Waleed Aly’s new reason for why the Yes campaign for an Indigenous Voice failed – but it leaves out one major claim from his first explanation

Waleed Aly’s claim that less educated Australians had failed to understand the complexities of the Indigenous vote proposal was nowhere to be found in his latest newspaper column on why the Yes campaign failed.

In his regular political column for the Nine-Fairfax newspapers, The Project presenter and academic dropped any focus on how voters with a ‘lower level’ of tertiary education voted – a claim he controversially made earlier this week .

Instead, he now says that “something about the idea itself didn’t quite match the intuitions of enough Australians.”

‘The best report on this I’ve seen comes from pollster Jim Reed, who concluded that Australians will vote for ‘granting equal opportunity to individuals regardless of their characteristics’, but will not vote for anything that ‘treats individuals differently’, ‘ Aly wrote.

The central obstacle that the Voice proposal never overcame, Aly writes, is “that it was exclusive to a subset of Australians.”

The Melbourne-based academic also noted that the Voice proposal raised “really big” questions that could not easily be answered with the blunt “yes” or “no” answers that the “terrible beast” of a referendum demanded.

Reasons such as prejudice against Aboriginal people, misinformation on social media and why many Labor voters abandoned the proposal were not enough to explain last Saturday’s 60 percent no vote, according to Aly.

Aly and ABC presenter Patricia Karvelas were both criticized in the days following the referendum result for claiming the No vote was driven by less educated Australians who may not have fully understood the complexities of the issue.

Australia voted resoundingly ‘no’ to the proposed constitutional change, with every state rejecting the proposal and only the ACT voting ‘yes’, in a major blow to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who spearheaded the referendum.

During The Project’s analysis of the results on Monday evening, Aly claimed educated Australians were more likely to vote ‘yes’.

The Yes campaign suffered a significant setback in Western Sydney, with ten federal voters in the area, which is crucial to the Labor Party, all voting No.

They are also home to millions of working-class Australians, which Aly referred to in his analysis of the referendum result.

Aly, who is also a university lecturer, said people with “the lowest levels of tertiary education … were at the bottom of the yes vote.”

‘The biggest dividing line seems to have been education. If you sat in a seat with a high level of tertiary education, bachelor or post, you were right at the top of the yes vote,” Aly said.

‘And that doesn’t mean that people with an education know what they’re doing, people who don’t have a tertiary education don’t know that. It’s about the style of the message.’

Aly said he “completely understands why you would propose to (the Voice). If you go through history, through the experience of the people who designed it or came up with the idea, it actually makes perfect sense.

“But most people haven’t experienced that journey, and when you come to them with this idea, which is actually quite abstract and complicated, their instinct is to react and that instinct is that it just doesn’t feel right.”

Ned Mannoun, mayor of Liverpool Council in Sydney’s west, responded to Aly’s comments, saying No voters in his electorate were “not stupid”.

“Comments that say ‘we’re not smart, that’s why we didn’t vote for The Voice’ are pretty disrespectful,” Mannoun told 2GB’s Ben Fordham.

‘The people here are very intelligent. They understand what’s going on, and there are several reasons why they didn’t vote yes to the Voice, and it wasn’t for educational reasons.

‘If you use tertiary education as a way of assessing intelligence, then I think that’s a very simplistic view of the world.

‘There are people, I’m sure you’ve met them all along, Ben, who work really hard. They are very, very, very smart people. They have never gone to university.”

Mr Mannoun said voters in Western Sydney rejected the idea of ​​supporting the Voice due to a lack of detail on the proposal.

“Again, that gut feeling, I think people here can smell bullshit from a mile away.

‘It just doesn’t make sense because if there had been details I think they would have had a much better chance of attracting people, but people didn’t know what it was.

‘I couldn’t explain it to people. “I didn’t have any details, I think I have a good idea of ​​how the government works,” he said.

‘There was no point. So please don’t look down on us.’

Ms Karvelas also came under fire after analyzing how people’s education and income reflected their vote with Fran Kelly on the ABC podcast The Party Room.

“The yes vote, if you look at it, was achieved in places where voters have a bachelor’s degree or an above-average wage, Fran, right?” Karvelas said.

“If you have a bachelor’s degree, chances are you know something about government structures, you’ve become interested in the way these things happen, not because you’re better, but just because you have the chance that I have.”

The Radio National presenter emphasized that she was not ‘judging people’s performance’ and was only suggesting that people with a bachelor’s degree were more likely to come to a ‘different conclusion’ about the Voice.

“I think about who and where remote Indigenous Australians are likely to get it, because they’re living it,” she said.

‘And where people have been educated, they have come to different conclusions.

‘And then you get a whole group of people who work very hard, I can say, and probably have very little time to concentrate on reading constitutions or proposals, and making the hot decisions quite quickly, while I think rapid social media campaigns likely had a major impact.

“And so I think that’s the biggest part of the demographic story. And the Yes campaign has not reached those people.’

Both Waleed and Karvelas’ comments were branded ‘out of reach’ by Australians.

One of them said: ‘If ABC journalists like Karvelas are wondering why the No campaign’s message of ‘No to division’ is so pervasive, they need to take a long hard look at themselves.’

Another added: ‘That’s coming from a talking head who works in a sheltered workshop.’

The referendum result has left states in the dark about the prospect of treaties with indigenous people.

On Thursday, Queensland Opposition Leader David Crisafulli walked away from a pledge to provide bipartisan support for a treaty in the state. The decision prompted Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to remind reporters that the process needs bipartisan support to succeed.

Meanwhile, NSW Premier Chris Minns and South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas have indicated progress towards treaties will continue in their states.