‘Can we go and change our vote?’: The aftermath of the referendum in the Northern Territory

From Top End to Arnhem Land to Katherine, Jilkminggan, Tennant Creek, Elliot, Alice Springs, and much in between, federal member for Lingiari Marion Scrymgour traversed thousands of kilometres in the three weeks leading up to the Voice to Parliament referendum to ensure remote communities in her Northern Territory electorate knew that the vote was coming, understood what it meant, and were equipped to cast a ballot.

Now, in the wake of a No result, the minister said she must retrace her steps and revisit those communities to “follow up” and explain what’s happened.

“People were feeling really flat, so I went back to Elliot,” Scrymgour told Crikey.

“I’m going to go back to Jilkminggan in the next week because a lot of people in that community were told that if they voted No, they could stop fracking. So, people voted No and they said to us after, ‘Can we go and change our vote?’ That’s the sort of thing that sticks with you and you think, we’ve got to be better with this. Follow-up is really important.”

The “not good enough” line was repeated to Crikey countless times by NT-based Indigenous leaders, service providers, politicians and voters, who all felt that despite the territory featuring as the subject of national debate, it was excluded from genuine conversations, processes, and outcomes.

“There’s so much effort and research and time put into voter engagement in cities, and they forget about the bush,” Deputy CEO of Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council Lynette Ross said.

“The whole thing just reflects on why we actually needed a Voice. So many processes just let what’s happened happen.”

In line with the rest of the nation (bar the ACT), the NT voted No to a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice — 60.3% No to 39.7% Yes. In Scrymgour’s electorate of Lingiari, it was overall a No-Yes split of 56.46% to 43.54% but Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) data of the 22 remote mobile teams that serviced NT communities in Lingiari with majority Indigenous populations showed a strong Yes vote in all bar one.

“That’s why we are where we are because you’ve just got a bunch of non-Aboriginal people thinking they know what’s better,” Ross said.

Her tri-state Aboriginal organisation (managing 26 communities in NT, South Australia and Western Australia) was one of many contracted by the AEC to assist with enrolments and voting services in remote communities for the duration of the referendum.

Ross told Crikey that the short-term engagement was good as NPY Women’s Council was able to offer inroads and language assistance to a wide range of communities, but she questioned why there was no capacity for longer-term investments, training opportunities, and employment.

“The AEC do use us, but I can see why they do. We do have contacts, we do have reach in those communities and we do know people. I get it, but they could put more effort in,” she said, acknowledging that the AEC was open to feedback and had made an effort to understand how to better engage in remote locations.

“When we say, ‘Use more local people’, it means train them, so they know what they’re doing. Pay them properly. Don’t just use them.”

For the first time this year, the AEC trialled a system of on-the-spot hires of bilingual Indigenous people in remote communities to act as interpreters and translators for polling days. Media spokesperson for the AEC Evan Ekin-Smyth told Crikey that its “new streamlined recruitment approach” of on-day onboarding resulted in the employment of 110 local assistants across 174 polling days.

Scrymgour said that although on-the-spot hires were not a bad thing, it was neither sustainable nor a solid step towards “Aboriginalising” the electoral workforce. 

“Some of the Aboriginal people who were just employed on the spot by the electoral commission came back to me after and said, ‘I’m not going to get paid now for three or four weeks. I’m not going to do this again’,” the minister said, adding that for many Indigenous people living in remote communities, it’s a situation of “hand-to-mouth” and compensation therefore needs to be immediate.

Scrymgour acknowledged the complexities of her electorate — size, scope, diversity, environment, and all the cultural sensitivities that come with the large numbers of different Indigenous countries and communities — and commended the AEC on doing a “fantastic” job, but said that whenever things failed or didn’t come to fruition, it was routinely on account of inadequate communications and language. She said that although the AEC had rolled out a “consistent approach” in each community, the reality was an inconsistent and “ad-hoc patchwork” of signs here but no signs there, support for location x and no support for location y, this community informed and others not at all.

The outcome, Scrymgour said, demonstrated why the one-size-fits-all approach that worked in cities had no application in remote NT communities, particularly when so many people remained confused as to why they were voting at all: “What was said to me was, ‘But we just had an election. We elected you last time, why are we going to another election and why isn’t there any candidate on the ballot paper?’”

Scrymgour wants these “information deficits” to be addressed with the resurrection of a permanent Indigenous education unit within the AEC to deliver “constant and continuous education and enrolment for Aboriginal people”. She said that under both Liberal and Labor governments these programs were either “never funded or defunded and never continued”.

“There used to be a unit that went into high schools across northern Australia and the APY Lands to talk to people about our democracy and federal Parliament and NT Parliament and elected members. It used to take a very unbiased position towards educating the communities about the electoral process. There’s a real need for that to come back.”

The AEC told Crikey that its Indigenous Electoral Participation Program (IEPP) conducted 28 educational sessions throughout the NT (compared to 250 nationwide), while the organisation more broadly worked with 20 NT-based local partner organisations (not exclusively Indigenous) and 20 NT-based community electoral participation officers to roll out enrolment and voting in remote locations.

Beyond the AEC, local organisations conducted educational endeavours of their own. Central Land Council (CLC) CEO Les Turner said that between early May and late September, the organisation (a prominent Yes advocate) held 72 Voice information sessions in the southern half of the territory that were attended by 2,300 people. These meetings were a combination of presentations, Q&A, and liaisons with local language speakers. He said that CLC also distributed a special Voice issue of its Land Rights News focused on enrolment and misinformation.

Despite their output, Turner said that CLC was “unable to keep up with the demand” for information sessions, including from communities that requested they return a second time to meet with residents who’d missed out on earlier sessions.

NPY Women’s Council also developed their own resources, including a 10-page A5 illustrated book in Pitjantjatjara that was distributed as an educational tool to those communities. It was not a Yes pamphlet (NPY were not permitted to campaign Yes because of its contract with the AEC) but rather a resource on the ins and outs of the Voice.

The pamphlet in language was not considered an official AEC resource.

Natasha Short, founder of Kimberley Jiyigas (also contracted by the AEC to assist with education and enrolment) told Crikey that education for Indigenous people about Australia’s electoral system required a “slow conversation”.

“There was a big drive to get Aboriginal people on board and more involved but people don’t want those opportunities because they have more important things on their agenda. Political involvement is about 100 on their list of priorities,” she said.

“People need more warning and more lead time.”

Short acknowledged the difficulties of operating in remote communities, particularly their transient nature — “It wouldn’t matter if you went out to one community 10 times, you would still have people who said, ‘I wasn’t there’” — but reiterated that time and education were key. Overall, she said she thought it was “done well”.

Going into the referendum, total enrolment in the NT topped 90% for the first time, with a record 87% for Indigenous Australians.

Ekin-Smyth said that the AEC was now moving into its “lessons learnt phase” to identify opportunities for improvement within the context of the NT’s uniquely complex geographic, communication, and cultural challenges.

“We’ll keep working at it,” he said.

Voter turnout in Lingiari — encompassing the majority of these remote locations — has been in continuous decline for the past few federal, territory, and local government elections. Scrymgour said that she hoped to see changes implemented to bolster education, enrolment, and long-term engagement of Indigenous people in relation to elections: “Too often people say we’ve done the report, we’ve done the review, and another election roles around and you see very little change.”

As for Indigenous people living in Central Australia, the “What next?” Ross said, is simply a matter of getting “back to business”.

“When the results came in, my dad was sitting there and he’s like, ‘Well, I guess we should have expected this’. And he goes, ‘But you know what? You take a breath and then you get back into it.’ That’s all you can do.”