The conservative opposition to the idea that existed among the ranks of the Liberals and National party bases was one of the factors that contributed to the fact that the constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians was never seriously advanced while the Coalition was in power. During the campaign for the referendum, Peter Dutton took a resolute position against yes, which represented this feeling.
The people of Australia have just finished voting in the first referendum of this century, and an examination of the voting trends on Saturday night has provided some enlightening takeaways.
Here are five things that we discovered after examining the results in greater detail.
Voters who support the coalition were victorious.
According to the results of the count that took place on Saturday night, Coalition voters overwhelmingly chose “no.” This, according to political analyst Simon Jackman, is a “really important part of the story” of how the voice to parliament was defeated because it shows “how the Coalition vote rallied behind the position of the party.”
The seats held by the Coalition received the most resounding rejections of the question anywhere in the country. Only 15% of voters in the constituency of Maranoa, which is held by David Littleproud, leader of the National party, voted yes. 35% of voters in Dutton’s electorate of Dickson went with the yes option.
The liberals come out on top, yet they end up losing the war.
The impression that the modern Liberal party has become uncoupled from its blue-ribbon urban base was reinforced by the vote on Saturday’s referendum, despite the fact that voters who had previously supported the Coalition played a big role in the failure of the measure. Yes supporters congregated around the seats currently held by the teal independents.
“I was surprised, having looked at a lot of campaign data and polling data out of Yes23 – I’m surprised by how strongly the teal seats have gone yes,” says Jackman. “I’m surprised by how strongly the teal seats have gone yes.” “I wasn’t expecting [a percentage in the 60s] in particular for Wentworth,” the candidate said. That is an incredible turn of events. They are going to be sent back on their heels by it. Liberals who believe that the Tea Party movement is nothing more than a protest vote and that the electorates involved would eventually get over it and return to their homes. They will not return to the house. Peter Dutton’s chances of retaining those seats aren’t helped by any of this.
The tight races in a few seats held by the Liberal Party will also serve to focus the minds of party strategists. There was a yes vote of 51% in the Sydney seat of Bradfield, which is represented by Liberal frontbencher Paul Fletcher. 47% of voters in Berowra, which is held by Julian Leeser, who was a supporter of the yes campaign, voted in favor of the proposition. The seat of Deakin, which is held by a member of the right-wing Michael Sukkar, was likewise quite close: 49% of his voters voted in favor.
The majority of the labor movement’s core supported the opposition with a “no” vote.
Anthony Albanese was unable to call on the same kind of commitment among his rusty cohort, in contrast to Peter Dutton, who could bank on their support. For Labor, the voting trends in the referendum were all over the place.
The voters in the prime minister’s district gave a resounding endorsement to the idea of saying yes (74 percent of voters in Grayndler responded yes to the voice). 71% of Tanya Plibersek’s constituents in Sydney voted in favor of the motion. On the other hand, the outcome was disastrous in other sections of the country.
The voice was rejected by the majority of voters in the seat of Barton, which is currently represented by Linda Burney, who is the Minister for Indigenous Australians. A substantial proportion of Burney’s residents are older immigrants who moved there at a younger age. According to the strategists, these voters were not swayed in any way by the argument in favor of yes, however the feeling was more positive among more recent arrivals from China and South Asia.
Only 28% of Dan Repacholi’s constituents in Labor-held seats in the Hunter valley voted yes on the referendum question. Only 29% of voters in the neighboring seat of Paterson, which is currently represented by Labor’s Meryl Swanson, supported the voice. There was thirty percent support for yes in the Queensland constituency of Blair, which is represented by Labor’s Shayne Neumann. It was the same story in Rankin, the electorate that Jim Chalmers, who is currently the treasurer, holds (35% of people said yes). In Melbourne, everything followed the same trend. Yes received 36% of the vote in the seat of Hawke, which is located in Melbourne’s western suburbs and is held by Labor’s Sam Rae.
Different attitudes prevail in the city and the surrounding areas.
This is hardly a fresh development in the political landscape of Australia, or, for that matter, any western democracy. However, the outcome of the referendum on Saturday night provides further evidence that voters in the inner city have a unique perspective on the world in comparison to people in the surrounding suburbs and provinces. Jackman has this to say about the so-called latte line: “One thing that I’m really taken by is the resilience of the so-called latte line, particularly in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne.”
Jackman continues by saying, “If it were possible in some way to show not only the voice vote, but also the plebiscite on same-sex marriage and the republic referendum, you would see very similar maps of Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.” The borders are not identical, but if you could see that pattern, it would be startling, and I believe that says something very profound about the outlines of ideology in Australia.
In the same manner that proximity to metropolitan centers is correlated with a yes vote, other indicators like income and education level are also found to have a positive relationship with this vote. On the other hand, this just gives us the characteristics of the places that were more likely to vote yes; it does not necessarily mean that persons with better incomes or higher levels of education voted yes more frequently.
Was there support for the voice from Indigenous Australians?
According to the strategists working for the Yes campaign, a proportion of voters may have been under the notion that it was acceptable to vote no due to the fact that Indigenous Australians were divided on the value of the voice. We are unable to determine how Indigenous people voted in the referendum; nonetheless, we are aware that in regions with a high percentage of Indigenous people, voters in general favored the voice.
In a few outlying booths, the percentage of voters who said yes was higher than 80 percent. Based on the results of the election in 2022, Jackman has made an estimate of the percentage of Indigenous people who live in each polling place catchment area. On the basis of this information, the average yes vote at polling stations where it was projected that more than fifty percent of the voters were indigenous was 63 percent.
