Unpopular opinion: there's nuance in the No Vote

Posted 14 Mar 2025 09:00AM

Updated on 14 Mar 2025 04:42PM

By Prof Megan Davis & Pat Anderson AO

So why did 61% of Australians Vote No? We won't oversimplify.

There's been a serious lack of analysis since October 14, 2023. The media loves to latch on to a single narrative and identify 'the one thing' that moved voters to the No camp.

But all of the data we have access to indicates that there was no one reason. The reasons people voted No were many and varied.

In the absence of any meaningful post mortem from the government or the media, we've done our own analysis of the polling and publications, and commissioned some of our own research via YouGov and Essential.

Was racism at play? Undeniably there was an element of it, but racism alone does not explain October 14. Our data suggests that somewhere between 7-12% of the No Vote can be attributed to racist attitudes.

Was it a lack of bipartisanship? Peter Dutton didn't help. Neither did David Littleproud when he came out against the Voice before he even knew what the proposal was. Recently published data showed a drop in support once the Liberals publicly opposed the Voice, but we can't be sure that bipartisanship would be changed the outcome. There has been a successful referendum historically that did not receive bipartisan support.

Obscuring everything was a thick cloud of lies. Trumpian discourse dominated. Remember when Peter Dutton speculated about a "rigged" referendum and a "rigged" AEC? Throughout the campaign lies spread from both ends of the political spectrum. None more dominant than those who told the Australian people that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did not want the Voice. Our research said they did (83%) and that was confirmed by the polling data. These bad actors were afforded an awful lot of attention during the campaign, and they were wrong.   

The second most damaging lie told by those opposing the Voice, was that its introduction would introduce race into the Constitution and divide Australians by race. This group failed to acknowledge that race is already embedded in the Constitution, and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are acutely aware of this fact because we're the only group to have laws made specifically for us.

More recently we see the Coalition and some media attempting to broaden the No to mean the rejection of welcome to country and other policy measures. Australians voted No to enshrining an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice in the Constitution.

• They didn't vote No to Truth-Telling.
• They didn't vote No to Agreement Making.
• The No doesn't mean a legislative Voice is off the table.
• And the No was not a No to constitutional recognition forever.

If you're interested in reading more on bipartisanship, this article from Murray Goot is interesting.

We know full-well that we live in a politically fractious time. A time when the effectiveness of Indigenous Policy is at an all time low, where the penalty for lying in the political arena is non-existent and where social media is engineered to point our attention towards things that outrage us.

Despite these significant headwinds, we're staying true to Uluru.