The injustice and inequity of Elections Act.

*THE WORKER*

Brisbane April 14, 1894

THE PRESENT BASIS UNJUST.

I was in hopes that when Mrs. Leontine Cooper resigned from the Woman's Equal Franchise League we had heard the last of the lady, but it now appears she has managed to organise the plural vote ladies in a new society, with the object of obtaining the franchise for women on the same basis as that now granted to men. Perhaps it would not prove uninteresting to your readers if I quote an illustration used by George Ryland, one of the Gympie Labour candidates at the last general election, to demonstrate the injustice and inequity of that clause in our present Elections Act which rules that a man must be a bona fide resident in an electorate for the term of six months before he can have a valid claim to the privilege to vote. “ Why gentlemen,” said George, “according to such an act, William Shakespeare would have been denied a vote because he was a strolling player! John Bunyan would have been denied a vote because he was a travelling tinker!”

Exactly so, And if one desirous of pointing out the incongruity and injustice of an Act which permits to some one man whose fortune or otherwise it is to possess property the right to exercise ten or twenty votes, when perhaps his neighbour, who may be greatly his superior in learning, intellectual ability, patriotism, and moral conduct, is only permitted to have one vote, he might say, to continue the illustration employed by Ryland, that according to such an Act such a man as Dr. Johnson, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Edmund Burke, would have been permitted one vote only where as a profligate lord or some rich debauchee, whose only qualifications were his vices, and whose only title his inanimate property, would be permitted ten or perhaps a dozen votes.

Finally it may be said that where such a heroine as Grace Darling or Florence Nightingale would be permitted only one vote so vicious a creature as a dissolute and extravagant woman of rank and property might be allowed to exercise a score of votes! Thus it can be seen that under the plural vote conditions, and under the residence qualification, our present electoral law does not regard intellectual ability or patriotic and moral worth, but more vulgar inanimate property possession.

Frank Tell, Gympie.