The republic referendum in Australia: a view from the left
(essay)
The modest republican constitutional change proposed in the November 6,
1999, referendum was hardly the most significant political question
facing Australians in recent times. Nevertheless the results provide a
very useful snapshot of a changing Australia.
The results were actually much better for the republic than most of the
media would admit. A 46.5 per cent Yes vote for a republic, first time
up, is a very good result when you consider that British-Australia was
still celebrating Empire Day about 30 years ago, and when you remember
the enormous grip all the hype about the British royal family still had
in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
Most older Australians can remember being bussed as schoolchildren to
showgrounds during royal visits to stand in the hot sun waiting for the
Queen to pass by. For most of the period since white settlement, the
Australian establishment has energetically promoted the monarchical
British connection as an invaluable support for the hegemony of the
ruling class in Australia.
To better understand the results, I have studied the detailed figures,
booth by booth, for all the seats in NSW, and the national results for
five categories of votes. The following analysis is based on my
examination of these results, supplemented by some useful figures
supplied by Mick Armstrong in the magazine, Socialist Alternative,
published by the group of the same name, which was one of the socialist
groups with sufficient understanding of the class forces at work in the
referendum to very sensibly advocate a Yes vote. Mick Armstrong’s
article is very useful and a lengthy quote from it is worthwhile here:
Indeed it has much in common with the Hanson phenomenon. Significantly,
the No vote in the referendum was highest in those rural areas where One
Nation polled well in the last federal elections. The three seats with
the highest No vote were the seats with the highest Hanson vote in the
last Federal election – the Queensland rural seats of Maranoa (No: 77
per cent, Hanson: 22 per cent), Hanson’s own seat of Blair (No: 75 per
cent, Hanson: 36 per cent) and Wide Bay (No: 75 per cent, Hanson: 26 per
cent). This pattern was replicated outside Queensland.
In NSW, Victoria and Western Australia the seat that topped the state No
vote also had the top One Nation vote: Gwydir, NSW (No: 75 per cent,
Hanson: 21 per cent), Mallee, Vic (No: 72 per cent, Hanson: 13 per
cent), O’Connor, WA (No: 72 per cent, Hanson: 14 per cent).
Similarly, the outer suburban areas with the highest No votes had
above-average support for Hanson: Canning in Perth (No: 68 per cent,
Hanson: 14 per cent), Bonython in Adelaide (No: 67 per cent, Hanson 15
per cent), Oxley in Brisbane (No: 66 per cent, Hanson: 18 per cent),
Werriwa in Sydney (No: 58 per cent, Hanson: 12 per cent).
By contrast the Yes vote was strongest in areas most resistant to the
appeal of Hansonism: the core working class suburbs of Melbourne and the
inner suburbs of Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra.
One misconception propagated by the media is that the Yes vote was
strongest in better-off Liberal electorates. It is true that Sydney’s
wealthy North Shore voted Yes and that the republic was narrowly
defeated in some Labor seats in Sydney’s outer west. However, in NSW
two-thirds of the seats that voted Yes were in the working class areas
of Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong.
Nationally, the five seats with an overwhelming Yes vote were safe Labor
seats, headed by Melbourne with 71.5 per cent, Sydney 68 per cent,
Melbourne Ports 66 per cent, Fraser (ACT) 65 per cent and Grayndler in
Sydney 65 per cent. And the Yes vote in these seats was well above that
in super rich Toorak.
Nearly two-thirds of the 30 seats with the highest Yes vote were Labor
seats. These were not simply inner-city “chardonnay socialist” areas but
included the core working class areas in Melbourne’s western and
northern suburbs.
The working class Yes vote was strongest amongst non-English-speaking
migrants and slightly better-off workers but lower in the poorest, most
depressed sections of the Anglo working class. In Melbourne it tended to
be the marginal outer suburban seats with fewer non-English-speaking
migrants and a larger churchgoing Protestant middle class that voted No.
So while there was not a totally clear-cut working class Yes vote, the
No vote was concentrated amongst the sections of the population most
easily swayed by populist appeals: the rural population, the
outer-suburban middle class, the less unionised and class conscious
workers, older people and traditional Anglo-Australians.
In addition to the points that emerge from Mick Armstrong’s analysis, a
number of other points emerge from my own investigations. The Australian
Electoral Commission has five special categories in each electorate, in
addition to each booth, of which there are usually between 30 and 50.
The five special categories are:
· absentee votes (cast on election day in other electorates).
· pre-poll votes (cast by arrangement before election day, usually
because of travel commitments on election day).
