page_title: Suffrage in Australia
section_title: Male suffrage
hierarchical_section_title: Suffrage in Australia / Male suffrage
caption_attribution_description: English: Boyle Travers Finniss was the first Premier of South Australia.
context_page_description: Suffrage in Australia refers to the right to vote for people living in Australia, including all its six component states and territories, as well as local councils. The colonies of Australia began to grant universal male suffrage to white men during the 1850s, with white women's suffrage following between the 1890s and 1900s. Today, the right to vote at federal, state and local levels of government is enjoyed by most citizens of Australia over the age of 18 years.
context_section_description: The first European-style governments established after 1788 were autocratic and run by appointed governors - although English law was transplanted into the Australian colonies by virtue of the doctrine of reception, thus notions of the rights and processes established by the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689 were brought from Britain by the colonists. Agitation for representative government began soon after the settlement of the colonies.
  Adelaide City Council was established in 1840 and the City of Sydney in 1842. The right to stand for election was limited to men who possessed £1000 worth of property and wealthy landowners were permitted up to four votes each in elections.
  In 1835, William Wentworth had established the Australian Patriotic Association which agitated for representative government for New South Wales and a broad franchise, a goal at least partially achieved in 1842. Despite opposition from conservative free settlers in the colony, who sought representative government but emancipists being disenfranchised, the colony's constitution of 1842 gave to emancipists the same political rights as free settlers, but which was subject to a property test. The right to vote was limited to men with a freehold valued at £200 or a householder paying rent of £20 per year, both very large sums at the time. Australia's first parliamentary elections were conducted for the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843. Voter rights were extended in New South Wales in 1850 and elections for legislative councils were held in the colonies of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.
  By the mid 19th century, there was a strong desire for representative and responsible government in the Australian colonies, fed by the democratic spirit of the goldfields evident at the Eureka Rebellion and the ideas of the great reform movements sweeping Europe, the United States and the British Empire, such as Chartism. The end of convict transportation accelerated reform in the 1840s and 1850s. The Australian Colonies Government Act [1850] was a landmark development which granted representative constitutions to New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania and the colonies enthusiastically set about writing constitutions which produced democratically progressive parliaments - though the constitutions generally maintained the role of the colonial upper houses as representative of social and economic "interests" and all established Constitutional Monarchies with the British monarch as the symbolic head of state. In 1855 South Australia granted the right to vote to all male British subjects (a term which extended to Indigenous males) 21 years or over. This right was extended to Victoria in 1857 and New South Wales the following year. The other colonies followed until, in 1896, Tasmania became the last colony to grant universal male suffrage, though some colonies explicitly excluded Indigenous males from the vote.
caption: Boyle Travers Finniss became the first Premier of South Australia in 1856 - and the first leader of an Australian colonial parliament elected by universal male suffrage.
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