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. p> 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. p> 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. p> 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, ...
