Understanding Public Opinion on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum: Racism, Hostility, and Divided Support
By: Carew Boulding, Raymond Foxworth, Sarah Maddison
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In October 2023, Australians voted in a referendum on a proposed constitutional amendment to create an Indigenous advisory body in the Australian Parliament. The proposed constitutional reform failed, with 60% of voters rejecting the change. In this paper, we use survey data collected the week before the vote to identify the factors motivating individual vote choice. We show that Indigenous voters were not nearly as divided as the campaigns made it seem (only 27% of Indigenous people said they were going to vote no, compared with 58% non-Indigenous). In full models controlling a range of variables, Indigenous peoples supported the Voice significantly more than non-Indigenous people. For non-Indigenous Australians, attitudes about the Voice were driven more by what we call anti-Indigenous hostility and the belief that Indigenous support was divided than by standard predictors of political attitudes, including demographic variables, ideology, or contact and familiarity with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples. Taken together, these findings help explain the failure of the Voice referendum.
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