Australia likes to think its democracy is secure. But buried inside our Constitution is an explosive power that, in the wrong political moment, could be turned against an entire people.

Australia has developed a comforting myth about itself. We tell ourselves that, unlike the United States, our institutions are stable. Unlike Europe, we are supposedly insulated from populist convulsions. Unlike younger democracies, our constitutional arrangements are mature, restrained, and sensible.

Yet hidden within the Australian Constitution lies a provision so extraordinary that, if exercised by a determined Parliament, it could strip an entire race of Australians of the federal vote overnight.

It is difficult to think of another liberal democracy that still carries such a constitutional relic into the twenty-first century.

Most Australians have never heard of it.

They should.

The forgotten Constitutional power

Section 25 of the Constitution is usually dismissed as an historical curiosity. It provides that if a State disqualifies "all persons of any race" from voting at State elections, those people are simply excluded from the State's population count for representation in the House of Representatives.

The provision is generally explained as a financial or representational penalty upon racist State governments. That interpretation has encouraged generations of constitutional lawyers to treat it as effectively harmless.

But constitutions are not interpreted merely by their intentions. They operate according to the powers they preserve.

Section 25 does something profoundly unsettling. It explicitly contemplates that Australian law may disqualify an entire race of citizens from voting.

Not that it once did. Not that it historically had. That it may.

The Constitution nowhere says such legislation would itself be unconstitutional.

Indeed, by providing the consequences if such a law were enacted, it assumes the possibility.

This is not merely an embarrassing historical artefact. It is a constitutional possibility that has never been conclusively extinguished.

Democracies rarely collapse all at once

History teaches an uncomfortable lesson.

Democracies almost never disappear in a single dramatic coup. They erode legally.

Governments inherit powers designed for extraordinary circumstances, reassure voters they will only be used sparingly, then gradually redefine who deserves equal protection under the law.

Every generation imagines itself immune to this pattern.

Thus far, every generation has been wrong.

Few Germans believed in 1928 that democratic institutions would soon be dismantled by legislation passed through constitutional procedures.

Hungary's democratic backsliding has occurred largely through legal mechanisms.

Around the world we are witnessing governments redefine citizenship, voting rights, judicial independence and media freedom while insisting that everything remains perfectly constitutional.

Australia is not magically exempt. Our institutions depend upon political culture; political culture which can now change astonishingly quickly.

'It could never happen here'

This is the phrase every stable democracy eventually says. It is also the phrase history delights in disproving.

Over the past decade Australia has watched increasingly extreme political rhetoric enter mainstream debate.

Groups once confined to the political fringe now openly discuss mass deportations, racial hierarchies, conspiracies about demographic replacement, and restrictions upon citizenship itself.

Much of this remains electorally marginal. Constitutions are not written for today. They are written for governments we hope never arrive.

The test of a constitutional democracy is not whether good governments behave well. It is whether bad governments are prevented from behaving badly.

That is precisely where Australia's constitutional architecture begins to look worryingly incomplete.

Rights assumed are rights unprotected

Unlike most comparable democracies, Australia possesses no comprehensive national bill of rights.

Many Australians celebrate this as evidence of parliamentary supremacy. But parliamentary supremacy has a darker implication.

If Parliament possesses the legal power to legislate, then citizens frequently possess only the political hope that Parliament chooses not to.

Our electoral rights largely exist because Parliament has granted them. Not because the Constitution guarantees them equally to every citizen.

The High Court has developed an implied constitutional protection of representative democracy.

That doctrine offers important safeguards. But implied freedoms remain exactly that: implied.

They are necessarily narrower than explicit constitutional guarantees.

It remains striking that Australia continues to rely upon implication where other democracies rely upon express rights.

Constitutional maintenance

Constitutions require maintenance just as bridges do.

No engineer would discover structural weaknesses in a major bridge and argue that repairs are unnecessary because nobody intends to drive recklessly across it.

Yet this is effectively how Australia treats obsolete constitutional provisions.

Section 25 has survived referendums, constitutional reviews and decades of bipartisan indifference.

Many politicians acknowledge it is offensive.

Almost none regard it as urgent.

That complacency misunderstands constitutional design.

The danger is not today's government. Nor tomorrow's. The danger is preserving constitutional powers for the government none of us can yet imagine.

History repeatedly reminds us that impossible governments eventually become possible ones.

Defusing the charge

Removing Section 25 alone would not solve every weakness in Australia's constitutional framework. Nor would it suddenly create a bill of rights.

But repeal would accomplish something profoundly important. It would eliminate one of the last provisions that still contemplates race-based exclusion from democratic participation.

More importantly, it would reaffirm a constitutional principle that ought never require implication.

In Australia, citizenship must never depend upon race.

Neither should the vote.

Constitutions tell future governments not merely what they can do, but what they may never even contemplate doing.

Our Constitution still contemplates something that no modern democracy should.

The gelignite remains buried.

We would be wise to remove it before somebody eventually decides to strike the match.

Jesse J. Fleay is a Boorloo-born Noongar writer and academic living in Naarm. He lectures in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. Views are his own.