Laws for the benefit of Aboriginals?

Section 51 of the constitution originally said:

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:-

The people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.

Effectively, after federation, the states were welcome to continue whatever they had been doing to “protect” Aboriginals in their own state, and the federal government was not welcome to intervene.

This section was not really about Aboriginals, but about solving other “problems” related to keeping Australia white. 
The words “any race” could naturally include Chinese, (Asian) Indians, indentured labourers from the South Sea Islands, “Ghans” or Malays (though not New Zealand’s Maori who, because of the Treaty of Waitangi, were British citizens).

The new federal government agenda included - amongst other things - repatriation of indentured labourers who had been lured to Australia from the Pacific Islands.

One of the 1967 referendum questions asked voters if they wanted to alter the wording of this Section 51, to remove the phrase relating to making special laws for Aboriginals.

Most Australians believed that by deleting this reference to Aboriginals, the federal government was finally ready to step in and take over Aboriginal Affairs from the states.

Yet the federal government had already had power over Aboriginal Affairs in the Northern Territory since 1912 and hadn’t done a great deal for Aboriginals there, so there was no reason to expect any improvement.

Usually, when a referendum is put to the people of Australia, an argument for the proposition and an argument against the proposition are both presented to voters, in writing. In 1967, there wasn’t a No case prepared for the proposed changes with respect to Aboriginals – both sides of the political divide supported the changes.