hese five categories, examined above, total about 1.8 million votes nationally, or about a fifth of the votes cast in the referendum, so the variations revealed are quite significant.
The variations in the voting pattern between the five special categories are of considerable interest. Among other things they clearly highlight the age factor in the results. An even more fascinating inference is what one might call the mobility factor. Greater republican inclination appears to be associated with greater mobility.
The absentee voters, many of whom voted in electorates quite close to their own electorate, show a higher Yes vote than the vote in their electorate. Voters who are even further away on voting day, visiting the state capital, show the highest Yes vote of the lot. (Possibly people who work outside their own electorate on Saturdays, and therefore vote absentee, also have a greater republican bias.) So, on the face of it, the further you travel, the more likely you are to vote for a republic, which is a new and rather novel concept in political science.
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The Yes vote, migrants and ethnicity
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There is no question that there was a strong Yes vote from most non-British migrant communities, including most second and third generation people of migrant background. In Sydney this was particularly apparent, with all the Labor seats having a large ethnic component, even seats like Lowe and St George, where the ethnic component is mainly older, more established and affluent people of second and third generation Italian and Greek background, voting solidly Yes.
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. p> 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.
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Sydney's voting pattern
In Sydney there was a...
