Last week we looked at the final results from the New Zealand election, but it’s also worth saying something about the bigger electoral event on the same day: Australia’s Indigenous “Voice” referendum, where results are also now final.
Absentee votes brought the “No” vote down slightly from the preliminary figures to 60.1%, still a crushing majority of well over three million votes. Every state voted No, as did the Northern Territory; even in its best state, Victoria, the Yes vote only reached 45.9%. The informal vote, subject of considerable debate beforehand, was only about 155,000, or 1% of the total – nowhere near enough to make a difference to anything.
Turnout was 89.9%, almost identical to last year’s federal election (in fact fractionally up), despite panicky reactions at the time suggesting a big drop. It was much lower than the previous referendum, in 1999, when it was 95.1%, but that’s primarily due to improved enrolment procedures: turnout is expressed as a percentage of those enrolled, and the electoral commission is now enrolling a lot more marginal voters. Election turnout has fallen in the same way.
There has, of course, been plenty of commentary about the result; some have particularly focused on the role of the media and the difficulty they have in maintaining impartiality when one side engages in deliberate falsehoods. (We’ve talked about this before.) Others have looked at the pattern of the vote: I previously recommended Ben Raue’s post on the subject, and Peter Brent’s recent piece is also well worthwhile, especially for his expert skewering of Paul Kelly.
As has been widely reported, only one Coalition-held seat voted Yes: Bradfield, in the northern suburbs of Sydney. Another seven Yes-voting seats recorded two-party-preferred majorities for the Coalition at last year’s election, but they are all held by Teal independents (Bradfield would probably have gone the same way if the Teals had run properly) and it may be questioned whether their voters really have much residual loyalty to the Liberal Party.
The average difference between the Labor two-party-preferred vote in a seat and the referendum Yes vote was 13.5 percentage points, but much of that is due to the fact that Labor did so much better than the Yes campaign. If you control for that – that is, if you just look at the difference between how much each seat under- or over-performed the respective average in the two votes – the average difference is only 7.5 points, a pretty reasonable correlation.
It’s noticeably better than the last referendum, on the proposed republic in 1999.* The corresponding figure then was 9.2 points, prompting a lot of discussion at the time about how the result showed quite a different pattern from an ordinary election. Wealthy, inner-city seats voted Yes, regardless of whether they were Labor- or Liberal-held; outer suburban Labor seats voted No just as strongly as rural Coalition seats.
But 24 years makes a difference. The pattern of the Voice result was quite similar to that on the republic; the average difference between them (again, controlling for the overall result – the republic managed a Yes vote of 45.1%) was only 4.2 points. It no longer looks so anomalous, though; Labor has consistently made up ground in the sort of seats that were more inclined to vote Yes both times, and gone backwards in the stronger No-voting seats.
In each referendum, pundits pointed to the fact that level of education was one of the best predictors for the strength of the Yes vote. No surprise, then, that education levels have been well correlated with swings to Labor at elections in the intervening period.
How you evaluate that trend is a matter of opinion. One side will contrast out-of-touch elites with the masses of “real Australia”; the other may refer (as I did nearly twenty years ago, although I was talking about the US) to one party “becoming more the party of the educated, the secular and the cosmopolitan, while their opponents attract the ignorant, the nativists and the fundamentalists.” But either way the trend shows no sign of going away.
That said, it is still a trend, and an uneven one, rather than an accomplished fact. There are still plenty of safe Labor seats that returned a stronger-than-average No vote: the working-class suburbs of Perth and Adelaide are particularly clear cases. At the other end of the table, the Coalition still holds several seats that, while they voted No, did so fairly narrowly: they include four of the last five Liberal seats in metropolitan Melbourne.
What remains to be seen is whether the parties will kick against this trend, prioritising the attempt to win back the seats that it has lost them, or go with the flow and concentrate on the new targets that it opens up. Going by their record, they will probably try to muddle through with a combination of both.
.
* Strictly there were two questions on the ballot in 1999; I’m ignoring the second one, on the preamble, which performed significantly worse but with a not very different pattern.
.
PS: I should have also linked to Antony Green’s post, which covers some of the same ground and has some nice colored graphs.
The World is Not Enough 
Australia is in fact the archetype of the “colonial settler state”. The climate was suitable for European settlement. British settlers did not die of malaria or yellow fever. There was no indigenous state to be conquered as in India, no large indigenous population to be subjugated as in Africa – not after introduced diseases and violent dispossession had done their work, at any rate. The land was suitable for both farming and pastoralism – a fairly small British population could produce a huge surplus of food and fibre that could be exported to Britain. The gold rushes were a magnet for ambitious settlers and produced a booming economy.
In time, as the population of the settler colonies grew and diversified, they evolved into independent countries. Australia has been fully self-governing since federation in 1901, and in fact in most respects since responsible government in the 1850s. Despite our residual link to the British monarchy, no-one would today call Australia a colony. Only a small minority of Australians can trace their ancestry back to the British settlers of the early colonial period. (I am one of those who can) To call the current generation of Australians “settlers” is an abuse of both language and history.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, I think that’s right. Australia’s origins are settler-colonial, and that’s an important fact to know in understanding its history & culture, but to describe its current non-Indigenous inhabitants as “settlers” is silly.
Contrast Israel, where the settler-colonial paradigm is less obviously applicable, but still has some relevance in understanding the situation.
LikeLike
Even if Israel was once a colonial settler state – so what?
Every country in the Americas began life as a colonial settler state. The populations of Argentina and Chile, in particular, are almost entirely European in ancestry. Fidel Castro, that great anti-colonialist, was the son of a Spanish colonial settler in Cuba. Canada, Australia and New Zealand were acquired by Britain specifically as settler colonies. Do these facts render these countries illegitimate, fit for abolition or destruction?
Denunciation of Israel as a colonial settler state is particularly strange coming from Australians, when Australia is the purest example of a colonial settler state. Its indigenous population was brushed aside, their land seized without compensation. Until well into the 20th century, it was settled almost exclusively by people from the British Isles, many of them through state-sponsored migration schemes. Non-European people were excluded by law, and even non-British Europeans were unwelcome. Its economy was tied to that of the colonial power, which remained its major source of imports and the market for its exports until the 1960s.
None of these things is true of Israel, or ever has been. The Israeli Declaration of Independence of 14 May 1948, after pointing out that “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people,” declared that the Jewish community of the Land of Israel, “by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.” Australia, by contrast, has no declaration of independence, because it was founded by Britain as a dumping ground first for its convicts and later for its surplus population, on lands taken by force from its indigenous inhabitants, and has only recently and reluctantly emancipated itself from its colonial heritage.
If we are going to play the game of who has the better claim to historical legitimacy, I rather think that Israel comes out ahead.
LikeLike
I agree that historical legitimacy is a silly game to play, but it’s perhaps less silly in the case of Israel than Australia, simply because the origins of the state are so much more recent. And independently of that, knowing that it is, in part & to some extent, a settler-colonial society is helpful in understanding its dynamics. But it’s far from a typical one; partly because the Jews do have a historical connection to the land, but also because they have no parent country to go back to.
The fundamental point is that both communities are there, they both have a deep connection to the land and they’ve both acquired rights to it that need to be respected. Any settlement – one state, two states, whatever – has to recognise the legitimacy of both & provide a basis for peaceful relations between them.
LikeLike