oral Commission has five special categories in each electorate, in addition to each booth, of which there are usually between 30 and 50. The five special categories are:
В· absentee votes (cast on election day in other electorates).
В· pre-poll votes (cast by arrangement before election day, usually because of travel commitments on election day).
В· postal votes, routinely made available by the Electoral Commission to elderly or housebound people.
В· special hospital mobile teams (votes cast in hospitals, nursing homes and aged care facilities on election day, again in practice, with a heavy predominance of elderly people)
В· votes cast at the capital city Town Hall polling booth in each state where a number of votes are cast on election day for each electorate.
The result for these five categories is very illuminating. Both the postal votes and the special hospital votes show a much higher No vote than the general vote in each electorate, even in the electorates that strongly voted Yes. This No vote is most pronounced in the hospitals. p> On the other hand, absentee voters, people who voted outside their electorate on voting day, showed a significantly higher Yes percentage than the general vote for their area. Pre-poll votes, the votes cast by arrangement before the election, averaged nationally about the same Yes vote as the national average, being a little less than the average in the Northern Territory and Victoria, roughly the same in NSW and the ACT and dramatically higher in WA, Queensland, SA and Tasmania.
The last grouping, the small but significant sample of people voting outside their own electorate at capital city Town Hall polling booths, shows by far the highest Yes vote of all. An obvious inference is the existence, in the referendum result, of a strong tendency for younger cohorts of voters voting Yes and older cohorts voting No.
Those voting at the capital city Town Hall polling booth for other electorates are obviously people who get around, and they are probably younger people. Anyway, they clearly show a pronounced Yes bias. The overwhelming result for No in the special hospital team votes and the postal votes clearly suggests a very heavy vote against the republic in older age groups. (A significant group amongst the postals, in addition to the aged, are people who are housebound for other reasons, such as disability. Probably some features of the situation of being housebound, such as being exposed to a steady diet of talkback radio, has a conservatising effect on voting patterns on an issue like the republic.)
The tendency for the young to vote Yes and the old to vote No is confirmed indirectly in another way. For the Yes vote to have done as well as it did, it emerges clearly that, to counterbalance the No vote among the old, younger age groups must have voted solidly Yes, including the "young fogies "of Generation X and younger, who conservative pundits desperately hoped were in a deeply conservative frame of mind.
This alleged conservative mood among the young didn't show up in the republic referendum results at all. The story that a large number of the young voted No is a conservative invention, not backed up in any way by the actual results. The electorate-by-electorate pattern confirms the general observation made by most electoral observers that people with tertiary education voted Yes very heavily.
This question of levels of formal education is somewhat intertwined with the age factor. As the steep rise in the number of Australians with tertiary education has taken place progressively over the last 30 years, the cohort of Australians in the age group, say of 55 and above, is the same cohort where the proportion of people with tertiary education is far less than in younger cohorts.
It also ought to be said that the older cohort are also the cohort whose whole lives were moulded in the rabidly royalist British-Australia of the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s, many of whom have an entirely natural human nostalgia for the period of their youth, which seems to translate electorally into a certain reluctance to vote for a republic. Natural demographic evolution will inevitably reduce the electoral impact of this cohort over time.
In parliamentary elections, postal votes and hospital votes are an area of ​​fierce contest between the campaigning political machines of candidates for different parties, whose interests are directly involved. All the anecdotal evidence suggests that on the occasion of the republic referendum this very sharp intervention by the various political machines was minimal because their electoral interests were not directly affected.
Consequently, the overall result in these two categories can be taken as a reasonable indicator of the viewpoint of these categories of voters on the referendum questions. The votes in t...
