Section 25 of the Constitution of Australia is a provision of the Constitution of Australia headed "Provision as to races disqualified from voting" and providing that "For the purposes of the last section, if by the law of any State all persons of any race are disqualified from voting at elections for the more numerous House of the Parliament of the State, then, in reckoning the number of the people of the State or of the Commonwealth, persons of that race resident in that State shall not be counted."
History
The section was proposed during the concluding stages of the Australian frontier wars in the 1891 constitutional convention by Andrew Inglis Clark, the then Tasmanian Attorney-General. Clark adapted the wording from section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which was introduced in 1868 following the US Civil War during the Reconstruction era and intended to deter states from excluding certain races from voting in the United States of America. Unlike section 25 in Australia, however, the US provision made no direct reference to race, and was designed for a different purpose with the Confederate States of America. For instance, the population of the Union was 18.5 million around the time of the Reconstruction era, when the 14th Amendment was included as a discretionary provision. However, in the Confederacy, the population during the civil war is listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved - which made a clear statement to the confederate states that representative numbers on a federal level would be affected, if they precluded their respective citizens on grounds such as race, on a state level, after their defeat by the Union in 1865.
Section 2 of the 14th Amendment reads,
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.
At the time what became section 25 was introduced to the draft there was not intended to be a separate federal franchise. Rather, those permitted to vote in lower house elections at state level would form the make-up of the Commonwealth franchise. One argument is that the drafters included it to ensure that a state could not on the one hand exclude people of a race from voting at the Commonwealth level, while also benefiting from their inclusion in the population when determining the number of representatives that state would elect to the House of Representatives. During the convention, it was argued that such a clause should be broader in order to prevent disenfranchisement such as that caused by property ownership qualifications in Western Australia, but this was never expanded on as it would have had no deterrent effect given Western Australia was to receive the minimum five representatives upon federation regardless. Later in the drafting process, section 30 was introduced, allowing the Commonwealth to legislate its own voting franchise, thus enabling the Commonwealth government to theoretically exclude certain races from voting in federal elections with no corresponding effect on the number of representatives in each state. Section 25 was nevertheless retained, despite this ambiguity, leaving future speculation on the application subject to conjecture for the new population of 3,773,801 Australian citizens recorded under the 1901 census - excluding Aboriginals who were not formally included within the census until 1971, due to section 127.