· postal votes, routinely made available by the Electoral Commission to
elderly or housebound people.
· special hospital mobile teams (votes cast in hospitals, nursing homes
and aged care facilities on election day, again in practice, with a
heavy predominance of elderly people)
· votes cast at the capital city Town Hall polling booth in each state
where a number of votes are cast on election day for each electorate.
The result for these five categories is very illuminating. Both the
postal votes and the special hospital votes show a much higher No vote
than the general vote in each electorate, even in the electorates that
strongly voted Yes. This No vote is most pronounced in the hospitals.
On the other hand, absentee voters, people who voted outside their
electorate on voting day, showed a significantly higher Yes percentage
than the general vote for their area. Pre-poll votes, the votes cast by
arrangement before the election, averaged nationally about the same Yes
vote as the national average, being a little less than the average in
the Northern Territory and Victoria, roughly the same in NSW and the ACT
and dramatically higher in WA, Queensland, SA and Tasmania.
The last grouping, the small but significant sample of people voting
outside their own electorate at capital city Town Hall polling booths,
shows by far the highest Yes vote of all. An obvious inference is the
existence, in the referendum result, of a strong tendency for younger
cohorts of voters voting Yes and older cohorts voting No.
Those voting at the capital city Town Hall polling booth for other
electorates are obviously people who get around, and they are probably
younger people. Anyway, they clearly show a pronounced Yes bias. The
overwhelming result for No in the special hospital team votes and the
postal votes clearly suggests a very heavy vote against the republic in
older age groups. (A significant group amongst the postals, in addition
to the aged, are people who are housebound for other reasons, such as
disability. Probably some features of the situation of being housebound,
such as being exposed to a steady diet of talkback radio, has a
conservatising effect on voting patterns on an issue like the republic.)
The tendency for the young to vote Yes and the old to vote No is
confirmed indirectly in another way. For the Yes vote to have done as
well as it did, it emerges clearly that, to counterbalance the No vote
among the old, younger age groups must have voted solidly Yes, including
the “young fogies” of Generation X and younger, who conservative pundits
desperately hoped were in a deeply conservative frame of mind.
This alleged conservative mood among the young didn’t show up in the
republic referendum results at all. The story that a large number of the
young voted No is a conservative invention, not backed up in any way by
the actual results. The electorate-by-electorate pattern confirms the
general observation made by most electoral observers that people with
tertiary education voted Yes very heavily.
This question of levels of formal education is somewhat intertwined with
the age factor. As the steep rise in the number of Australians with
tertiary education has taken place progressively over the last 30 years,
the cohort of Australians in the age group, say of 55 and above, is the
same cohort where the proportion of people with tertiary education is
far less than in younger cohorts.
It also ought to be said that the older cohort are also the cohort whose
whole lives were moulded in the rabidly royalist British-Australia of
the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s, many of whom have an entirely
natural human nostalgia for the period of their youth, which seems to
translate electorally into a certain reluctance to vote for a republic.
Natural demographic evolution will inevitably reduce the electoral
impact of this cohort over time.
In parliamentary elections, postal votes and hospital votes are an area
of fierce contest between the campaigning political machines of
candidates for different parties, whose interests are directly involved.
All the anecdotal evidence suggests that on the occasion of the republic
referendum this very sharp intervention by the various political
machines was minimal because their electoral interests were not directly
affected.
Consequently, the overall result in these two categories can be taken as
a reasonable indicator of the viewpoint of these categories of voters on
the referendum questions. The votes in these five categories, examined
above, total about 1.8 million votes nationally, or about a fifth of the
votes cast in the referendum, so the variations revealed are quite
significant.
The variations in the voting pattern between the five special categories
are of considerable interest. Among other things they clearly highlight
the age factor in the results. An even more fascinating inference is
what one might call the mobility factor. Greater republican inclination
appears to be associated with greater mobility.
The absentee voters, many of whom voted in electorates quite close to
their own electorate, show a higher Yes vote than the vote in their
electorate. Voters who are even further away on voting day, visiting the
state capital, show the highest Yes vote of the lot. (Possibly people
who work outside their own electorate on Saturdays, and therefore vote
absentee, also have a greater republican bias.) So, on the face of it,
the further you travel, the more likely you are to vote for a republic,
which is a new and rather novel concept in political science.
The Yes vote, migrants and ethnicity
There is no question that there was a strong Yes vote from most
non-British migrant communities, including most second and third
generation people of migrant background. In Sydney this was particularly
apparent, with all the Labor seats having a large ethnic component, even
seats like Lowe and St George, where the ethnic component is mainly
older, more established and affluent people of second and third
generation Italian and Greek background, voting solidly Yes.
