1967 Australian referendum (Parliament)

1967 Parliament referendum

27 May 1967 (1967-05-27)
Question 1 Do you approve the proposed law for the alteration of the Constitution entitled— 'An Act to alter the Constitution so that the number of members of the House of Representatives may be increased without necessarily increasing the number of Senators'?
Results
Choice Votes % Yes 2,298,669 40.25% No 3,411,940 59.75% Valid votes 5,710,609 98.43% Invalid or blank votes 90,975 1.57% Total votes 5,801,584 100.00% Registered voters/turnout 6,182,585 93.84%
Results by electorate. Results by state. Results by county

The first part of the 1967 Australian referendum to change the Constitution was the Parliament question, which related to the relative number of members in each house of the Australian Parliament − the so-called "nexus". The 1967 Australian referendum called by the Holt government on 27 May 1967 consisted of two parts, with the second question relating to Aboriginal Australians.

Section 24 of the Australian Constitution requires that the number of members in the House of Representatives be, as nearly as possible, twice the number of members in the Senate.^[1] The most important effect of the "nexus" in the Australian Constitution is to prevent the dilution of the collective voting power of the Senate, which represents the Australian states equally, in any joint sitting of both houses following a double dissolution election. The nexus ensures that Senators will always have about one-third of the votes in a joint sitting, and Members of the House of Representatives about two-thirds. The referendum question asked the public to vote on whether "the number of members of the House of Representatives may be increased without necessarily increasing the number of Senators".^[2] It was defeated, with 59.75% of voters voting "No" to this question.