This is also one of the major explanations for the extraordinarily high Yes vote in metropolitan Melbourne, where recent migrants and second-generation ethnics are fairly evenly distributed in almost all areas and are not concentrated so strongly in particular regions as they are in Sydney.
There is also a very high component of first, second and third generation Greek and Italian Australians scattered all over Melbourne, which has a very high proportion of migrants. Of the 20 Melbourne electorates, 17 voted comfortably Yes, with very high Yes votes in working class areas. The only three Melbourne electorates that voted No were outer-suburban electorates with fewer migrants and ethnic Australians.
All of this suggests that the widely distributed cultural weight of migrant ethnicity was a major factor in the very strong Melbourne Yes vote.
In NSW the contrast in the results between the Newcastle and the Illawarra-Wollongong areas was very informative. Newcastle, a working-class area, with a number of Labor seats but proportionately a much lower number of migrants and people of migrant background, showed a very bad result for Yes. The only electorate that voted Yes in this region was the Newcastle electorate itself, by a very narrow margin.
Newcastle is the Hunter Valley electorate in which tertiary educated people are most heavily concentrated.
On the other hand, the story was dramatically different in the Illawarra region, an area where there is a very high migrant and ethnic population, perhaps the highest proportionally in the whole of Australia. The electorate of Cunningham, the main Illawarra electorate, showed an overwhelming Yes vote, both in the more affluent suburbs north of Wollongong, where there are more tertiary educated people, and in the strongly ethnic working-class suburbs south of Wollongong.
In Cunningham, it is clear, both major social layers: blue-collar workers of whom, these days, a very high proportion are migrant workers; and tertiary educated people, voted Yes. In the next electorate south, Throsby, there was a No majority, but it was derived mainly from a strong No vote in the Southern Highlands area, where there are few migrants, and where a generally affluent Anglo middle-class and rural mood prevails.
A number of the booths in the northern part of Throsby, which are in outer-suburban working class suburbs of Wollongong, with a large migrant component, voted Yes. The different and contrasting results in Newcastle and the Illawarra underline the significance of migrant ethnicity in the results.
Even in metropolitan Brisbane, the capital of conservative Queensland, there was a strong Yes vote, and here again there is a clear association between a Yes vote and two elements: firstly, migrant ethnicity, and secondly, tertiary education. At this point it is worth saying that by my reading of the results, there was a majority Yes vote in descending order of magnitude, in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Wollongong, Brisbane and Hobart, with a majority No vote in Perth, Adelaide, Newcastle, Geelong and Launceston. The more heavily urbanised, cosmopolitan cities were the centre of the Yes vote.
In Sydney there was a striking geographical divide, starting at Bobbin Head, going down to Baulkham Hills then through the middle of Parramatta, down to the northern outskirts of Liverpool and across from Liverpool, past the affluent Anglo suburbs north of the Georges River, and hitting the Georges River at about Tom Ugly's Bridge, then out to sea. The electorates, Liberal or Labor, to the east and north of this divide voted Yes, and the electorates south and west of it voted No, although there were strong pockets that voted the other way in all these areas.
There were some striking but significant local idiosyncracies. Often distinctively individual, slightly isolated communities, with a strong local identity and a larger old, established Anglo component, seemed to vote heavily No. Two examples that jumped out at me were Kurnell in Sutherland Shire, which voted almost two thirds No in fairly sharp contrast with the rest of that electorate, where the No vote was lower. Another striking example was Riverstone-Schofields, an old working-class, largely Anglo community, where the meat works was closed some years ago, which showed a No vote approaching 70 per cent, much higher than the No vote in the rest of that electorate, a Labor electorate, where Yes did quite well in the other areas.
These kinds of results suggest strongly that there is some truth in the proposition that pockets of traditionally Labor-voting people who exercised a strong No vote were often expressing a fairly sharp social protest against the political class, against economic and political elites and against the fact that not much has been done for them lately.
On the Tory side of the usual electoral divide, the break from the suburban North Shore to semi-rural kind of activity at Baulkham Hills is the sharp divide in the republic referendum result. Semi-rural areas and, once again small distinctive Anglo communities such as Richmond, Windsor, Castle Hill, etc, were strong No areas, whereas the dormitory North Shore voted fairly solidly Yes.
