Thomas Mayo and Kate Chaney get plaudits in Perth, but WA regions rail against the voice
The Yes campaign for the voice believes undecideds are the key to winning the west, but it appears there is much work to be done to convince regional Western Australia.
Night was falling when 650 people filed past the Olympic-sized swimming pool at Perth’s Newman College into Marist Auditorium. They came to listen to the case for an Indigenous voice to parliament.
The college is the alma mater of Formula One driver Daniel Ricciardo. It is geographically in the centre of one of the most advantaged electorates in Australia, the Golden Triangle of real estate between the Swan River and the Indian Ocean. It is 600km by road, and figuratively a million miles, from the Goldfields that built the state. There, Kalgoorlie-Boulder Mayor John Bowler believes locals have decided against the voice before pamphlets from either side of the debate arrive in their letterboxes.
Newman College is in the seat of Curtin, previously held by former foreign minister Julie Bishop. It was Western Australia’s safest Liberal seat until Kate Chaney of the high-achieving Chaney dynasty took it from Celia Hammond at the last federal election.
Chaney is a teal, but is campaigning on the voice with Greens senator Dorinda Cox and Labor minister Madeleine King.
She was helped during her campaign by her uncle Fred Chaney, the Aboriginal affairs minister in the Fraser government who had come to believe his old party was unfit to govern, largely because of Robodebt.
The voice forum was the former Anglicare executive’s biggest event yet. Some of the western suburbs’ favourite sons and daughters were there. Former chief justice of Australia Robert French was onstage with child health researcher Fiona Stanley, after whom the state’s biggest hospital is named. Janet Holmes a Court was in the audience.
There was a standing ovation for Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo after he recited the Uluru Statement from the Heart without notes. The Yes campaign believes it can still win WA. That is why Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney has just spent six days there, flying out on Sunday night after talks with Indigenous people from the south coast to the far north Kimberley. A campaign insider said the Albanese government was in possession of secret polling showing the No vote in WA was in the high 40s and the Yes vote was in the high 30s, but the key detail was that undecideds sat at 15 per cent.
Out in the WA farming and mining electorate of O’Connor, Liberal MP Rick Wilson sees baked-in opposition. In the last week of June, Wilson ran a survey of his own email database. Though it lacked any of the rigour of a poll, Wilson’s survey concluded 80.1 per cent of the 1487 respondents intended to vote No at the voice referendum later this year.
While Liberal MP Bridget Archer campaigned with Burney for the voice in Launceston for two days last week, Wilson will not help Burney.
“I won’t be campaigning with Linda but it would be fair to say she needs all the help she can get,” Wilson said.
The biggest regional centre in Wilson’s electorate is Kalgoorlie-Boulder, the division where in 1967 an unusually high 33.32 per cent of voters said No to constitutional changes that took away the states’ sole responsibility for laws governing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
The WA Labor government’s new Aboriginal heritage laws have become a thorn in the side of the Yes campaign in O’Connor. The update to existing laws was broadly welcomed in the wake of the destruction of Juukan Gorge in 2020 but the legislation, enacted on July 1, has become ammunition for voice opponents. Though properties under 1100sq m are exempt, as are a long list of activities such as building a patio or installing a pool, wild claims have proliferated on social media. Noongar man Mervyn Eades was on the verge of tears after reading comments about those new laws on the Facebook page of WA Liberal leader Libby Mettam.
“The farmers are shitting themselves. They are scared. We don’t want nothing that’s theirs but they think we do,” Eades told The Australian.
Eades grew up in the farming town of Cranbrook in Wilson’s electorate and is now a director of the Wagyl Kaip Aboriginal Corporation, formed to help administer the biggest Native Title settlement in Australian history, the $1.3bn southwest land deal struck with the former Liberal Barnett government.
He said his old people cleared farms on Noongar country in arrangements akin to slave labour yet their descendants were being treated like thieves for wanting to protect the few remaining heritage sites in the region.
“This whole thing has made me realise how many racist people there are,” he said. “They don’t know what they don’t know but the hatred towards us, I can feel it. I just want to cry over it. Where is our rightful place in this country?”
Mayor Bowler is a former state resources minister in the Gallop Labor government who believes the Yes campaign has lost his hometown. He said residents of the town of 30,000 would have voted for the voice three months ago, but not now.
“The feedback I am getting is that the Yes case hasn’t articulated what it’s going to be,” Bowler said.
The apparently differing views of Bowler’s constituents and those at Chaney’s voice forum in Perth cannot be described neatly. It is not about haves and have nots. It is well understood by year 12s preparing for life after high school in WA that engineers, geologists and tradies in the mines earn more than many of the GPs and professionals who populate the leafy western suburbs of Curtin. The median household income in Chaney’s seat of Curtin in 2021 was $2309 per week. In Kalgoorlie it was $2095, well above the national average of $1770.
In Curtin, 0.7 per cent of residents identify as Indigenous, according to the ABS. In Kalgoorlie, it is 7.7 per cent.
“The issues in Kalgoorlie are crime and anti-social behaviour,” Bowler said. “Lack of jobs is not an issue. We have too many jobs.”
North of Kalgoorlie in the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku, traditional owners were sceptical during the Morrison government years that the voice could represent them. Shire president Damian McLean said they were reconsidering.
In the southwest corner of Wilson’s electorate, Noongar elder Oscar Colbung wants the voice to help bring back the old work for the dole scheme called CDEP. Colbung, 76, said the replacement had been a decade-long failure that rewarded the private sector with fat fees for box ticking. “The result is our people unemployed, filling up the prison,” he said.
Chaney said it was refreshing to host a forum that was “a really substantive discussion about the voice, in contrast to the polarising politics that have dominated recent discussion”.
“People have a genuine interest in learning more about the potential benefits of the voice, its history and its constitutional context,” Chaney said. “We have had feedback that the event addressed concerns and that attendees will share this information with their friends and families.”
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