude, the wage earners who have votes continue to cast them for Mr. Nelson and his pestiferous colleagues, the workers have no one to blame but themselves.

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Mr. Nelson says that no man should have a vote unless he has a stake in the country. A stake in the country, indeed! Would that Dalrymple, the man of definitions, had supplied Mr. Nelson's audience with an explanation of the phrase! Interpreted according to the provisions of the Queensland Electoral Act it means the ownership of a freehold estate of the clear value of £100, or the holding of a license to depasture; or residence for the preceding six months; or householding for the preceding six months. These two latter as well as the former are in the case of the bushmen matters of impossibility. How can a man who only obtains an average of four months' work in a year remain six months in one electorate, and how is it in the power of a man whose wages do not average more than £60 per year to save out of that sum the necessary £100 to buy a “stake in the country,” or pay £10 for a leasehold qualifying him to vote? The questions are nearly as absurd as the Premier's asking men who only average £60 per year “where were their wives?”

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A stake in the country! The logic of the demand that a man shall have a stake in the country has never yet been proved by the peg-vote party. One of Mr. Nelson's colleagues says that “the test of a man's ability and capacity to acquire and to keep that which he has is the property he has.” This statement was made in the Legislative assembly during a debate on Electoral Reform, and was one of the few “arguments” advanced by the Conservative Party; but the orator might just as well have said that the test of the size of a man's feet is the boots he wears, for however true the statement may be it cannot be taken as the test of a man's ability to cast a sensible vote. A man who runs a crooked race “consultation” may, with his ill – gotten gains, buy a hundred stakes in the country; a middleman who buys farm produce at 2d. per lb. And retails it at a shilling may, by thus robbing both farmer and consumer, be in a position to “lay house to house and field to field;” the grocer and the baker who sell light-weight sugar and light-weight bread, the milkman who waters milk and the publicans who worse than water grog may with the money they thus “acquire” purchase splendid £100 building sites in various electorates; the drapers and clothiers who have their goods made up in Brisbane sweating dens (pants 10s. a dozen, and shirts 1s. 6d. a dozen) may grow wealthy and show great capacity to acquire and ability to keep that which they have acquired, but the WORKER respectfully submits that although on the Queensland electoral rolls there are the names of many of the light-weight fraternity there are thousands of honest men in the Queensland bush, homeless and almost moneyless, whose names are not on the roll, who could be relied on to give their votes in the true interests of the country of their birth or adoption when the light-weight brotherhood would sell it to the highest bidder.

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The Premier's close contact with Mr. Tozer has evidently increased his admiration for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He (the Premier) declared to the Longreach deputation that electoral privileges now existing in Queensland were amongst the most liberal in the world. As a matter of fact amongst the Australasian colonies, only one has more illiberal electoral rights than Queensland, and that is Chain Gang Tasmania. In South Australia every man or woman (even new arrivals in the colony) of the age of 21 years, being a natural born or naturalised subject is entitled to at once have his (or her) name placed upon the electoral roll, and after his name has been the electoral roll for a period of six months he is entitled to vote. No man or woman is permitted to have more than one vote, plural voting having been abolished. Provisions is made in the Act for transfer from one district to another. Any person whose name may for the time being be upon any electoral roll of any district, and who has been registered thereon for six months, and who shall have changed his residence into another electoral district shall be entitled to have his name inserted on the electoral roll of such other district, and he may on written application obtain from the returning officer of the district of the electoral roll on which his name is a certificate by post stating that his name is on the roll, etc., and the returning officer of the district to which the applicant wishes his name transferred shall then place his name upon the electoral roll, and the man may vote at once. In South Australia there is also provision made for persons who are absent from their electorate to vote under the Absent Voters Electoral Act of 1890, according to which if a voter has reason to believe he will be absent when an election takes place he can procure a certificate from the registrar of the district in which he resided, also a voting paper on which on polling day he may (in presence of the postmaster of the place in which he may happen to be, and on production of his certificate) write the name of the candidate for whom he wishes to vote, and which being stamped by the postmaster, put in an envelope and sealed, is carried free to the electorate where the voter resides.

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In New Zealand every person of the age of twenty-one years or upwards who has resided for one year in the colony and in the electoral district for which he or she claims to vote during the three months immediately preceding the registration of his or her vote, shall be entitled to have his or her name, as the case may be, placed upon the electoral roll. No man or woman is allowed more than one vote, plural voting having been abolished in the year 1889. The franchise was extended to seamen in the year 1890 by the issue of electors' rights which enable the elector to record his vote for the place where he received the elector's right in whatever part of the colony he may happen to be at the time of an election. Any master refusing to allow a person holding an elector's right to go ashore and record his vote is liable to a month's imprisonment. According to clause 14 of the New Zealand Electoral Act of 1893 whenever any person whose name is on the roll of any district in respect of a residential qualification has removed there from and has resided in another district for ONE MONTH he may have his name transferred on to the electoral roll in respect of a residential qualification in the district to which he has removed if he shall deliver or send BY POST to the registrar thereof a claim or declaration attested by a registrar or deputy registrar or J.P., or postmaster or AN ELECTOR OF THE DISTRICT. Part 3 of the New Zealand Electoral Law amended the Act of 1890 (which provides that seamen may take out elector's rights) by extending the same right to commercial travellers, while a later amending Act, assented to October 6, 1893, extends to shearers the same right as is extended to commercial travellers who vote at the post officers, provision being made that while a seaman's right lasts so long as his name is on the electoral roll, in the case of commercial travellers and shearers the right has to be renewed at the end of every fourth month from the date of issue. ( the act “shearers” means and includes every person who, during the season of the year for shearing sheep in any locality is employed by any owners of sheep in such locality for shearing his sheep.)

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Queensland's Premier did a good turn for the bush workers when he told the Longreach deputation he had no sympathy with them. Thus he kept strictly to the lines of his late chief McIlwraith who was an open enemy. Far better to have an antagonist who cannot conceal his contempt and bitter pride than a two-faced politician who would promise to do the best he could while in his heart he meditated the worst. Time and truth can conquer the former; time and truth seem powerless against the latter, for the two-faced politician with smiling face and fair words deceives the poor workers into carrying him shoulder high when the open enemy would be deposited in the political gutter.