This is also one of the major explanations for the extraordinarily high
Yes vote in metropolitan Melbourne, where recent migrants and
second-generation ethnics are fairly evenly distributed in almost all
areas and are not concentrated so strongly in particular regions as they
are in Sydney.
There is also a very high component of first, second and third
generation Greek and Italian Australians scattered all over Melbourne,
which has a very high proportion of migrants. Of the 20 Melbourne
electorates, 17 voted comfortably Yes, with very high Yes votes in
working class areas. The only three Melbourne electorates that voted No
were outer-suburban electorates with fewer migrants and ethnic
Australians.
All of this suggests that the widely distributed cultural weight of
migrant ethnicity was a major factor in the very strong Melbourne Yes
vote.
In NSW the contrast in the results between the Newcastle and the
Illawarra-Wollongong areas was very informative. Newcastle, a
working-class area, with a number of Labor seats but proportionately a
much lower number of migrants and people of migrant background, showed a
very bad result for Yes. The only electorate that voted Yes in this
region was the Newcastle electorate itself, by a very narrow margin.
Newcastle is the Hunter Valley electorate in which tertiary educated
people are most heavily concentrated.
On the other hand, the story was dramatically different in the Illawarra
region, an area where there is a very high migrant and ethnic
population, perhaps the highest proportionally in the whole of
Australia. The electorate of Cunningham, the main Illawarra electorate,
showed an overwhelming Yes vote, both in the more affluent suburbs north
of Wollongong, where there are more tertiary educated people, and in the
strongly ethnic working-class suburbs south of Wollongong.
In Cunningham, it is clear, both major social layers: blue-collar
workers of whom, these days, a very high proportion are migrant workers;
and tertiary educated people, voted Yes. In the next electorate south,
Throsby, there was a No majority, but it was derived mainly from a
strong No vote in the Southern Highlands area, where there are few
migrants, and where a generally affluent Anglo middle-class and rural
mood prevails.
A number of the booths in the northern part of Throsby, which are in
outer-suburban working class suburbs of Wollongong, with a large migrant
component, voted Yes. The different and contrasting results in Newcastle
and the Illawarra underline the significance of migrant ethnicity in the
results.
Even in metropolitan Brisbane, the capital of conservative Queensland,
there was a strong Yes vote, and here again there is a clear association
between a Yes vote and two elements: firstly, migrant ethnicity, and
secondly, tertiary education. At this point it is worth saying that by
my reading of the results, there was a majority Yes vote in descending
order of magnitude, in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Wollongong, Brisbane
and Hobart, with a majority No vote in Perth, Adelaide, Newcastle,
Geelong and Launceston. The more heavily urbanised, cosmopolitan cities
were the centre of the Yes vote.
Sydney’s voting pattern
In Sydney there was a striking geographical divide, starting at Bobbin
Head, going down to Baulkham Hills then through the middle of
Parramatta, down to the northern outskirts of Liverpool and across from
Liverpool, past the affluent Anglo suburbs north of the Georges River,
and hitting the Georges River at about Tom Ugly’s Bridge, then out to
sea. The electorates, Liberal or Labor, to the east and north of this
divide voted Yes, and the electorates south and west of it voted No,
although there were strong pockets that voted the other way in all these
areas.
There were some striking but significant local idiosyncracies. Often
distinctively individual, slightly isolated communities, with a strong
local identity and a larger old, established Anglo component, seemed to
vote heavily No. Two examples that jumped out at me were Kurnell in
Sutherland Shire, which voted almost two thirds No in fairly sharp
contrast with the rest of that electorate, where the No vote was lower.
Another striking example was Riverstone-Schofields, an old
working-class, largely Anglo community, where the meat works was closed
some years ago, which showed a No vote approaching 70 per cent, much
higher than the No vote in the rest of that electorate, a Labor
electorate, where Yes did quite well in the other areas.
These kinds of results suggest strongly that there is some truth in the
proposition that pockets of traditionally Labor-voting people who
exercised a strong No vote were often expressing a fairly sharp social
protest against the political class, against economic and political
elites and against the fact that not much has been done for them lately.
On the Tory side of the usual electoral divide, the break from the
suburban North Shore to semi-rural kind of activity at Baulkham Hills is
the sharp divide in the republic referendum result. Semi-rural areas
and, once again small distinctive Anglo communities such as Richmond,
Windsor, Castle Hill, etc, were strong No areas, whereas the dormitory
North Shore voted fairly solidly Yes.
