Mrs JOHNSTON —My question is addressed to the Prime Minister. Has the Prime Minister's attention been drawn to the comments regarding the outcome of the 1967 constitutional referendum? What is the government's response to those comments?

Mr HOWARD (Prime Minister) —My attention has been drawn to some comments made in Adelaide last night by the member for Oxley regarding the 1967 referendum. Let me read what the member said. I found the statement made by the member quite extraordinary for two reasons. This is what she had to say:

They didn't have the right to vote until the Australian people, in the referendum of 1967 when they cast that vote—when they believed that Aboriginals should have the right the vote and should be treated equally, the same as everyone else.

She then went on to say:

But if Australians knew today what was foreshadowed for them, they would have thought twice about casting that vote because they were looking at giving the Aboriginal race equality.

There are two major areas of concern in that statement. By far the most sinister of those is that the member has actually entertained the notion that one section of the Australian community should not have the vote. Stripped of any kind of rhetoric, any kind of excuse, any kind of explanation, what the member for Oxley was saying last night was that she actually contemplates the notion that one section of the Australian community should not have the vote.

I would have thought that, whatever our differences on other issues are, we all believe—as the coalition government believes—that all Australians should be treated equally. I certainly believe that. It has been a cornerstone of the policies that the government has followed since March of 1996 that all Australians should be equal under the law, they should all be entitled to an equal dispensation from that law and they should all be equally accountable to that law.

We on this side of the House do not believe in one law for indigenous Australians and another law for other Australians. Equally, we believe that the protection of the law should be equally available to indigenous Australians as it is to other sections of the Australian community. The very notion that you would think twice about giving a section of the Australian community the vote, which is after all the most basic of all democratic rights, is not only a notion that I reject, and I believe all members of this parliament ought to reject, but a notion that I know the overwhelming majority of Australians would reject. That, of course, was the most serious element of the statement.

But the other element of the statement which I find quite extraordinary is, of course, that it betrays a complete ignorance of what the 1967 referendum was all about. The 1967 referendum was not about giving indigenous Australians the vote. The 1967 referendum was about counting indigenous Australians in the census and about giving coextensive legal authority to the Commonwealth parliament to legislate for the Aboriginal people. Indeed, indigenous people in Australia in some parts of the country had had the vote since Federation, with those areas of the country where the vote did not exist prior to the mid-1960s being dealt with by legislation in the mid-1960s repairing the injustice in relation to the franchise in some areas of the country.

I am very proud, of course, to record the fact that the 1967 referendum was sponsored by the coalition government led by the late Harold Holt, and the Deputy Prime Minister in that government was in fact the late Sir John McEwen, the then leader of the Country Party. I think it is an abhorrent notion that anybody should contemplate taking the vote away from any section of the Australian community. And I would also make the statement that, before any member of this House gets into a debate about the implications of a referendum, they ought to at least understand what occurred at the referendum.