Early polling shows poor turnout for South Australian voice election

Early counting in the South Australian voice election shows a total of just 1048 Indigenous people have voted.

Candidate for the Central Region First Nations Voice, Khatija Thomas. Picture: Dean Martin

Early counting in the South Australian voice election shows a total of just 1048 Indigenous people voted in the APY Lands, Coober Pedy, Port Augusta, the Flinders Ranges, Whyalla, the Adelaide Plains and towns immediately south and east of Adelaide combined.

According to the Australian Electoral Commission, there are an estimated 27,534 Indigenous Australians enrolled to vote in SA. This has grown approximately 10,000 in the past six years.

However, about half of all Indigenous South Australians live in Adelaide and results for booths in the capital had not been published on Tuesday afternoon as counting continued. The electoral commission has published the counts and voter turnouts for three of the six regions in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people voted for preferred candidates on Saturday.

In the region known as Far North, which takes in the APY Lands, just 397 votes were cast. More than 2000 Aboriginal people live on the APY Lands but voter enrolment has been traditionally low compared to other less remote regions. In 2021, when the SA electoral commission conducted the most recent elections for the APY executive board, only 171 Aboriginal people voted.

The electoral commission had completed counting late on Tuesday for Far North and for two other regions outside Adelaide – Flinders and Upper North, where 349 votes were cast, and Riveraland and South East, where 302 votes were cast.

The SA First Nations voice election is different in key ways to the referendum for a national Indigenous advisory body that failed last October. The proposed national voice would have had a constitutional guarantee, meaning the federal parliament could never abolish it without another referendum. The SA voice is protected only by legislation and this was passed the year before the voice election. This meant that South Australians knew the detail of the voice’s structure months before 113 candidates were nominated. There will be a total of 46 members of the SA voice from six regions. Elected members from each region will form a local voice. Each local voice will nominate two members – a male and a female – to sit on the state voice.

Only Indigenous people were eligible to vote in the SA voice election and only Indigenous people were permitted to nominate. However, the person nominating to be on the voice did not have to be a traditional owner in the region where they nominated. For example, a Torres Strait Islander Australian who lives in Adelaide could have nominated for the voice.

After polls closed last week, SA Aboriginal affairs minister Kyam Maher said that although his government did not have numbers yet for the voter turnout, there was “a fair deal of anticipation” from Indigenous people.

He told The Australian that some Indigenous voters in SA were bruised by the emphatic defeat of the national voice referendum.

“There is a hangover from the referendum in terms of some people not wanting to be engaged,” Mr Maher told The Australian.

“A lot of Aboriginal people gave a lot of themselves during the voice campaign and they have been taking time to heal.”