Indigenous Voice polling round-up

152 comments on “Indigenous Voice polling round-up”

1. Can we please keep this thread relevant to the Indigenous Voice. The main thread for general discussion is here.

2. https://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2023/09/voice-referendum-polling-nothing-has.html

   (Last week’s article updated)

   I get about the same, I have Yes at 41.8 and I also have a noticeable slowing of the rate of decline after adjusting for estimated house effects (and a house-effect adjusted graph at the bottom).

3. Yes probably will narrow the gap, due to the huge spending advantage they have and the army of volunteers and heavy media backing from the likes of the ABC and the Nine Papers, but I think the damage was done months ago. Too little, too late, my guess!

4. The portentous and probable no vote is nothing to gloat about. This will likely be a massive albatross around our collective necks for a long time to come.

   When the dust settles, I suspect it will be Dutton who wears the opprobrium. His decision to stall progress by politicising every issue will backfire on him. It is easier to scuttle reform than to lead. He has painted himself as a wrecker.

   Time will tell.

   Bring on the Murdoch royal commission.

5. Worth reading: https://theconversation.com/how-might-the-first-nations-voice-to-parliament-referendum-affect-australias-international-reputation-213764

   MC Hammer reminds us the world is watching: https://twitter.com/MCHammer/status/1704835837983379774

6. On the polls, I remain optimistic, for reasons I’ve explained: on the ground it’s plain as day that people are just tuning in now.

   And even in the event of NO win, YES will very likely win in VIC, TAS and both territories. This will leave the country divided, and the matter settled only in the narrow constitutional sense. We’ll still have to do something about an Indigenous Voice to parliament in the long run.

   And a special note to anyone still considering a “Progressive No” vote: your NO vote will sit in the exact same NO pile with the conservative NO, the assimilationist NO, the racist NO, the ignorant NO, the confused NO, and the ‘I simply fear change of any sort’ NO.

   And that will be who you stood with on October 14. Don’t do it. Even if it’s cool in your clique – don’t do it. Vote Yes, and tell them you voted No. You know you’ll feel better later. 🙂

7. I don’t have a problem with The Voice itself.
   It may even be a good idea and might easily have secured my support as a legislated initiative.

   However, I do have a problem with embedding race based provisions of any sort in our Constitution. I advocate the removal of any that are there already.
   Racism is a scourge on society. I protested against apartheid in South Africa and I don’t want to see it embedded in our own Constitution.
   It is for this reason that I will be voting no.
   I believe a lot of Australians are of the same view.

   For many (most?), the referendum is not about whether there should be a Voice to Parliament or not. It is about whether or not such a Voice, if there is to be one, should be embedded in our Constitution.

   The failure of the yes campaign to even acknowledge that this is a key issue means that they have not addressed it in presenting their case. Very seriously a strategic error.

   There are those who claim this proposal is not about race.
   I can’t see how it is not and the proponents of that view have provided little or no evidence to convince me otherwise. The little I have seen reads like gobbledegook. I think that most Australians share my view.

   The whole project has been a shambles and fatally mismanaged from the start.
   I felt seriously misled when Albanese started spruiking the referendum in his victory speech on election night. The issue had not been mentioned during the election campaign apart from some broad statements about supporting the Statement From The Heart. There was nothing specific about holding a referendum in the first term. Suddenly, after the polls closed it was the central theme of the new government. Not cost of living, not integrity in government/national corruption commission, not Climate Change which were the central themes of the campaign. The fact that Albanese concealed his intent during the campaign only to make it the feature of his victory speech was very jarring.

   That the whole yes campaign has been a complete debacle only adds to the disaster.
   I think that Albanese has made a huge error in promoting his vanity project over all else.
   It has made the implementation of a Voice to Parliament so much more difficult, if not impossible, at least in the foreseeable future.

   It has also overshadowed the new government’s several worthy achievements in its first year.
   It has undermined Albanese’s credibility and that of his government and squandered political capital that could have been spent on matters of far more importance to the people who elected him.