The Yes vote on the normally Liberal-voting North Shore was quite high,
but not as high as the Yes vote in the Labor electorates, where the Yes
vote had the majority. Once again, education obviously has a bearing.
The North Shore electorate with the lowest Yes vote was Bronwyn Bishop’s
electorate of McKellar, which stood out from the rest of the North
Shore, with an almost 50:50 split between Yes and No.
When you look at the Bureau of Statistics breakdown of Sydney, the
Northern Beaches area, which comprises Bronwyn Bishop’s electorate, has
a high concentration of self-employed tradespeople and contractors.
Another Anglo area where there is a strong concentration of
self-employed tradespeople and contractors, intertwined, however, with
people with tertiary education, are the three subdivisions in Daryl
Melham’s Labor electorate of Banks, just north of the Georges River.
In federal and state elections Labor wins these subdivisions with a
lowish margin, much smaller than the margin in the rest of Banks. In the
republic referendum, in which Banks as a whole voted No by a significant
margin, these very affluent Anglo subdivisions showed a very substantial
No majority. (On the other hand, in Melham’s electorate, subdivisions
such as Penshurst, with a large Asian community, voted solidly Yes.)
This patchwork of voting patterns suggests strongly that people such as
self-employed tradespeople, contractors and Anglo small-business people
very largely voted No.
One of the more entertaining small sidelights of the referendum was that
the vocal public demagogy of two Republican No advocates, Phil Cleary
and Ted Mack, didn’t persuade the majority of people in either of the
electorates that had once put them into the federal parliament. Cleary’s
old Melbourne working-class migrant electorate of Wills voted
overwhelmingly Yes. Mack’s upwardly socially mobile, Liberal/independent
Sydney lower North Shore electorate also voted overwhelmingly Yes.
The Labor electorates that had a No majority, in the outer suburbs of
Sydney and in Newcastle still, despite this, registered a fairly high
Yes vote, averaging about 40 per cent, which suggests the traditional
core of the Labor vote, trade union members, migrants, many people of
Irish Catholic background, Aboriginal Australians, etc, voted Yes.
In Country Party and Liberal seats in rural areas and provincial cities
all over Australia, the Yes vote corresponded fairly closely with the
Labor primary vote in the last federal elections, which strongly
suggests that Labor voters who were drawn away by the populist noises
from the Direct Electionists were replaced on the Yes side by tertiary
educated traditionally Liberal voters, who voted Yes on this occasion.
The voting pattern in the Blue Mountains area was extremely informative.
The upper Blue Mountains: Katoomba, Wentworth Falls, etc, where there is
a high concentration of people with tertiary education, showed a very
high Yes vote. The Penrith, lower Blue Mountains area, which is an Anglo
outer-suburban area with far fewer tertiary educated people, more
self-employed tradespeople, and more church-going Protestants, showed a
fairly strong No vote.
A referendum day vignette. Fun and games at Newtown
A curious experience of the republican referendum campaign was to work
on voting day, as I did, for the Yes side, at the main Newtown polling
booth. Early in the day some members of the most obvious sectarian
socialist group, the International Socialists, put on a bit of a stunt
for a couple of hours, noisily campaigning for a No vote, with the
slogan, “No to the boss’s Republic”.
A number of the Yes campaigners had to be gently restrained from doing
bad things to the ISers, who got a universally hostile response from the
Newtown voters, who are wildly multi-ethnic and pretty young, including
quite a number of students.
In the event, the result for the two Newtown subdivisions, one in the
seat of Grayndler and one in the seat of Sydney, were about the two
highest booth results for the Yes vote in the whole of Australia. The
Newtown subdivision in Grayndler registered an almost unbelievable 83
per cent Yes vote. The irony of the eccentric behaviour of the IS is
underlined by this result. Newtown is their patch, so to speak. It’s the
only place in Sydney where they consistently sell their paper. The
masses of Newtown decided to do precisely the opposite of what was
recommended to them by the International Socialists.
Conclusions about the current shape of Australia and future electoral
prospects
It seems very likely to me that observant and demographically informed
conservatives will be looking at the republic referendum result with
very considerable uneasiness about the electoral future for Australian
conservatism.
The angry social and political undercurrents in rural, provincial and
outer-suburban parts of Australia were expressed in the No vote in those
areas. They are also expressed in the Pauline Hanson phenomenon. These
undercurrents are quite clearly an ongoing feature of current Australian
political life, and are unlikely to go away for quite a while.
