Booth by booth, Indigenous Australians backed the Voice

Polling booths servicing majority Indigenous populations were more likely to support the Yes vote in the referendum, a breakdown of electorates across the country shows.

One of the claims made by No proponents in the run-up to the referendum was that there was a lack of support among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, while the Yes camp used advertisements on poll day arguing there was 80 per cent backing among Indigenous voters.

Alfred Murdoch casts his vote at the Cherbourg voting centre in the Queensland seat of Wide Bay. It was one of just three booths in the seat to vote Yes.Credit: Rhett Wyman

The referendum results show that in areas with a large proportion of Indigenous residents, the Yes vote did much better than at most other booths in the country.

The community of Palm Island, in the Queensland electorate of Herbert, had an Indigenous population of 91 per cent at the last census. On Saturday, the Palm Island booth had a Yes vote of 75.1 per cent compared to the overall Herbert vote of just 24 per cent.

Mornington Island, within the seat of Kennedy in the Gulf of Carpentaria, has an Indigenous population of more than 80 per cent and delivered one of the highest Yes votes in Queensland at almost 78 per cent.

Also in Kennedy, in an area stretching just south of Cairns, Yarrabah has an Indigenous population of 95 per cent. Its Yes vote was almost 76 per cent while the overall Yes vote in Kennedy was less than 20 per cent.

Elsewhere in Far North Queensland, the booth of Hope Vale services an Indigenous community to the north of Cooktown in the electorate of Leichhardt. More than three in four people in the area voted Yes, compared to 33 per cent for the entire electorate.

The seat of Lingiari, which covers all the Northern Territory bar Darwin, has the highest proportion of Indigenous residents in the country at 40 per cent. It also, traditionally, has one of the lowest turnouts at elections. At last year’s federal election, just two-thirds of people on the electoral roll in Lingiari cast a ballot.

Much of that population lives in remote parts of the territory that are usually serviced by special mobile voting teams from the Australian Electoral Commission.

More than 10,000 remote ballots have been counted in the seat, with 72 per cent backing the Voice. The Yes vote across all of Lingiari was 42 per cent.

In the vast West Australian electorate of Durack, where 13 per cent of voters identify as Indigenous, booths servicing Indigenous majority populations such as Halls Creek, Fitzroy Crossing and Wyndham all voted Yes to the Voice.

Areas with large but not majority Indigenous populations were also more likely to vote Yes in heavily No seats.

About 29 per cent of the far north-west town of Kununurra, also in Durack, identifies as Indigenous and the Yes vote at that booth was 44 per cent. A similar story played out in nearby Derby, where 38 per cent of the population is Indigenous and the Yes vote was 49 per cent.

In the NSW seat of Parkes, centres such as Brewarrina, Bourke and Coonamble, all with relatively large Indigenous populations, had higher Yes votes than the electorate’s overall result of 21 per cent.

Parkes also had the second-lowest Yes vote of any booth in the country, in the small community of Boomi, where just three of the 74 votes cast were in favour of the Voice.

At the weekend, opposition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price maintained the Yes campaign had engaged in misinformation by claiming up to 80 per cent of Indigenous voters supported the referendum.

“I knew, having spoken to people throughout the Northern Territory … and right across the country … that a vast group of Indigenous Australians did not support this proposal,” she said.

This masthead asked Price on Saturday night about her claim that a majority of Indigenous Australians had voted no.

She ducked the question and said “it will be interesting to see” before appearing to question the behaviour of the Australian Electoral Commission.

“One thing that I do know is the way in which Indigenous people in remote communities are exploited for the purpose of somebody else’s agenda,” she said.

But Health Minister Mark Butler said the figures showed Indigenous Australians were highly supportive of the Yes case.

“Of course, there was not complete uniformity of opinion in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. There’s not about anything in any community,” he told Sky News.

“But this idea that there was not overwhelming support for the voice by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people I think is a furphy that was put to rest by some of those results last night.”

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.