8. YouGov has just released its latest poll results, finding 53% of voters intend to vote No in the Indigenous Voice referendum, 38% intend to vote Yes, and 9% are undecided. The poll was conducted between 25 to 29 September with a nationally politically representative sample of 1,563 voters.

   Yes leads among Labor voters (49% to 41% no), and Greens voters (70% to 24% no), but No leads among the Coalition voters (73% to 22% yes).

   Yes leads in inner metropolitan electorates by 48%-41% but No leads in outer metropolitan electorates by 58%-31%, provincial city electorates by 56%-40% and rural electorates by 60%-34%.

   YouGov director of government Paul Smith said:

   With pre-poll voting on the Voice referendum starting today, No enjoys a commanding 15-point lead. While only a small majority of 2022 Labor voters intend to vote Yes, the referendum is having no discernible effect on voting intention, with Labor enjoying a slightly greater two-party preferred vote than the last election and Anthony Albanese enjoying a 17-point lead over Peter Dutton as preferred prime minister.

   The poll finds Labor leading 53% to 47% for the Coalition in two-party preferred terms.

9. A huge problem for Yes, as I’ve said all along, is the high percentage of Labor voters from the 2022 election supporting No, that is the real handicap for them currently.
   Of course Yes is doing badly in outer metropolitan areas and regional Australia, very predictable.

   e.g.w – good analysis above, I totally agree with you. The Yes campaign from the start has been a complete shambles, and considering the huge advantage they have in terms of money to spend and volunteer numbers and media/corporate support, they should be knocking this thing out of the park. I think the mistake Albanese and the Yes23 camp made was wrongly assuming the polls of 6 months ago(60% support for yes) would hold up today. Albo too thought he could use this as a wedge to divide the Liberal Party. Political calculations came into this, definitely, from both sides.

10. It is all happening as it has always happened. Referendums start with huge support and it declines and is defeated. Nothing unusual in all this. Anyone saying yes23 should be kicking this out of the park has no idea how a referendum with no bipartisanship always worked.

11. A referendum on race is doomed to fail. We are a decent, fair go, genuine multicultural society. We intend to stay that way.

12. “I do have a problem with embedding race based provisions of any sort in our Constitution. ”

    Perhaps you should actually read the constitution. Start with paragraph one:

    “WHEREAS the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established:”

    All you’re doing is parroting someone elses lies and misinformation. You need to turn down the tap pressure of crap you’re pumping into your head.

13. Pi at 13:17 (in response to e.g.w):

    “Perhaps you should actually read the constitution. Start with paragraph one:”

    Perhaps you should try to comprehend the section you have quoted. It makes no reference to race.

14. Pi says:
    Wednesday, October 4, 2023 at 1:17 pm
    “I do have a problem with embedding race based provisions of any sort in our Constitution. ”

    Perhaps you should actually read the constitution. Start with paragraph one:

    “WHEREAS the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established:”

    All you’re doing is parroting someone elses lies and misinformation. You need to turn down the tap pressure of crap you’re pumping into your head.
    =========================================================

    Not sure what the relevance of that part of Paragraph 1 you quoted has to my post.

    However, if you read beyond paragraph 1 to: Part V – Powers of the Parliament at (xxvi);
    “51. Legislative powers of the Parliament
    The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:
    ….……………………..
    (xxvi) the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws;”

    It is pretty clear to me that we do have race based provisions in our Constitution. Demonstrably, no crap in what I wrote at all! Have a nice day.

15. I reckon if you bothered to look at contemporaneous material you’d see heaps of reference to ‘the British race’ which founded the rationale for the White Australia policy adopted shortly after federation.

    But you could always just pretend the transition from colonial to dominion governance wasn’t the result of assertions of racial and cultural superiority and wish that were true.

