Voting Rights

*THE WORKER*

BRISBANE APRIL 13, 1895.

Deputation from the Worker's Union.

Mr. Cameron introduced a deputation from the Australian Worker's Union to the Hon. H. M. Nelson last week at Longreach, the deputation consisting of Messrs. A. J. Brown, R. D. Shillington, and Henry Kelly. The Hon. A. J. Thynne and the Hon. R. Philp were also present.

Mr. Cameron said the deputation desired to explain the necessity for and the advisable-ness of securing an alteration of the present electoral laws, as such laws disfranchised a large number of men who were perfectly competent to vote, but who by following their ordinary vocations in the bush, were debarred from exercising their undoubted rights through their inability to fulfil the requirements of the residential clause. Mr. Cameron said he was a very old resident of the outside districts, and he knew it was quite impossible for a considerable number of men to qualify themselves for a vote and earn their living at the same time. Men had to start, say, in the Gregory district, and had to work up right through the Barcoo and Mitchell districts, staying in none of such places long enough to acquire a vote.

The Premier; Where are their wives?

(What a question? - ED.)

Mr. Cameron said the majority were single men.

Mr. Shillington said Mr. Cameron had very fairly stated the case, and if the Government thoroughly understood the conditions under which the bush workers had to live, they would acknowledge the impossibility of their fulfilling the electoral qualifications. He thought the Government might give the workers some kind of voter's right, such as they had in Victoria.

Mr. Nelson; The voter's right in Victoria only applies to one electorate.

Mr. Shillington said if a worker changed from one electorate to another he should be allowed to change his right easily; but if he was coming back he should only exercise it in the original electorate.

Mr. Brown said their very occupation debarred them from fulfilling the residential conditions. The Government were sufficiently strong to give them something which would make it easier for them to secure a vote.

Mr. Kelly said they only asked for facilities for Queensland men, not those who might come over from New South Wales. Mr. Nelson, in reply, said he did not feel inclined, from the arguments they had brought forward, to take any action in the way they would like. In the first place, it was not to the interest of the colony to encourage a nomadic population, and the Government had tried by land laws and other means to get the people to make homes for themselves. Surely the men of the colony should have homes somewhere. The whole basis of representation had been upon a certain number of people being located in a certain locality. Of course if the colony was one electorate, returning seventy members, that proposal might be right. They were not in a worse position than commercial travellers, who were constantly shifting in the pursuit of their ordinary business.

Mr. Shillington said the commercial traveller had somewhere to start from. He had a home.

Mr. Nelson asked why they should not have a home? The Government had offered every facility. The system they proposed would be utterly subversive of all justice in any form of representation. He asked if the deputation wanted the colony made one electorate.

Mr. Cameron explained that what the deputation wanted was that a man moving from one district to another should not lose his electoral qualifications until he had had the opportunity of acquiring a new one.

The Premier said the men had that opportunity. He would not give further electoral privileges, as those now existing were among the most liberal in the world. The men here were in perfectly the same position as those in the South.

Mr. Shillington; They do not change as we change, every six months or less.

After further discussion, in which Mr. Cameron urged the men's cause, the Premier said he could give them no encouragement. Every man should have a stake in the country he had no right to vote.

The deputation then withdrew. - Courier.