Referendum in 1967 did two things but Indigenous recognition wasn’t one of them

Facebook users are urging people to vote against the proposed voice to parliament because Indigenous peoples have been recognised in the Australian constitution since 1967.

This is false. Experts told AAP FactCheck that Indigenous peoples haven’t been mentioned in the constitution since a referendum in 1967, and that specifically recognising them as the First Peoples of Australia in the document is unprecedented.

This Facebook post (archived here), and other posts here, here, here, here, here and here, make the claim and cite it as a reason to vote no in the upcoming referendum.

“I call bulldust on the entire ad because indigenous people have been recognised in the constitution since 1967,” the post says.

It’s unclear where the claim originates, but experts say the Australian Constitution has not mentioned Indigenous Australians since 1967.

That year, more than 90 per cent of voters approved the removal of two sections of the constitution that prevented the federal government from making laws for Indigenous people and barred Indigenous people from being counted as part of the nation’s general population.

Constitutional law expert Professor George Williams from the University of New South Wales, says the changes removed “negative forms of recognition” of Aboriginal people – which permitted adverse, differential treatment – that had existed in the constitution since 1901.

“Both references to Aboriginal peoples were deleted by the 1967 referendum. These negative forms of recognition were replaced with silence, meaning that there has been no recognition of any kind of Australia’s first peoples in the constitution since 1967,” he told AAP FactCheck in an email.

Dr Jon Piccini, a historian at the Australian Catholic University, says 1967 was not a collective act of recognition of Indigenous peoples by voters.

“But in fact one of removal,” he told AAP FactCheck in an email.

“It expunged all mention of First Nations peoples from the constitution.”

Emeritus Professor Tim Rowse, a researcher of Australian history at Western Sydney University, said the 1967 vote wasn’t about recognising Indigenous people as the first peoples of Australia in the constitution.

The removal of the mentions did result in them being “recognised” as a group whom the federal government could make laws for and as part of the national population in censuses, Prof Rowse explained.

But if that was the case, he said, one could argue Indigenous people have been either “recognised” or mentioned directly in the Australian Constitution since 1901.

“There is a lot of careless talk about the constitution at the moment – some mischievous, some innocently ignorant, some making use of slippery terms like ‘recognise’,” Prof Rowse told AAP FactCheck.

“It’s a schemozzle, and the boundary between fact and bulls*** is often unclear, so that removes certainty from some fact-checking, as in this case.”

However, Prof Rowse said if the ‘yes’ vote succeeds in the upcoming referendum it would be the first time Indigenous people would be recognised as the “First Peoples of Australia”.

“So this specific recognition (recognition as…) has no precedent, and the term ‘First Nations’ was undreamt of in 1967,” Prof Rowse added.

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