16. A recap:

    egw: “I do have a problem with embedding race based provisions of any sort in our Constitution. ”

    Pi: Demonstrates race based provisions in the constitution.

    egw: “It is pretty clear to me that we do have race based provisions in our Constitution. Demonstrably, no crap in what I wrote at all!”

    Yeah.

    Rewi: “I reckon if you bothered to look at contemporaneous material you’d see heaps of reference to ‘the British race’ which founded the rationale for the White Australia policy adopted shortly after federation. ”

    No-one said these chumps were smart. They read propaganda and regurgitate it. They don’t even understand the words they’re using. A non-stop diet of sky news and the herald sun comments section will do that to some people.

17. Our Federation Journey – A ‘White Australia’

    Summary

    Australia became a nation when the six self-governing colonies united in 1901. Before this, the colonies were politically separate, with their own laws and parliaments. During the long political process that led to Federation, a stronger sense of what it meant to be Australian was formed; and as this narrative shows, that meant being of British descent.

    ‘[It is] of no use to shut our eyes to the fact that there is a great feeling all over Australia against the introduction of coloured persons. It goes without saying that we do not like to talk about it, but it is so.’ (John Forrest, later the Commonwealth Minister of Defence, at the Federation Convention of 1898.)

    At the time of Federation, most Australians feared that the introduction of people from non-European backgrounds would threaten the security and unity of the new nation. They believed that Australia should be a nation of people of British descent and that an increase of the population was necessary for Australia’s survival. Over the first few years, the new nation primarily encouraged British immigration, but tolerated migrants from Northern Europe and to a lesser degree from Southern Europe. Few Europeans sought to migrate to Australia before World War One, but after the war, Southern Europeans as well as non-European migrants, were excluded from migrating to Australia.

    The majority of the leaders of the Federation movement felt that steps should be taken to produce a ‘White Australia’. Federation would make this goal easier by making strict immigration restrictions more enforceable. This vision of the future Australia overlooked both Aboriginal people and people who had already come to Australia from non-European countries like China, the Pacific Islands, India and Japan.

    https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/articles/13327

    It is no surprise, of course, that the people making such claims of a pristine constitution of equality have zero interest in, nor knowledge of, history.

18. You can call it a “race based” provision all you want, and get hung up on that, but that’s clearly not the reason why the provision is being suggested.

    Similarly in response to Al Pal – Yes, we are a decent, fair go, genuine multicultural society. However, we all occupy a land that had indigenous peoples before we all settled here in the last 235 years – can you not see that??

    The starting point for supporting this referendum was always that you can see a historic wrong in the Constitution omitting any reference to the land’s indigenous people – you aren’t going to be convinced by the “closing the Gap” / we must do better argument if you can’t see that basic historic issue.

    To argue that correcting this historic omission makes us less of a “decent, fair go”, rather than enhances it, is quite the Orwellian level of doublethink.

19. Al Palsays:
    Wednesday, October 4, 2023 at 12:14 pm
    “A referendum on race is doomed to fail. We are a decent, fair go, genuine multicultural society. We intend to stay that way.”

    We are a decent, fair go, genuine multicultural society except when it comes to Aboriginal Australia.

    We are a mostly indecent, greedy, multiculural society of new Australians mostly unable to acknowledge that as new Australians we have stolen the traditional lands of first Australians, denied the atrocities committed in stealing their land and have compiled a massive prologue to enable some warped justifications for the brutal acts of murder, suppression and erroneous excuses.

    The Voice referendum has displayed Australia as an ugly portrait.

    The continued referencing to a Constitution is beyond belief.
    The Constitution is a document so imperfect that it is essentially ignore, only to emerge as a disngenerous eraser for a moment in the short history of white Australia.

    Australia has disgraced itself with its dishonesty, lies, racism and self delusion.

    Gold, Gold, Gold, has been replaced with Shame, Shame, Shame,

20. A lot of people are missing the point. The 1967 took powers to legislate about Indigenous people away from the states. This was good as the federal government could ensure consistency.

