Perhaps no single factor better explains the evaporation in support for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament from early this year through to its decisive defeat on Saturday than a mounting perception that Indigenous peoples were far from united behind the idea.
The notion was encouraged by the adroit use of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine as the combined public face of the No campaign, with considerable help from the distinctive viewpoint of Lidia Thorpe and her flair for calling attention to it.
The Yes campaign vainly sought to push back through its frequently invoked claim that 80% of Indigenous people supported the Voice, based on two polls conducted earlier in the year.
This failed to account for the fact that overall support had been at around 60% at the time, and there was little reason to think Indigenous support had been exempt from the general downward trend.
Amid cries of foul from the No camp, the RMIT ABC Fact Check unit brought its extensive scrutiny to bear on the issue in reaching a verdict of “yes, but more to it”.
The arrival of hard answers in the form of Saturday’s voting results has done little to quell the dispute.
Exhibit A for the Yes camp is five booth results and nine remote mobile team results from localities where the Indigenous population accounted for more than 80% of the total.
The combined Yes vote across the five booths was 66%, peaking at over 75% in the especially strongly Indigenous communities of Yarrabah and Palm Island.
The result was even stronger from the nine remote mobile teams, landing just shy of the Yes campaign’s magic number at 79%.
Queried about such results on Saturday night, Price complained of “unions that come in and overpower vulnerable Aboriginal communities” and called for a “look at the way the AEC conduct themselves”, while Mundine angrily demanded that journalists “wake up to yourselves and start asking real questions”.
Price’s notion of remote communities as prey for corrupt political machines is complicated by their volatile record in the Northern Territory, where they swung massively against federal Labor amid the fraught politics of the intervention in 2010 and tipped a territory Labor government from power unexpectedly in 2012.
Rather than compound a particularly depressing feature of the campaign by traducing the AEC (it is now verifiably the case that the AEC’s treatment of ticks and crosses did not hand “a very, very strong advantage to the Yes case”, contrary to the claims of Peter Dutton), Price might have done better to emphasise the acknowledged fact of low turnout.
Palm Island recorded an adult population of over 1,300 in the 2021 census, but only 432 ballots made it into the boxes there on Saturday.
Whether the abstentions are seen as a measure of apathy or hostility, it was open to Price to argue that they didn’t amount to a mandate.
The voting data also offers little direct insight into the 83% of Indigenous peoples who don’t live in remote areas — although Mundine complicated that potential line of argument when he claimed in August that the 80% figure had been skewed by a failure to poll remote areas.
No such ambiguity surrounds a second controversy about how the results might look, in this case relating to the seven teal independent seats.
News Corp outlets proved especially receptive to suggestions that these seats would rebuke their pro-Voice members by voting No, offering reports of polling that supposedly showed a dead heat in Kooyong, emphatic No leads in Wentworth and Warringah, and a slight advantage to No across all seven seats.
The Australian Financial Review got in on the act with a claim that “Sydney’s wealthiest suburbs are emerging as surprising hotbeds of the No vote”, while a front page splash from Perth’s Sunday Times invoked the especially dubious source of the Fair Australia campaign in reporting a No lead of 60% to 32% in Curtin.
Such accounts are comprehensively defied by a scoreboard that currently has Yes ahead in all seven seats with a combined share of 56.4% (though late-arriving postal votes are likely to erase slender Yes leads in Curtin and Mackellar).
While well short of majorities recorded in seats held by the Greens, results like the 62.2% Yes vote in Wentworth offer support for the notion that opposing the Voice scored Peter Dutton a short-term win at the heavy cost of pushing once bankable Liberal seats further from the party’s grasp.
Disclosure: William Bowe conducts paid consultancy work for Climate 200, which supported the campaigns of the teal independents at the federal election.
What is most “amazing” is that news outlets are writing things that are patently untrue. All the teal seats are in the Yes column, Kooyong at nearly 60%. But I guess this is part of the delusional politics of the right, convincing themselves of what they want it to be rather than what it is.
Of course this is a good thing. Dutton cannot win government without getting those teal seats back and he’s got zero chance now.
Of course, Frydenberg has read the room, esp Kooyong, and opted to go into business.
On the latter, that was after he gaslit Melburnians and Victorians from Sydney…..not very smart or very arrogant.
Price…..called for a “look at the way the AEC conduct themselves”
This is shameful – a wholly unjustified attempt to copy from the Trump playbook.
Warren Mundine demanding journalists start asking real questions is pretty funny. That is the last thing the No campaign would have wanted as it may have exposed their lies and misinformation.
The man who slapped down Indigenous Australians and put them back in their box, Peter Dutton, has permanently alienated the Teal seats and most likely many others. Plenty of no voters will not like the way him and his team went about this and it will show at the next election. This is a good thing. The sooner the libs become totally irrelevant the better. There is still a vacancy for a real political party with proper liberal policies who acts on principle rather than the whims of lobby groups. I hope it appears soon.
If anybody wants to find out what went on in the minds of the NO voters, they’ll have to spend a lot of money on post referendum polling!
My guess is that many people were confused that the YES side started off by saying this change would be the magic that would fix everything. They ended up by saying it was only about an “advisory body”. Suddenly, the prior claims looked like lies. We all know how likely an advisory body is to fix any problem of such complexity. Remember the APOLOGY … it deserves the capitalisation! That was going to fix everything. How could being mentioned in the CONSTITUTION (again a document of such agency that it needs capitalisation) fail to fix everthing.
I voted YES because I figured people needed another lesson in the simple fact that symbolism isn’t worth a brass razoo when it comes to fixing problems. Most of our most important principles are not in the constitution. The separation of Church and State being one of them. We all get it that when your child is sick you take them to a hospital and not a Church. Similarly, First Nations people need to relegate dreaming stories to the category of mythology and filter the dross out of their culture; keeping the good and dumping the bad (like cruelty to animals and two week funerals). Fixing the gap is about concrete things … education, health care and employment … it won’t be fixed by symbolism. Not by apologies, or words on a piece of paper, even it if it is the CONSTITUTION.
First sentence is a very important point, but if Brexit was anything to go by, now RW MSM, MPs, influencers etc. will demand no more talking or analysis, it’s all over (permanently) just move on, to deal with and negate any reversal in sentiments; in UK now clear majority support to rejoin the EU as many Brexit voters have departed this earth….. vs demands they cannot reverse the outcome of an advisory referendum….
Can’t remember anyone saying this, other than people like you using it as a straw man.