2023 Referendum
Well that was disappointing!
After a concerted lobbying effort by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders across Australia, the referendum to place Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Constitution and give them an advisory voice to parliament was rejected by Australians. Whilst the majority of indigenous Australians were optimistic about this vote gaining approval it really came as no surprise that the majority of the rest of Australia could not find it in their hearts to vote Yes.
Nationally the votes were split 39.2% Yes and No at 60.8%. An emphatic and resounding No.
In attempting to understand why, it is useful to look at the results to try and gain an understanding. The map below displays the data by electorate and also breaks it down by polling booths across the country.
Surprisingly, the booth with the highest Yes vote in Australia was in the suburb of Carlton, Victoria, with 93.03% (1722) Yes votes and 6.97% (129) No votes. At the opposite end of the spectrum was the booth at Yetman, New South Wales, with 3.7% (3) Yes votes and 96.3% (78) No votes. When viewing the polling booths on the map it is plainly seen that in inner city locations there was a high percentage of Yes votes, but these quickly dissipated the further out from urban centres.
The percentage of Yes votes was high in individual Indigenous communities across the country with Fitzroy Crossing, Western Australia, with the highest Yes vote at 80.47%. This still leaves about 20% of the community voting No and this was seen across indigenous communities with 20 - 40% of people voting No.
The why is a lot harder to explain, and is probably multi-faceted. Clearly having two high profile indigenous spokespeople for the No campaign helped, though I personally don’t think that this influenced the majority, as their logic and reasoning at times didn’t stand up to scrutiny. Clearly the lack of detail and explanation from the Yes camp built a distrust in the electorate that was difficult to claw back. One area that hasn’t been scrutinised too much in the media was how technology impacted the vote. Anecdotally, I saw a lot of misinformation and, frankly, racist commentary through social media created by bots, and I’m sure this had an impact on many, but how to measure that is difficult. If we took out the flat out racist votes from the result, I wonder if the Yes vote would have triumphed?
What data doesn’t count is the number of broken hearts, shattered lives and those driven to despair.
Aboriginal people are resilient and we have strong leaders. We will pick ourselves up and move on to the next fight. Given the resounding defeat I think it will be difficult for any referendum to get up in the future, but there will be other ways to improve the lives of First Nations people.