    The 2023 Referendum is simply saying that Indigenous people should be consulted before the use of that power.

    Voting no is not gonna change a single thing about “race” in the constitution. But voting yes will make it fairer

21. More from the yougov poll:
    Those under the age of 50 are a majority Yes vote.
    Those 50 and over are very much in favour of No – 70/30 split.

22. I’d certainly be more trustworthy of voting yes if Albo and his crowd:

    1) Followed proper Referenda protocol and had a Constitutional Convention which allowed for there to be a fair discussion, debate around the model with a “final model” proposed. If the Libs disagreed afterwards you could then blame them, hardly blameable now.
    2) Albo had allowed for national debates of this nature and were televised/reported on along with other civil debates between both sides without gag orders on Burney;
    3) Albo hadn’t lied about “80% of indigenous supporting it” (ABC Fact Check proved a lie);
    4) Albo had circulated the legislation due out on 16 October if “yes” gets up. Don’t know why he’s been so opaque on this.
    5) Albo hadn’t knee-capped the “no” sides through each of these machiavellian tactics and had also given proper tax-free status to the “no” camp and not just the “yes” camp.

    Failure lay squarely at Albo’s feet as the chief protagonist, architect and supporter of all five failures above.

23. The 2023 Referendum is simply saying that Indigenous people should be consulted before the use of that power.
    =============================================
    The fact that you, and other posters on this (predominantly lefty) agreefest site cannot agree to what the Voice “simply” does speaks volumes for you and the “yes” camp.

    😛

24. Mark: “It’s your fault I’m racist”

    That seems the long and short of it.

    You should work harder trying to point out how or why you’re different than the people that very much are. Because all of the ones that are, are voting no.

25. I’m a strong yes voter in Queensland and my observations are there’s just no energy about the voice at all in my area. Completely different to the 2022 Federal, where there was green signage everywhere and a real sense among people of change (I’m in Ryan).

    We should see a poll bounce before referendum day but sadly I don’t think it will be enough. 57 NO 43 YES nationally seems a reasonable prediction given current information from polls.

26. To demonstrate his intellectual integrity, Mark will now list the NO! misrepresentations, lies and nasty political tactics.

27. To demonstrate his own intellectual integrity, Boerwar will doubtlessly list the Yes misrepresentations, and compare and contrast them to the alleged No ones.

28. Except he didn’t do that, did he? The entire no campaign is an avalanche of lies, misinformation, division, and the targeting of racism for political gain. And then they blame everyone else for their own racism. The thing they never want to talk about is the actual plight of indigenous people, which is what the referendum is about. There’s a reason for that.

29. ‘Fargo61 says:
    Wednesday, October 4, 2023 at 5:45 pm

    To demonstrate his own intellectual integrity, Boerwar will doubtlessly list the Yes misrepresentations, and compare and contrast them to the alleged No ones.’
    ————————————
    LOL.

    ‘alleged’

    The latest truly nasty racist dog whistling is to demand an audit of Indigenous specific expenditure to make sure that only the ‘most deserving’ cases are getting the money.
    This from the spivs who spent a decade corrupting governance and chucking hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ monies to their mates. Which of those were least deserving, do you think?

    Get back to me when you sort that one out.

30. If, as has been argued, the creation of a Voice will achieve better outcomes on the ground due to more effective consultation with communities, then it should be able to be legislated regardless of whether there’s a Yes or No vote on 14 October. The only practical difference would be that a future government could potentially abolish the Voice. (But even if Yes gets up, a future government with control of the Parliament could potentially throttle the Voice, for example by legislating to define it as consisting of the Commonwealth, State and Territory Ministers for Indigenous Affairs; or of the Indigenous members of the Federal Parliament. And there’s also the small matter of whatever happened to the Inter-State Commission apparently required by s101 of the Constitution.) And it’s at least arguable that if the only point of having the Voice is to improve outcomes on the ground, then hopefully the day would come when it would no longer be needed for that purpose.