The Yes vote on the normally Liberal-voting North Shore was quite high, but not as high as the Yes vote in the Labor electorates, where the Yes vote had the majority. Once again, education obviously has a bearing. The North Shore electorate with the lowest Yes vote was Bronwyn Bishop's electorate of McKellar, which stood out from the rest of the North Shore, with an almost 50:50 split between Yes and No.
When you look at the Bureau of Statistics breakdown of Sydney, the Northern Beaches area, which comprises Bronwyn Bishop's electorate, has a high concentration of self-employed tradespeople and contractors. Another Anglo area where there is a strong concentration of self-employed tradespeople and contractors, intertwined, however, with people with tertiary education, are the three subdivisions in Daryl Melham's Labor electorate of Banks, just north of the Georges River.
In federal and state elections Labor wins these subdivisions with a lowish margin, much smaller than the margin in the rest of Banks. In the republic referendum, in which Banks as a whole voted No by a significant margin, these very affluent Anglo subdivisions showed a very substantial No majority. (On the other hand, in Melham's electorate, subdivisions such as Penshurst, with a large Asian community, voted solidly Yes.) This patchwork of voting patterns suggests strongly that people such as self-employed tradespeople, contractors and Anglo small-business people very largely voted No.
One of the more entertaining small sidelights of the referendum was that the vocal public demagogy of two Republican No advocates, Phil Cleary and Ted Mack, didn't persuade the majority of people in either of the electorates that had once put them into the federal parliament. Cleary's old Melbourne working-class migrant electorate of Wills voted overwhelmingly Yes. Mack's upwardly socially mobile, Liberal/independent Sydney lower North Shore electorate also voted overwhelmingly Yes.
The Labor electorates that had a No majority, in the outer suburbs of Sydney and in Newcastle still, despite this, registered a fairly high Yes vote, averaging about 40 per cent, which suggests the traditional core of the Labor vote, trade union members, migrants, many people of Irish Catholic background, Aboriginal Australians, etc, voted Yes.
In Country Party and Liberal seats in rural areas and provincial cities all over Australia, the Yes vote corresponded fairly closely with the Labor primary vote in the last federal elections, which strongly suggests that Labor voters who were drawn away by the populist noises from the Direct Electionists were replaced on the Yes side by tertiary educated traditionally Liberal voters, who voted Yes on this occasion.
The voting pattern in the Blue Mountains area was extremely informative. The upper Blue Mountains: Katoomba, Wentworth Falls, etc, where there is a high concentration of people with tertiary education, showed a very high Yes vote. The Penrith, lower Blue Mountains area, which is an Anglo outer-suburban area with far fewer tertiary educated people, more self-employed tradespeople, and more church-going Protestants, showed a fairly strong No vote.
A curious experience of the republican referendum campaign was to work on voting day, as I did, for the Yes side, at the main Newtown polling booth. Early in the day some members of the most obvious sectarian socialist group, the International Socialists, put on a bit of a stunt for a couple of hours, noisily campaigning for a No vote, with the slogan, "No to the boss's Republic".
A number of the Yes campaigners had to be gently restrained from doing bad things to the ISers, who got a universally hostile response from the Newtown voters, who are wildly multi-ethnic and pretty young, including quite a number of students.
In the event, the result for the two Newtown subdivisions, one in the seat of Grayndler and one in the seat of Sydney, were about the two highest booth results for the Yes vote in the whole of Australia. The Newtown subdivision in Grayndler registered an almost unbelievable 83 per cent Yes vote. The irony of the eccentric behaviour of the IS is underlined by this result. Newtown is their patch, so to speak. It's the only place in Sydney where they consistently sell their paper. The masses of Newtown decided to do precisely the opposite of what was recommended to them by the International Socialists.
Conclusions about the current shape of Australia and future electoral prospects
It seems very likely to me that observant and demographically informed conservatives will be looking at the republic referendum result with very considerable uneasiness about the electoral future for Australian conservatism.
The angry social and political undercurrents in rural, provincial and outer-suburban parts of Australia were expressed in the No vote in those areas. They are also expressed in the Pauline Hanson phenomenon. These undercurrents are quite clearly an ongoing feature of current Australian political life, and are unlikely to go away for quite a while.
