Areas with a high-level of university graduates tended to vote yes in the Indigenous voice referendum – but wealthy pockets around Australia paint a more complex picture about what led populations to back the advisory body.
Guardian Australia’s analysis of polling data shows areas with a high proportion of university-educated graduates was one of the single biggest predictors of a yes vote, and a stronger predictor than median income level.
Kos Samaras, a political strategist and a director at RedBridge Group, said a yes vote was related to a university degree, but there was “nuance”.
“There are pockets around the country which don’t align with the idea that income and education means yes,” he said. In those areas, occupation played an important role in how votes were cast.
Votes were heavily no in areas with high incomes and with high numbers of managers in industries such as banking, finance and real estate. Samaras singled out the Melbourne suburb of Greenvale, which voted 72% no, and has a weekly household income of about $2,200, as an example.
Areas with high levels of education – but not necessarily high earnings – voted yes. Samaras describes these voters as public service workers and lower level professionals in female-dominated industries, such as healthcare.
“There’s this misconception that wealthy areas are full of big earners, but in reality they represent a small number of voters and drag up the median income range and conceal the fact that a lot of people in those areas have average wages and high education,” he said.
Residents of Carlton North, where yes was 92%, gave him a “very strong, clear picture of what a yes voter looks like”. They tend to skew young and be tertiary qualified, monocultural, very progressive and they vote Greens, he said.
He explained that “social contagion” was at work in large cities, with university, occupation and location creating “social tribes”.
The Melbourne suburb of Mill Park, a 65% no area, is a middle-income area home to many second-generation Greek, Macedonian and Turkish families.
“We think there’s a lot of self-made wealth, people who come from working-class backgrounds but are better off than their parents,” Samaras said.
“Perhaps this is how the yes campaign betrayed itself – in a certain cultural light, the vote was not necessarily about Aboriginal people, it was about those who are running it: inner-city white progressives who come from a particular class.”
Peter Lewis, the executive director of Essential Media, said the company’s polling results showed the yes vote for those who felt “financially comfortable” was 56%. This fell to 39% for the “financially secure”, 32% for the “financially struggling” and 28% for those “in serious financial difficulty”.
Lewis said the no campaign used the voice referendum for “the sort of identity politics that they can weaponise with groups of voters who are more focused on their material needs”.
They did this by casting the yes advocates as “elites”, even though their own campaign had generous backers, including the billionaire miner Clive Palmer.
“One of the tricks of turning an issue into elites versus battlers is that it allows the argument to be prosecuted without actually talking about the substance of the issue,” Lewis said.
“That was the thing that the no campaign managed to do, to not have conversations about First Nations disadvantage.”
Prof Nicholas Biddle, a researcher at the Australian National University’s Centre for Social Research and Methods, says education correlates with people’s confidence in their views and in their futures.
“People with high levels of education are more likely to feel they can understand issues, that they can engage with the content and that their views are supported by the evidence,” he said.
On the flip side, he said, the no campaign emphasised the complexity of the referendum and the debate.
Biddle said education has also surpassed income as a predictor of voting direction because it is more likely to lead to permanent, more stable income. That makes people more willing to take risks, he said.
“If you have a high level of education, you probably feel more confident that whatever happens you can ride it out,” he said.
If someone has a higher income but a lower level of education, they might feel more threatened by change, worry more about the cost of living than the referendum, and might be more likely to take on board misinformation about the voice.
Biddle said those with high levels of education were more likely to interact with people with similar views.
“People are more likely to be talking and engaging with people with similar backgrounds to themselves and I think there’s a likelihood that as the campaign progressed … those echo chambers were influencing [the debate].”