    But there’s also the symbolic dimension. And here, I think, the Yes campaign didn’t foresee the impact of a counter-argument which would appeal to the quite deeply held Australian value of equality for all. It’s been too easy for the No proponents to characterise the Voice as potentially creating a situation in which some people would be seen as more authentically Australian than others. And in discussions I’ve had with acquaintances who are planning to vote No, that appears to be a sticking point: they feel that they were born here too, have no other home, and are equally authentic.

    Having said all that, I’ll vote Yes because Canberra is already awash with voices, and one more isn’t going to break the bank; because the practical benefits if it succeeds will be considerable; and because most Constitutions represent compromises, rather than pure expressions of basic principles. (Indeed, if “equality for all” is to be a basic principle of the Constitution, that would require the Senate to be redesigned so that it doesn’t take ten times more votes to elect a Senator in NSW than in Tasmania, and also so that a constitutional amendment can’t be sunk by voters in three States.)

    I’ll also vote Yes because large chunks of the official No case were an insult to one’s intelligence.

31. Ah, yes.

    The unique romance of Tiananmin Square… being squashed alive by tanks.

    https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202310/1299160.shtml

32. If No wins I hope those who advocated for it get a bone pointed at them.

33. No one seems to be mentioning the passivity of the green mps in brisbane .
    May be affecting yes vote campaigning in brisbane

34. Calling everyone you disagree with racist appears to be working well. Keep it up.

35. fubar: “Calling everyone you disagree with racist appears to be working well. Keep it up.”

    It’s my fault you’re racist, amirite?

36. Pi

    Your over-inflated moral certitude continues to come across as one of the greatest, if not the greatest cockwombles on this site, almost completely out of touch with most voters including all those ALP voters who are going to vote No. amirite?

37. Wife and I voted “Yes” today at prepoll in Inner West Sydney.
    Don’t know what this means for demos but we’re both in our late 30s.
    We both didn’t really research the ins and outs of it but felt that if the majority of First Nations wanted it, who am I to deny them of this.
    I liken it a bit to the Quebec independence vote in the late 90s which went down due in large part to spite.
    I don’t have a dog in the fight and from what I know about it the Voice, won’t be impacted, adversely or otherwise by its creation.
    I guess I’ve looked at it like a business- give the customer what they want.

    On US matters, am tipping Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise or Elise Stefanik as the next Speaker.
    Dems to regain the House in 2024 regardless of who is President

38. Here’s the thing; It’s an objective fact that all of the racists are no voters. The only exception to that are the ones who say otherwise are the racists that call the voice racist, and they’re both dumb and racist.

    But none of the no voters say they’re opposed to the voice because they’re racist, do they? How do you reconcile that no voters? They parrot the same lies as all no voters. They actively telegraph the same misinformation as all no voters. They actively encourage the same division as all no voters. They never change their opinions even after having their positions repeatedly debunked as with all no voters. They invent new reasons to justify their already established opinions just like all no voters. So how does one tell you apart? You can’t, can you? What are YOU doing to disassociate yourself from the racists that you know are part of your campaign and are using the same arguments you are? Nothing, are you? There’s a reason for that.

    And I don’t care what party you think you represent. If you think kicking indigenous people is OK as long as you can justify it for political reasons, you’re even worse.

39. Will the Yes case see a Penrith Panthers style comeback on election day?

40. “We are a decent, fair go, genuine multicultural society”
    Aboriginals should just shut up then and stop whining right? Stolen generation? Who cares! Deaths in custody? Not racist! Having their sacred sites blown up by Rio Tinto? Boo hoo cry more.

    “The unique romance of Tiananmen Square… being squashed alive by tanks.”
    Tiananmen Square is an object lesson not to provoke soldiers by lynching & burning their comrades to death.

    Unlike say, the Kent State Massacre where the soldiers formed a firing squad for no reason.

