LAST UPDATE | 14 Oct 2023

AUSTRALIANS HAVE VOTED against enshrining an Indigenous advocacy committee in the constitution, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has said.

“Australians have not voted for a change to the constitution,” Marles said, as partial results pointed to a resounding defeat for the reform. “We very much respect this result,” Marles said. 

The Indigenous Voice would have been a committee comprised of and chosen by Indigenous Australians to advise the Parliament and government on issues that affect the nation’s most disadvantaged ethnic minority.

“Tonight I want to recognise that for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, this campaign has been a heavy weight to carry. And this result will be very hard to bear,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said after conceding the historic vote had failed.

Opinion polls in recent months had indicated a strong majority of Australians opposing the proposal. Earlier in the year, a majority supported the Voice before the ‘No’ campaign gathered intensity.

“This is a difficult result, this is a very hard result,” said Yes23 campaign director Dean Parkin.

“We did everything we could and we will come back from this,” he said.

Voice advocate Tanya Hosch, who spent a decade developing the model, told ABC: “On a personal level, I feel devastated.

“There’s going to be a lot of pain and hurt and dismay and we’re going to need to take a moment to absorb that message and what it says.”

Another advocate, Tom Mayo, said he was also “devastated” and blamed unfair attacks on the plan.

“We have seen a disgusting ‘no’ campaign. A campaign that has been dishonest, that has lied to the Australian people,” Mayo said.

Albanese, who visited every Australian state and mainland territory in the past week, had hit back at critics who said his proposal had created division in the Australian community.

“The ‘No’ campaign has spoken about division while stoking it,” said Albanese, saying the real division is the difference in living standards between Indigenous people and the wider community.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton had described the Voice as “another layer of democracy” that would not provide practical outcomes.

The proposal for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament has bitterly divided Australia’s Indigenous minority, as well as the wider community.

Indigenous activist Susanne Levy had said the Voice would be a setback for Indigenous rights imposed by non-Indigenous Australians.

“We’ve always had a voice. You’re just not listening,” she said as she spent polling day at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, an Indigenous land rights protest in the heart of Australia’s capital, Canberra, since 1972.

With reporting from AFP and Press Association