I’mma try and copy/paste this into comment or two for shits and giggles. In the meantime if someone could create a website that turns interactive articles into regular articles that would be great.
Beyond No, here’s what we know about the Voice results
By Tim Leslie, Ashley Kyd, Julian Fell, Ben Spraggon and Matt Liddy
Australians in all six states have said a resounding No to a Voice to Parliament, sinking a years-long campaign for Indigenous constitutional recognition.
For Yes campaigners, the picture is stark.
There’s still more counting to do, but only the ACT will return a vote for Yes.
But these maps alone aren’t enough to tell us the full story of how the country voted.
Let’s dig deeper and see what more we can reveal.
Along the way, we’ll find out what the places with the highest and lowest Yes votes have in common, as well as uncovering just how little might have changed since the republic referendum was held 24 years ago.
First up, we’re going to bring in a map of Australia that looks a little different.
What we’ve done here is re-sized the states based on how many people live in them.
Now, let’s switch to a more nuanced view of the result, one that takes into account the strength of the vote in each state.
The darker the orange, the stronger the No vote.
As you can see, Queensland voted much more strongly No than Victoria.
While referendums are decided by how people vote on a state and national level, if we look at how Australians voted in every electorate, a very different picture emerges.
Suddenly, we have a tapestry — orange still predominates but there are patches of purple for Yes, as well as grey areas where the vote was close to an even split.
A quick look at the extremes is worthwhile here …
The regional Queensland seat of Maranoa has the highest No vote in the country — topping 80 per cent — while inner-city Melbourne is the strongest Yes.
Curiously, these seats at opposite ends of the country have at least one thing in common. Their sitting members are both party leaders — the Nationals’ David Littleproud in Maranoa and the Greens’ Adam Bandt in Melbourne.
We’re going to hear more about these two seats a little later on.
But for now let’s just say these two seats sit at opposite ends of a trend that played out across the nation.
Here’s a snapshot of the inner-city seats across our capital cities — as you can see, these are the country’s Yes hotspots.
However, that core of support quickly drops away when you look at the outer-metropolitan suburbs.
And in regional and rural Australia there is very strong opposition to the Voice.
You can see this trend at play even in Victoria, the state with the highest Yes vote overall.
While these maps give us an indication of how different parts of the country voted, the voting data has more to tell us.
By looking at the results through a different lens, we can start to sketch out a picture of what might have driven votes across the country.
Here are all the electorates lined up based on their Yes vote, so those with a stronger support for Yes appear higher on the chart.
Looking at it this way, you can see Melbourne all the way up the top, and to Maranoa down the bottom.
Charting the vote against how far electorates are from their state’s capital city starkly shows what’s evident on the map — the further they were from the city, the more likely voters were to vote No.
This steady drop-off of support is evident when we look at who lives in each electorate.
When we switch the horizontal axis to show the level of educational achievement, individual seats shift but the shape remains the same.
A similar pattern plays out with age.
And again with income.
We don’t know if any of these factors are the reason why people voted against the Voice, but what they do show is that it failed to resonate with a wide group of Australians.
Tellingly, they also show how similar the results are to the last time we had a referendum.
Let’s look at the No vote for the 1999 Republic referendum on the horizontal axis.
From Melbourne to Maranoa, the majority of electorates that voted against a republic in 1999 have repeated history.
A generation has passed, people born after the referendum are now adults, and yet only a handful of seats have voted differently.
The highlighted purple hexagons are those that voted No in 1999 but Yes in 2023, and the highlighted orange electorates went the other way.
Despite all the differences between the two referendums — the same areas that were resistant to change, and those that embraced it, have hardly shifted at all.
What also hasn’t shifted in the past two decades is the divide between the lives Indigenous Australians can hope to lead, and those of the rest of the country.
The journey to the 2023 vote was set in motion in 2017 when Indigenous leaders and community members “from all points of the southern sky” met at Uluru and wrote an invitation to the Australian people to walk with them on a path toward “constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country”.
That letter asked Australians to listen, and urged us all to support structural reforms to overcome the “torment of [First Nations] powerlessness”:
“Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are alienated from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.”
Neither side of the Voice debate denied the need for Australia to create a better future for First Nations children.
But, by majority vote, Australians have made clear that a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament is not how they want to respond to these crises.
That last question is what the coalition and the No voters have to answer now, now that they have successfully campaigned that this isn’t the right way to go about it.
Senate seats. A government department with funding and actual powers for decision making on indigenous issues. That would be a start, and a much better one than another voice to be ignored.
I’mma try and copy/paste this into comment or two for shits and giggles. In the meantime if someone could create a website that turns interactive articles into regular articles that would be great.
“Reader mode” in my browser converted this article into something perfectly readable. It still hand single sentence paragraphs but otherwise nothing wrong with it.
I’m sorry I couldn’t get through that awful scrolling design pattern. Just give me a damn slideshow or something.
