The Indigenous voice to parliament referendum likely would have passed if there had been bipartisan support for the proposal, according to a large study conducted throughout the campaign.
Support for the referendum among Labor voters dropped 16 percentage points between January and October, while support among Coalition voters dropped by more than 30 percentage points, according to the survey of more than 4,200 people conducted by the Australian National University.
Most of the decline in Coalition support occurred after the Liberal party came out in opposition to the referendum in April. And the reasons for people’s vote choice mirrored the major talking points of the campaigns, according to Australian National University Prof Ian McAllister, the head of the Australian Election Study.
The ANU poll found 39% of Coalition voters supported the voice in January. By early April this number had dropped to 35%. By August, support had fallen another 11 percentage points, ending up at 8% in favour by October.
If there had been bipartisanship, and party voting patterns on referendum day in October had reflected the polling in January, McAllister says, then the referendum would have passed.
“It wouldn’t be a very divisive campaign because the two major parties would be basically agreeing on the proposal, he says.
Political scientists have noted that voters tend to take their lead from parties and other figures when making decisions about a referendum.
“[For a yes voter] your feelings about the Labor party were actually not statistically significant in determining your vote but there was a huge effect for your feelings about Albanese,” McAllister says.
“And in the case of the Liberal side, your feelings about the Liberal party were actually much more important than your feelings about Peter Dutton.”
Division and risk were major talking points of the no campaign throughout the referendum and these concerns were reflected in the reasons given for voting no.
The yes vote was driven, but to a lesser extent, by “the desire for reconciliation and better outcomes for Indigenous people”, McAllister says.
The study also found the referendum was likely to have passed if it had been conducted on the basis of recognition alone. But this option had been consistently rejected by Indigenous-led processes for years.
“Our findings suggest [the issue was] not [so] much the premise of recognition but the model that was being presented to voters at the referendum, among other key factors,” says Prof Nicholas Biddle, a co-author of the survey.
According to the survey, 76% of no voters thought Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders deserved a voice on key policies and decisions, while 87% of all voters in the survey agreed. More than 80% also backed a formal truth-telling process.
The survey broke out voting patterns by demographics, finding that no voters were more likely to be older, male, have lower levels of education and speak a language other than English at home.
Education and age were some of the best predictors of how Australians voted in the referendum. Australians aged 18-24 were more than twice as likely to vote yes than those aged 75 and over.
Australians with a degree were almost three times more likely to support the voice as those who had not completed high school.
Recent research has found that younger Australians are bucking the trend of voting for more conservative parties as they age, with high levels of education a major factor.
No voters were also less likely to identify as caring a great deal about the outcome of the referendum, or to say they had paid a good deal of attention throughout the campaign.
But that could be because many of the “soft yes” voters had changed their minds by the end of the campaign, and those that were left were strongly in favour of the proposal.
Very few people who intended to vote no at the start of the campaign ended up voting yes, according to the ANU survey. But 42% of those who intended to vote yes in January ended up voting no.
This was reflected in the polling throughout the campaign, which saw a steady drift of undecided and “soft” yes voters towards the no side.