The monarchists achieved the immediate electoral result that they
desired on the republic by a very populist and very public appeal to the
discontent of these social layers against political and commercial
elites.
It would not be overstating it to say that the monarchist side snatched
a victory by stepping aside a little and vigorously exploiting the
reactionary demagoguery of the so-called Direct Election republicans,
Ted Mack, Phil Cleary and Peter Reith. There is an obvious danger in
this tactic for the general conservative side in politics, which was
demonstrated dramatically in the recent Victorian election.
The problem for the conservatives is that this kind of anger is even
more easily directed against the Tory parties in politics than it is
against the Laborites, which is clearly indicated by the result in the
Queensland election, the Victorian election and even in the last federal
election.
The other problem for the conservatives at the level of electoral
politics is that the existence of different Hansonite independent
electoral formations tends to atomise the conservative vote, with
obvious electoral benefits for Labor. This situation is developing in
much the same way as the existence of the Democratic Labor Party
severely damaged the electoral prospects of the Labor Party from 1955 to
1972.
The current electoral backlash against the conservatives is likely to
peak after the introduction of the GST in June this year. Many of the
social categories of Australians most disadvantaged by the GST, and most
opposed to its imposition, are precisely the social categories that were
persuaded to vote against the republic by the populist campaign
attacking the political and commercial elites. Particularly important in
this regard is the self-employed small business sector. They are going
to be particularly infuriated against the Liberals during the long
period of initial implementation of the GST.
On the Labor-Green-Democrat side of politics, the electoral prospects
are a good deal more promising. The only thing in question here is
whether the Labor leadership has enough foresight and courage to adopt a
more leftist, populist economic policy, which is obviously required, to
appeal to the discontented social layers who were so obvious in the
referendum result.
The age polarisation that showed up in the referendum will also
obviously help the progressive side in politics electorally, for the
foreseeable future. In addition, the lack of emotional involvement by
ethnic Australians in the monarchical ethos of British-Australia,
demonstrated in the referendum, is very promising for the Labor side
electorally. In addition to this, the steady and more or less inexorable
increase in tertiary education among Australians is a potential
electoral plus for the progressive side of politics.
Their use of New Class rhetoric indicates that the conservative side of
politics is bleeding electorally
There has recently been an energetic outburst, emanating basically from
the conservative side of politics, alleging that people with tertiary
education, now approaching 20 per cent of the adult population,
represent some kind of “New Class”, with interests basically different
to those of “ordinary Australians”, who the conservatives claim to
represent.
The close referendum result underlines why the conservatives are so
alarmed by these demographic developments. On many issues there clearly
is a new social factor emerging in electoral politics. The steady rise
in the educational level of the population produces a kind of potential
“education dividend” for the progressive side in politics if it is
prepared to argue a case energetically before an increasingly
well-educated electorate.
This showed up during the referendum campaign in the interesting
exercise of getting a few hundred ordinary Australians into Old
Parliament House in Canberra and having a debate on the republic
proposal, in which those ordinary Australians were themselves involved,
over a couple of days. By the end of that process, the republic side had
dramatically improved its support among that group of people.
The problem the conservatives have is that the steady increase in the
educational level of Australians tends to work against them electorally.
All the nasty rhetoric that they use about the New Class has its real
origin in this set of circumstances.
The steady increase in the educational level of Australians is ongoing
and inexorable. This continuing improvement in the educational level
constantly undermines and diminishes the scope of one of the traditional
weapons of conservative politics, which is the exploitation of, and
appeal to, all sorts of cultural and educational backwardness. When you
add to this the continuing electoral effect of past, present and future
immigration, and intermarriage between different ethnic and cultural
groups in Australia, the electoral difficulties for the conservative
side in politics are likely to further increase.
The angry Labor voters who voted No to the republic in outer-suburban
areas and provincial cities because of their antagonism to political and
business elites will inevitably swing back to Labor at some further
point in the political cycle, which will almost certainly be reached
very soon, with the June 30 introduction of the GST.
On the other hand, many of the mainly younger, tertiary educated people
who have in the past voted Liberal, who voted Yes to the republic in the
referendum, have made a very major first-time change in their voting
behaviour. Quite a few of them are likely to move over in the future to
voting Democrat, Green or Labor.
Seriously investigated, the results of the referendum on the republic
reveal enormous emerging electoral problems for the conservative side in
Australian politics. These demographic problems for the conservatives
are obviously going to increase in the future.
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