Waleed Aly and Patricia Karvales have been criticized after claiming the no vote in the Voice 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 that educated people were more likely to vote ‘yes’.
‘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 at the very top of the ‘yes’ vote.
Aly, who is also a university lecturer, said people with “the lowest levels of tertiary education … were at the bottom of the yes vote.”
‘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.”
The Yes campaign suffered a significant setback in Western Sydney, with ten federal voters in the area seen as crucial to the Labor Party at the election and all voting No. It is also home to the working-class Aussies Aly referred to in his analysis of the election. outcome of the referendum.
Liverpool Mayor Ned Mannoun hit back at Aly’s comments, saying Western Sydney residents 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.
Education level was the main deciding factor in whether people voted yes or no for the indigenous voice in parliament, Waleed Aly said, adding that the referendum was simply too “complicated” for some people.
‘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, 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.’
Meanwhile, ABC host Patricia Karvelas came under fire after analyzing how people’s education and income reflected their vote with Fran Kelly on ABC podcast The Party Room.
ABC Radio National and Q&A host Patricia Karvelas (pictured) came under fire after she and Fran Kelly analyzed how people’s education and income reflected their vote
“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 would say, and who probably have very little time to concentrate on reading constitutions or proposals, and making quite quick decisions, while I think quick social media campaigns probably had a big impact.’
“And so I think that’s the biggest part of the demographic story. And the Yes campaign has not reached those people.’