I’mma try and copy/paste this into comment or two for shits and giggles. In the meantime if someone could create a website that turns interactive articles into regular articles that would be great.
Beyond No, here’s what we know about the Voice results
By Tim Leslie, Ashley Kyd, Julian Fell, Ben Spraggon and Matt Liddy
Australians in all six states have said a resounding No to a Voice to Parliament, sinking a years-long campaign for Indigenous constitutional recognition.
For Yes campaigners, the picture is stark.
There’s still more counting to do, but only the ACT will return a vote for Yes.
But these maps alone aren’t enough to tell us the full story of how the country voted.
Let’s dig deeper and see what more we can reveal.
Along the way, we’ll find out what the places with the highest and lowest Yes votes have in common, as well as uncovering just how little might have changed since the republic referendum was held 24 years ago.
First up, we’re going to bring in a map of Australia that looks a little different.
What we’ve done here is re-sized the states based on how many people live in them.
Now, let’s switch to a more nuanced view of the result, one that takes into account the strength of the vote in each state.
The darker the orange, the stronger the No vote.
As you can see, Queensland voted much more strongly No than Victoria.
While referendums are decided by how people vote on a state and national level, if we look at how Australians voted in every electorate, a very different picture emerges.
Suddenly, we have a tapestry — orange still predominates but there are patches of purple for Yes, as well as grey areas where the vote was close to an even split.
A quick look at the extremes is worthwhile here …
The regional Queensland seat of Maranoa has the highest No vote in the country — topping 80 per cent — while inner-city Melbourne is the strongest Yes.
Curiously, these seats at opposite ends of the country have at least one thing in common. Their sitting members are both party leaders — the Nationals’ David Littleproud in Maranoa and the Greens’ Adam Bandt in Melbourne.
We’re going to hear more about these two seats a little later on.
But for now let’s just say these two seats sit at opposite ends of a trend that played out across the nation.
Here’s a snapshot of the inner-city seats across our capital cities — as you can see, these are the country’s Yes hotspots.
However, that core of support quickly drops away when you look at the outer-metropolitan suburbs.
And in regional and rural Australia there is very strong opposition to the Voice.
You can see this trend at play even in Victoria, the state with the highest Yes vote overall.
While these maps give us an indication of how different parts of the country voted, the voting data has more to tell us.
By looking at the results through a different lens, we can start to sketch out a picture of what might have driven votes across the country.
Here are all the electorates lined up based on their Yes vote, so those with a stronger support for Yes appear higher on the chart.
Looking at it this way, you can see Melbourne all the way up the top, and to Maranoa down the bottom.
Charting the vote against how far electorates are from their state’s capital city starkly shows what’s evident on the map — the further they were from the city, the more likely voters were to vote No.
This steady drop-off of support is evident when we look at who lives in each electorate.
When we switch the horizontal axis to show the level of educational achievement, individual seats shift but the shape remains the same.
A similar pattern plays out with age.
And again with income.
We don’t know if any of these factors are the reason why people voted against the Voice, but what they do show is that it failed to resonate with a wide group of Australians.
Tellingly, they also show how similar the results are to the last time we had a referendum.
Let’s look at the No vote for the 1999 Republic referendum on the horizontal axis.
From Melbourne to Maranoa, the majority of electorates that voted against a republic in 1999 have repeated history.
A generation has passed, people born after the referendum are now adults, and yet only a handful of seats have voted differently.
The highlighted purple hexagons are those that voted No in 1999 but Yes in 2023, and the highlighted orange electorates went the other way.
Despite all the differences between the two referendums — the same areas that were resistant to change, and those that embraced it, have hardly shifted at all.
What also hasn’t shifted in the past two decades is the divide between the lives Indigenous Australians can hope to lead, and those of the rest of the country.
The journey to the 2023 vote was set in motion in 2017 when Indigenous leaders and community members “from all points of the southern sky” met at Uluru and wrote an invitation to the Australian people to walk with them on a path toward “constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country”.
That letter asked Australians to listen, and urged us all to support structural reforms to overcome the “torment of [First Nations] powerlessness”:
“Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are alienated from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.”
Neither side of the Voice debate denied the need for Australia to create a better future for First Nations children.
But, by majority vote, Australians have made clear that a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament is not how they want to respond to these crises.
An urgent question emerges — what is?
Amazing write up, thank you.
That last question is what the coalition and the No voters have to answer now, now that they have successfully campaigned that this isn’t the right way to go about it.
Senate seats. A government department with funding and actual powers for decision making on indigenous issues. That would be a start, and a much better one than another voice to be ignored.
Omg thank you!
“Reader mode” in my browser converted this article into something perfectly readable. It still hand single sentence paragraphs but otherwise nothing wrong with it.
I tried reader mode in firefox but only got the first half a dozen paragraphs.
“ODYSSEY FORMAT BY ABC NEWS STORY LAB”
Pitchforks out! 🔱
I’m here for it 🔱🔱🔱
Thankfully Firefox’s reader mode can make some sense of it.