Introduction by Croakey: At a time of widespread concern that government policies are contributing to rising incarceration rates, many people in prison are denied the opportunity to vote at the upcoming federal election.
Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy OAM, two founding members of the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, have called for law reform so that all people in prison have the right to vote.
Since 2007, people serving sentences of three or more years have not been eligible to vote in elections, referendums, and by-elections.
This followed a successful challenge by Yuin woman Aunty Vickie Roach of a ban, introduced by the Howard Government in 2006, which prohibited all people in prison from voting, no matter the severity of the crime they were imprisoned for or length of their sentence.
Below, Lean and Kilroy say that this ongoing restriction on voting rights “overwhelmingly affects Aboriginal people, poor people and those criminalised by systemic injustice” and often most disproportionately impacted by government policy.
Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy write:
This federal election, when politicians and voters debate the future of this country, we must ask: who is left out? Who is deliberately excluded and disenfranchised?
Prisoners serving sentences of three years or more are stripped of their voting rights under Australian law.
This means that, in Australia – the so-called lucky country – not everyone has the right to vote. Not everyone gets to have a say in the policies that shape their lives or the political direction of the nation.
This exclusion overwhelmingly affects Aboriginal people, poor people, and those criminalised by systemic injustice.
These are the people most impacted by government policy, yet they are denied a say in shaping it. We are excluded from the very democracy that claims to represent all.
Many people in prison – especially those serving long sentences – are working. They pay taxes through work release programs and pre-release centres. They contribute to society.
Yet, they cannot vote.
They are expected to obey the laws of this country while being denied a say in how those laws are made. And let’s be clear: this is not about public safety. This is not about justice.
It is about disposability. It is about who is seen as worthy of participation and who is cast aside. It is about power – who gets to wield it, and who is deliberately silenced.
Long and political history
The disenfranchisement of incarcerated people in Australia has a long and deeply political history.
When the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 was passed, it prohibited any prisoner serving a sentence of one year or longer from voting in federal elections.
In 1983, the Commonwealth softened this restriction to exclude only those serving a sentence of five years or longer. In 1995, the reference to those serving a sentence of five years was changed to three.
But in 2006, the Howard Government introduced a blanket ban, stripping all incarcerated people of their voting rights, regardless of their sentence length.
Aunty Vickie Roach, Yuin woman, member of the National Network, born to a Stolen Generations mother and then stolen herself, successfully challenged this with the High Court, which later overturned the complete ban in Roach v Electoral Commissioner (2007).
The ban was ruled to be unconstitutional because it violated the principle of representative democracy embedded in the Australian Constitution.
However, the court still upheld the exclusion of those serving three years or more, a threshold that continues to silence thousands of voices today.
This is a deliberate act of power. People don’t care when prisoners are disenfranchised because we are treated as a disposable population.
The right to vote is seen as settled. But it is not settled for us.
And because it is the poor, the racialised, and the marginalised who remain locked out of full participation, society accepts this exclusion as natural and justified.
Our rights are seen as negotiable. Our voices are treated as unimportant. But we refuse to accept that.
As a National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, we refuse to be silent.
Structural inequalities
No government can claim legitimacy while denying thousands of people their democratic rights. Full suffrage must mean full suffrage. Anything less is an indictment of the so-called democracy we live under.
The community we live in, the community we work for, and the community we belong to are some of the most marginalised in this society, facing extreme disadvantages before, during, and after imprisonment.
- We are 100 times more likely to be homeless.
- More than half of us were unemployed before going to prison, and post-prison unemployment sits around 60 percent, with even worse statistics for Aboriginal people and women.
- Over 40 percent of us have a diagnosed mental health condition.
- Aboriginal women in prison are 100 times more likely than non-Indigenous women to have had a child removed by the child protection system.
These are not individual failings.
These are deep structural inequalities that pipeline people into the criminal legal system and keep us locked in cycles of disadvantage. And yet, while governments create and maintain these inequalities, they deny those most impacted the right to vote on the policies that govern their lives.
A truly democratic nation would not accept this. Australia cannot claim to be one while maintaining laws that deliberately silence thousands of people, particularly Aboriginal people, from participating in elections.
The question for voters and politicians alike is simple: do we believe in democracy for all, or only for those deemed worthy?
If we accept the latter, then we must admit the truth: our democracy is a lie.
We urge Australians to support our self determination by supporting campaigns and organisations led by incarcerated people. You can support Sisters Inside here and the National Network here.
About the authors
Tabitha Lean is an activist, poet and storyteller. An abolition activist determined to disrupt the colonial project and abolish the prison industrial complex, she’s filled with rage, channelling every bit of that anger towards challenging the colonial carceral state. Having spent almost two years in Adelaide Women’s Prison, 18 months on Home Detention and three years on parole, Tabitha uses her lived prison experience to argue that the criminal punishment system is a brutal and too often deadly colonial frontier for her people. She believes that until we abolish the system and redefine community, health, safety and justice; her people will not be safe.
Debbie Kilroy OAM was first criminalised at the age of 13 and spent over two decades in and out of women’s and children’s prisons. Driven to end the criminalisation and imprisonment of girls and women, Debbie established Sisters Inside, as well as her law firm, Kilroy & Callaghan Lawyers. An unapologetic abolitionist, Debbie’s activism work centres on dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex and all forms of carceral control and exile. With a firm belief that there should be ‘nothing about us without us’, Debbie established the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls to centre the voices, experiences and aspirations of criminalisation and imprisonment women and girls in order to change the face of justice in this country.
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