There are many reasons Australians will vote No. Jacinta Price is just one of them

By James Massola

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Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is not the only reason the Voice to parliament is staring at defeat on October 14.

But she’s a pretty good place to start.

In 11 days time, when voting has closed, counting has finished and the first drafts of history come to be written, Price’s early intervention to ensure the National Party was voting No – long before the Liberals adopted a position – will come to be seen as perhaps the decisive moment if No succeeds.

“It is very powerful”: Jacinta Price’s influence on the No vote.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

The Voice to parliament has been one of the most bitterly contested issues in Australian politics since the turn of the millennium, ranking alongside the republic referendum, the Iraq war, climate change and same-sex marriage.

Other key decisions will be debated: over the release of detail, whether it should have been legislated first, the emergence of a “progressive” No campaign, whether the proposed constitutional amendment should have been tweaked, even on whether the timing was right.

But through her actions and rhetoric, perhaps more than anyone else, Price has opened the door marked ‘it’s OK to have doubts and vote No to the Voice’.

Pollster Kos Samaras, the director of Redbridge Strategic Research, said that Price had the largest effect on the Voice referendum of any individual.

“She’s an Aboriginal woman saying ‘don’t vote for this’. It is very powerful because it turned this into a political fist fight and not a proposition above politics … progressive No hasn’t had the same impact,” he said.

With petrol prices past $2 a litre, a big spike in the cost of mortgages and rents and other household bills rising, “a lot of people are voting No because they fell like the PM is not paying attention to them economically”.

Voice support on the decline

The polls, including the Resolve Political Monitor, certainly suggest voters have turned on the Voice: from 64 per cent support in September 2022 to 43 per cent support in September 2023. From here, the Yes campaign will need everything to go right to pull off an unlikely victory.

Support for the Voice among Labor voters had fallen from 75 per cent in April to 60 per cent by September. I asked Prime Minister Anthony Albanese twice this week why four in 10 Labor voters (close to 2 million people) now opposed a major election promise from a popular first-term leader.

He did not directly address the question, instead criticising the No campaign for spreading fear and disinformation and then holding out hope for victory.

“I know a lot of people have not made up their mind, and what I know is that the feedback, when people talk through these issues, they arrive at a Yes vote pretty comfortably,” he said.

Pollsters and political observers believe No voters span a spectrum: from hard right conservatives; to undecided or disengaged – and therefore still persuadable – soft Nos; through to a smaller subset of progressive Nos, who believe the Voice will not do enough for Indigenous Australians and that treaty should be the priority.

A majority of voters over the age of 35 are voting No, as are people in the outer suburbs, the regions, Coalition voters, people who have a trade or school qualification, religious voters and those on lower and middle incomes – a broad cross-section of Australians, according to the Resolve Political Monitor’s September polling.

So changing the minds enough of those No voters in the time remaining will be no small task.

The No vote in the suburbs

I spoke to early voters from Melbourne’s outer suburban Melton, in the safe Labor seat of Hawke, and in affluent Camberwell across town in the Liberal-turned-Teal seat of Kooyong, seeking to understand who No voters were and why they opposed the Voice to parliament.

Hawke has a median household weekly income of $1738, a median age of 35, and 17.5 per cent of people have a university degree. Kooyong has a median income of $2333, median age of 40, and 52 per cent of people have a tertiary education.

In Sydney, the equivalent seats would be Labor-held Macarthur, which has a median household weekly income of $1904, median age of 34 and 20.4 per cent of people have a degree and Teal-held Warringah, which has a median household income of $2870 a week, a median age of 40, while 47.9 per cent have a degree.

Time and again, No voters brought up the fact that some prominent Indigenous politicians – Price and her campaign colleague Nyunggai Warren Mundine – were also opposed to the Voice.

Barbara, a volunteer for the No campaign at an early voting station in Camberwell, said she believed in Price.

“I think if you listen to her, she says it all. I have read the [Uluru] statement, I think we are all equal, we are not racist and I think it is going to make us a very racist country if we do it,” she said.

Though there were ten Yes volunteers and two No volunteers on hand in Camberwell to pass out fliers – and plenty more voters who smiled and nodded back at the Yes team as they walked in – her enthusiasm was undimmed.

“I see a lot of news and have listened to her over the journey and I just think Jacinta’s amazing. She’s so level and even and not nasty and she’s living it.”

Across town in Melton, in the Labor heartland seat of Hawke, there was just one volunteer handing out fliers for each side of the debate, though several more Yes volunteers turned up soon after. Most early voters turned away the fliers offered by both sides. After 16 months, they had made up their mind. A total of 124,000 people voted on the first day polls were open.

An older woman named Mary, who did not want to give her last name or be in a photo and who voted No, said “I think they have enough rights as it is. Even the Aborigines, some of them want to vote No.”

Neil, who voted soon after Mary, said a lack of information was key to his No vote and added he felt “very pushed into it, very government and corporate affiliated”.

But voters in Melton, in the seat of Hawke, weren’t all voting No.

One Yes voter, a tradie in his mid-40s who asked not to be named and did not wish to be photographed, said he has changed his mind twice since Albanese announced the vote.

“I was a Yes, then I went a No after that booklet that came around … then I asked my kids and they said you should vote Yes and I thought a bit more about me, and they swayed me. The pamphlet is not good for the Yes vote. The argument, it’s just not there.”

More than once, No Voters expressed broad sympathy with Indigenous Australians’ historic experience of colonialism and racism – but questioned whether the Voice would fix it.

Wendy, in Kooyong, said she wanted First Australians to be “looked after” but she wasn’t sure the Voice was the answer.

“I can see two points [of view] from Aboriginal people, they seem a bit confused, so that’s confused me even more, but to still say No. I understand where they are coming from, they haven’t had a fair deal, but I’m a bit tired of being sorry.”

Why No is resonating for the undecided

Resolve’s Reed said voters in Australia can be broken down into three broad groups: one third progressive, one third conservative and a transactional group in the middle who are persuadable.

“Same-sex marriage won progressives over by forcing a better outcome for that group, but it also got the practical middle too because it awarded equal opportunities to individuals regardless of their attributes. That’s what wins social issues in Australia, and the Voice is failing there because it treats individuals differently,” he said.

So in this frame, Australians could back same-sex marriage because it made people more equal, and then vote No in the referendum because they feel it makes the country less equal.

“Of course, most people voting No are not racist,” said Reed. “They tend to be more conservative people who are thinking, ‘are we doing the right thing, will it be effective, will it have unintended consequences?’.

“They want action too – they’re quite comfortable with recognition and consultation – but see an enshrined Voice as a permanent experiment that could go horribly wrong. They will be expecting something else to be done in its place.”

Price, Mundine and other Indigenous No voters have appealed to the persuadable centre of Australian voters, telling them Indigenous Australians don’t want this solution either.

Albanese is aware, as Samaras said, that some voters are marking his government down for being too focused on the Voice and not enough on their economic pain.

On Monday, he visited the seat of Hawke to promote what his government had done to cut the cost of childcare and medicines, while also introducing fee-free TAFE courses.

Both Reed and Samaras believed their polls are accurate and that No is on track to win.

“We are going to end up with a No vote of around 60 per cent,” Reed predicted, though he adds “it is not impossible that the Yes case wins”.

“The polls are an accurate read of sentiment at this time,” Samaras said, “I think it will end up about 60-40”.

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