Australians as a whole might have swiftly rejected the idea of a Voice to Parliament on Saturday, but a picture of particularly strong pockets of both support and opposition is starting to emerge across Western Australia.
Counting of millions of votes across the state is continuing and will for some time but trends are beginning to emerge.
Looking just at polling places where 100 or more formal votes had been counted as of around midday Sunday local time, there were 97 locations where at least 80 per cent of voters opposed the Voice.
Those leading pockets of opposition were in:
- Moonyoonooka, on the fringes of Geraldton
- Newdegate, a largely farming community in the Great Southern
- Calingiri about an hour-and-a-half north-east of Perth
- Mukinbudin in the Wheatbelt
- Cervantes, a coastal town two hours north of Perth.
By contrast there were just five polling places that showed the same level of support for the proposal – all but one of them mobile polling teams that went into remote communities in the massive seat of Durack, which stretches from WA’s very northern tip down to Northam, north of Perth.
Strong support in Kimberley
Other strongest supporters of the Voice included voters who cast ballots early in Fitzroy Crossing (80 per cent Yes) and voters in Leonora (79 per cent Yes).
Many polling places in the Kimberley supported the referendum, including in Broome, Wyndham and Halls Creek, while residents in Kununurra and Derby voted more in line with the national result.
Around 40 per cent of the population in the Kimberley are Indigenous, with the region grappling with significant justice, health and housing issues across multiple communities.
But further south in the Pilbara, where many of those same issues are in play, the result fell in line with the national and statewide trend, with the indigenous community of Roebourne (68 per cent) the only major town to record a Yes majority.
The issues the Yes campaign had in the state’s agricultural heartland following the Cook government’s bungled reforms to WA’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage were readily apparent, with most of the Midwest and Wheatbelt lining up solidly behind No.