41. Stolen generation – States issue, not Federal.
    Deaths in Custody- States issue, not Federal (and similar rate to non-Aboriginal)
    Juukan Gorge – States issue, not Federal.
    The vast majority of issues impacting on Aboriginals are State and Local Government issues – not Federal ones.

42. “Deaths in Custody- States issue, not Federal”
    Still had a royal commission into it though, so your idea that these issues can’t be discussed outside the states is bunk.

43. Pedant @ 6.09
    “I’ll also vote Yes because large chunks of the official No case were an insult to one’s intelligence.”

    That’s about the best reason from the multiude of “red neck” garbage being “flung” about.

    The greatest irony being that the referendum has created even more division in an Australia that has metamorphosed the concept of “fair dinkum” to produce a concept “fair dinkum, what about me”.

    “fair dinkum, what about me” has been no better displayed in all its new metamorphosed state by the Morrison government, exposed and defeated at the last election, after being found to be disingenerous, non transparent and dishonest.

    The “no” campaign has been platformed by Dutton and the remnant liberals/nationals on the new dictum, “fair dinkum, what about me”.

    The unruly “footy crowd” mentality, lose and banal, at odds with the adoration given to the plethera of indigenous sporting greats and so quickly claimed by the “red necks” as their own.

    The “no” vote has “blood on its hands” both colloquially and historically!

    Remember when the Vietnam veterans were barred from RSL clubs after returning from Vietnam because they were not “real” soldiers.

    Geez, we’ve come a long way!

44. Changing the Constitution because of the inability to effectively performance manage failed public servants is massive overkill.

45. I must commend the Yes campaign on their highly effective use of both the AEC logo and colour palette to establish their brand identity and not get pulled up on it until now when their signs are placed at polling stations and look almost exactly like AEC signs. Machiavelli would be proud.

    An innocent coincidence, apparently.

46. The Yes side have every advantage in the world, and yet they are behind by double digits, why is that?
    And Ray Martin labelling No voters as Dinosaurs and dickheads, that will not help Yes either, especially as a smirking Albanese looks on.

47. Reading the comments in the site, it is disappointing to see how quickly it degenerated into juvenile name calling. I am a yes voter but I believe the no vote will succeed. Leaving aside historical failure rates for referenda, beyond the noisy fringe on both sides, the community just does not care. They have more than enough to worry about with cost of living, inflation, interest rate rises, housing, crime etc. People who are scared about their ability to pay their mortgage, put food on the table, petrol in their car, protect themselves and their children from crime etc will unsurprisingly react with resentment to being forced to vote on something that has no meaning for them whilst their own concerns are seemingly being ignored. The republic failed for this reason, as will the voice likely fail in the absence of a miracle. But one clue for the commenters here on the yes side- calling an undecided voter a racist if they don’t vote a certain is more likely to earn you a middle finger than an ally. This is particularly so with anonymous processes like elections.

48. No one likes being wedged when making a decision. Combining recognition in the Constitution with the Voice concept is a political wedge tactic. To express surprise that voters reject being wedged in this way is either political naïveté or political dissembling.

49. At a pre poll booth on Wednesday (for YES) I listened to a No campaigner claim to be indigenous, claim the “elders” don’t want the Voice, that the vote was rigged, that masks cause covid, that the Uluru Dialogue either was not representative of Indigenous people or did not happen and that Labor had a secret agenda.
    Later she claimed to live near an Indigenous community and whenever “government” interfered it was disastrous. My innocent comment if the community had a voice that was listened to there may be a better outcome was immediately derided.
    The one consistency with no campaigners is the ability contradict their own arguments at will, not see the inconsistency and an inability to apply either truth or logic.

50. That’s the thing about racists; As soon as one set of lies gets exposed, they just use new ones. Because the reasons are irrelevant. If one set of lies become useless against a particular person, they just use a new set. What matters is the outcome. Not the justification.

    Now it’s because it’s a state thing. Now because it’s a cost of living thing. It’s an endless well to draw from.