Waleed Alys new take on why Indigenous Voice failed after backlash over education comments

TV personality Waleed Aly has expanded on his verdict of why the Indigenous Voice to Parliament resoundingly failed after widespread backlash from his claims less educated Aussies voted No in the referendum.

Aly reasoned on The Project earlier this week that “the biggest dividing line seems to have been education”.

“If you were in a seat with high levels of tertiary education, Bachelor or Post you were at the very top end of the Yes vote,” he said.

“If you had the lowest levels of socio-education you were at the low end of the Yes vote.

“That’s not to say people who were educated know what they’re doing and people who don’t have tertiary education don’t.”

He went on to say the “style” of the messaging from the Yes campaign failed to resonate with many voters from certain socio-economic groups.

His comments prompted a swift backlash from Western Sydney mayor Ned Mannoun who launched a blistering attack on 2GB, telling Ben Fordham his community was “not dumb”.

“I want to stand up for the people of Western Sydney,” he said, labelling Aly’s comments “disrespectful”.

“There were multiple reasons people didn’t support the Voice and it wasn’t because of education levels,” he said.

But in Nine newspapers today Aly appeared to walk away from his comments over education levels, offering a more nuanced account of why the Voice failed.

In fact, Aly appeared to drop the education argument altogether, not mentioning it in his analysis.

He wrote that while the Yes advocates always insisted it was a “simple, modest proposal” as a “referendum proposal, it wasn’t simple at all”.

“It required you to jump through plenty of hoops…” he continued.

These “hoops” included whether the proposal was a good idea, whether it should be a constitutional body and if it was “prudent to entrench a largely untried institution in this way rather than try it out first?”

Aly argued voters also had to contend with whether there would be any “unintended consequences” from the proposal.

He described each of these “hoops” as “big questions” that voters had to answer yes to if they wanted to land in the Yes camp.

By contrast, to vote No you only needed to disagree with one of those questions, he reasoned.

Aly said it was “tempting” for people to look for shortcuts for why people voted a certain way.

“In political debate, perhaps the most tempting shortcut is to assume that your opposite number on an issue is your total opposite in every way: a mere negative image,” he wrote.

“If we succumb to this, we might think we’re describing our opponents, but we’re more likely using them to describe ourselves. That’s especially pronounced when we attribute to them a single reason for their position, as though it is a sufficient explanation.

“So, if we say our opponents are simply ignorant, or simply prejudiced, or simply duped, it’s often a way of declaring ourselves informed, enlightened, or savvy.”

He crystallised the issue for the Yes campaign as the perception Indigenous Australians were being given more rights than other Australians.

“The best account of this I’ve seen comes from pollster Jim Reed, who concluded that Australians will vote to ‘award equal opportunities to individuals regardless of their attributes’, but won’t vote for something that ‘treats individuals differently’.”

He compared the same-sex marriage plebiscite with the Voice referendum “identifying the central obstacle the Voice never overcame: that it was exclusive to a subset of Australians”.

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Australians resoundingly rejected the Voice with all states voting against the proposal and the national vote against the proposal at 60 per cent.

For the referendum to succeed, a double majority was needed, meaning both the majority of Australians and the majority of states vote Yes.

carla.mascarenhas@news.com.au

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