Yesterday, Australia voted in a referendum to change our constitution to include a so-called Voice to Parliament. The Voice would have been effectively a third chamber of Parliament that represented the concerns of indigenous people, able to veto any legislation or executive action of the Australian Government.

This referendum will go down as Australia’s Brexit moment. As with the Brexit vote in the UK, the ordinary people of Australia told their elite overlords to get out of identity politics and the “woke” agenda and start listening to the people who pay for all this stuff.

There are many reasons why the Voice is wrong in principle, including the following:

• It gives one group of people extra rights not enjoyed by others
• The aboriginal industry has over 1000 groups paid for by tax payers already
• In Parliament, the proportion of indigenous Members and Senators exceeds the proportion of the general population. If they cannot be a “Voice” to the Government, (their job description is literally to represent the interests of their electorate), then who can?
• The Voice would not solve the problems of remote aborigines who are the 20% who comprise the gap between mainstream Australia and indigenous Australia
• The Voice would just be a talk fest for the inner city elites who already have plenty of platforms to voice their grievances

In Australia, constitutional change is difficult to achieve. As well as getting a national majority in favour, proponents must also win a majority in a majority of states (i.e. 4 out of 6 states). To achieve that, history shows that both sides of politic need to be actively in favour. In this case they weren’t.

So here are the results from the AEC web site as of close of counting on Saturday night. The vast majority of votes have been counted, but the result cannot be officially declared for two weeks until postal votes are included.

Overall, the vote was about 60% “No” nationally and in every state. Even Victoria, the wokest state ended up 54% “No”. Early in counting, it almost looked like it would be about 50-50, but the later counting brought it more into line with the rest of the country.

Interestingly SA and WA which were the two states that the “Yes” campaign had to win to ensure the majority of states, they had an even greater “No” vote. In other words, the more people saw of this proposal, the more likely they were to reject it.

If you go to the last line in the table you see the ACT vote. They were the exact opposite of the rest of the country- 60% “Yes”. The Canberra bubble is the cause of most of the problems in this country. Dominated by the bureaucracy, the ACT is exactly out of step with the rest of the nation. It must surely be time to dismantle Canberra- that would be a constitutional change that could get through.