Liverpool City Council Mayor Ned Mannoun has refuted suggestions that a person’s education level was a key factor behind whether they backed last weekend’s referendum on changing the Australian Constitution.
“I want to stand up for the people of Western Sydney. Commentary that says we’re not smart enough out here: that’s why we didn’t vote for ‘The Voice,’ it’s pretty disrespectful,” Mr. Mannoun told 2GB radio on Oct. 17.
“People here are very intelligent. They get what’s going on and there are multiple reasons why they didn’t support The Voice and it wasn’t because of education levels.”
The western Sydney mayor said many in his community were migrants concerned about the preservation of Australian democracy.
“There’s a lot of migrants, new Australians that have come out here from war torn countries with an absence of thriving democracy. This Voice concerned a lot of them because they saw it as a potential regression of the democratic process.”
Graffiti and a “Vote NO” campaign sign is seen outside a home in Perth, Australia, on Oct. 7, 2023. Matt Jelonek/Getty Images
On Oct. 14, Australians took to the polling booths to vote on whether to alter the Constitution to embed an advisory body into government that will have the power to “make representations” to the executive and legislature on policies that affect Indigenous people.
Suburban, Regional Australians Voted Against The Voice
The Albanese Labor government’s proposal to embed an Indigenous Voice to Parliament into the Constitution was overwhelmingly rejected by Australian suburban and regional electorates.
In the seat of Fowler in South-West Sydney, which includes Liverpool City, 60.4 percent of residents voted against the proposal.
Further, 59 out of 78 seats held by federal Labor MPs nationwide returned a majority No vote despite the party’s official support for the proposal.
Federal electorates that backed The Voice included some of the nation’s most affluent seats like Warringah, Higgins, McNamara, and Wentworth.
The electorate with the strongest support nationwide was Melbourne—held by Greens Leader Adam Bandt—with 77.8 percent of voters choosing Yes.
The electorate that voted most strongly against the proposal was the division of Flynn—a regional Queensland seat occupied by Nationals MP Colin Boyce—where 83.9 percent of residents voted No.
The five electorates with the largest proportion of Aboriginal residents—Lingiari, Parkes, Leichhardt, Durack, and Kennedy—all voted No by an average of 71 percent.
Conversely, the five seats with the smallest populations of Indigenous residents—Goldstein, Chisholm, Bradfield, Kooyong, and Higgins—averaged a 56 percent Yes vote.
Yet the results showed that in individual polling booths with large proportions of Indigenous Australians, the Yes vote performed better than in most other polling booths nationwide.
For example, Palm Island in Queensland—with a population made up of 91 percent Indigenous residents—returned a 75.1 percent Yes vote whereas in its federal electorate Herbert, only 24 percent of voters came back in favour.
Similarly, Mornington Island in Far North Queensland has a population comprising 80 percent Indigenous people. It delivered one of the highest Yes votes in Australia at 78 percent despite its electorate Kennedy reporting a majority No vote.
Waleed Aly’s Comments
Mr. Mannoun’s comments come in response to those made by Channel 10’s The Project host Waleed Aly on Oct. 16 evening.“The biggest dividing line seems to have been education, so if you are in a seat that had high levels of tertiary education then you were at the very top end of the Yes vote. If you had the lowest levels of tertiary education you were at the low end of the Yes vote,” Mr. Aly said.
Mr. Aly also said a threshold of education was needed to understand The Voice concept.
“If you go through the history, you go through the experience of the people who designed it or who came up with the idea, it actually makes perfect sense. Most people actually haven’t been on that journey and when you come to them with this idea that’s actually kind of abstract and complicated, they’re going to respond with instinct.”
Mr. Aly went on to clarify that it was not necessarily because formally educated people were more intelligent, but that the style of campaign resonated more with metropolitan residents and not with those in lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
Meanwhile, following the referendum’s defeat, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was upset but nonetheless respected the wish of the Australian people.
Some prominent Coalition MPs have backed a less contentious proposal to alter the preamble of the Constitution to recognise Indigenous people, a move Nationals leader David Littleproud says would have won support from the public.
While former Greens and now independent Senator Lidia Thorpe said The Voice was an “easy way to fake progress” without any meaningful change.