The monarchists achieved the immediate electoral result that they desired on the republic by a very populist and very public appeal to the discontent of these social layers against political and commercial elites.
It would not be overstating it to say that the monarchist side snatched a victory by stepping aside a little and vigorously exploiting the reactionary demagoguery of the so-called Direct Election republicans, Ted Mack, Phil Cleary and Peter Reith. There is an obvious danger in this tactic for the general conservative side in politics, which was demonstrated dramatically in the recent Victorian election.
The problem for the conservatives is that this kind of anger is even more easily directed against the Tory parties in politics than it is against the Laborites, which is clearly indicated by the result in the Queensland election, the Victorian election and even in the last federal election.
The other problem for the conservatives at the level of electoral politics is that the existence of different Hansonite independent electoral formations tends to atomise the conservative vote, with obvious electoral benefits for Labor. This situation is developing in much the same way as the existence of the Democratic Labor Party severely damaged the electoral prospects of the Labor Party from 1955 to 1972.
The current electoral backlash against the conservatives is likely to peak after the introduction of the GST in June this year. Many of the social categories of Australians most disadvantaged by the GST, and most opposed to its imposition, are precisely the social categories that were persuaded to vote against the republic by the populist campaign attacking the political and commercial elites. Particularly important in this regard is the self-employed small business sector. They are going to be particularly infuriated against the Liberals during the long period of initial implementation of the GST.
On the Labor-Green-Democrat side of politics, the electoral prospects are a good deal more promising. The only thing in question here is whether the Labor leadership has enough foresight and courage to adopt a more leftist, populist economic policy, which is obviously required, to appeal to the discontented social layers who were so obvious in the referendum result.
The age polarisation that showed up in the referendum will also obviously help the progressive side in politics electorally, for the foreseeable future. In addition, the lack of emotional involvement by ethnic Australians in the monarchical ethos of British-Australia, demonstrated in the referendum, is very promising for the Labor side electorally. In addition to this, the steady and more or less inexorable increase in tertiary education among Australians is a potential electoral plus for the progressive side of politics.
There has recently been an energetic outburst, emanating basically from the conservative side of politics, alleging that people with tertiary education, now approaching 20 per cent of the adult population, represent some kind of "New Class", with interests basically different to those of "ordinary Australians", who the conservatives claim to represent.
The close referendum result underlines why the conservatives are so alarmed by these demographic developments. On many issues there clearly is a new social factor emerging in electoral politics. The steady rise in the educational level of the population produces a kind of potential "education dividend" for the progressive side in politics if it is prepared to argue a case energetically before an increasingly well-educated electorate.
This showed up during the referendum campaign in the interesting exercise of getting a few hundred ordinary Australians into Old Parliament House in Canberra and having a debate on the republic proposal, in which those ordinary Australians were themselves involved, over a couple of days. By the end of that process, the republic side had dramatically improved its support among that group of people.
The problem the conservatives have is that the steady increase in the educational level of Australians tends to work against them electorally. All the nasty rhetoric that they use about the New Class has its real origin in this set of circumstances.
The steady increase in the educational level of Australians is ongoing and inexorable. This continuing improvement in the educational level constantly undermines and diminishes the scope of one of the traditional weapons of conservative politics, which is the exploitation of, and appeal to, all sorts of cultural and educational backwardness. When you add to this the continuing electoral effect of past, present and future immigration, and intermarriage between different ethnic and cultural groups in Australia, the electoral difficulties for the conservative side in politics are likely to further increase.
The angry Labor voters who voted No to the republic in outer-suburban areas and provincial cities because of their antagonism to political and business elites will inevitably swing back to Labor at some further point in the political cycle, which will almost certainly be reached very soon, with the June 30 introduction of the GST.
On the other hand, many of the mainly younger, tertiary educated people who have in the past voted Liberal, who voted Yes to the republic in the referendum, have made a very major first-time change in their voting behaviour. Quite a few of them are likely to move over in the future to voting Democrat, Green or Labor.
Seriously investigated, the results of the referendum on the republic reveal enormous emerging electoral problems for the conservative side in Australian politics. These demographic problems for the conservatives are obviously going to increase in the future.
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