Referendum results are made up of building blocks of states – four states are required to pass a referendum. While a successful referendum also requires a majority nationwide, that has never been the deciding factor. It’s always been about the four states.
In this post I’m analysing which states have tended to vote together, and the combinations of states that have appeared throughout the twentieth century.
There have been 44 referendums, but eighteen of those have involved all six states voting together. On eleven occasions, all six states have voted No. On another seven cases, they have all voted Yes.
This post will focus entirely on the other 26 referendums, where the states have split between Yes and No.
Those 26 referendums have taken place over thirteen separate referendum days between 1910 and 1984.
One thing I noticed was that, with one exception, when these referendums were held on the same day, the states voted the same way.
In 1910, Victoria and South Australia voted No alongside NSW on one question and voted Yes with the other states on the other question. For the next twelve referendum days, split-result referendums would always split in the same way.
In some cases, these referendums were held alongside other referendums which had a 6-0 result. For example, in 1946 one referendum was won 6-0, while two others split 3-3. In 1984, one referendum split 3-3 and the other went 0-6. Split-result referendums also occured alongside unanimous referendums in 1937, 1967 and 1977.
It’s interesting that combinations of Yes-voting coalitions have rarely been repeated. NSW stood alone in 1967 and 1974, and the same combination of Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania were the Yes-voting states in the 1910 Surplus Revenue referendum and the 1951 Communist Party referendum.
Every other combination of states only appeared in referendums held on one day.
There has been a marked shift over the twentieth century, with some states becoming less likely to vote Yes, and others more so.
As I explained in Monday’s post, there were a lot of referendums in the 1910s, and every one of them produced a split result. In contrast, only five out of ten referendums in the 1970s had a split result, and just one of six in the 1980s.
The next table divides up the split results into three eras: the 1910s, the 1920s to the 1950s, and the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
In that first decade, Western Australia, Queensland and to a lesser extent South Australia were the main Yes-voting states. New South Wales did not vote Yes once in that decade.
For the remainder of the first half of the century, New South Wales became more pro-Yes, supporting referendums in 1926 and 1946, while Queensland and Western Australia became more ambivalent.
Since 1967, New South Wales has been overwhelmingly supportive, voting Yes more than any other state. Victoria has voted Yes twice, and South Australia just once. Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania have not voted Yes since they all voted to ban the Communist Party in 1951.
Finally, I have also mapped out how often each state has voted with each other state in the following grid:
New South Wales clearly stands apart from Queensland and Western Australia. They have only voted with New South Wales on a handful of occasions.
The strongest alliance has been Queensland and Western Australia, yet there has still been eight occasions when these states didn’t vote together. These states voted on opposing sides in split-result referendums in 1926, 1937, 1944 and 1946, before coming back together to ban the Communist Party in 1951, and they haven’t parted ways since.
When the Constitution was written, part of the fear of the small states was of NSW and Victoria voting together to overrule the smaller jurisdictions, but that hasn’t happened. Victoria has sat somewhere between NSW and the peripheral states like Queensland and Western Australia. And there’s only been one occasion when NSW and Victoria voted in favour while all other states voted No – in 1984.
That’s it for this week, but I’ve got plans for more blog posts for next week – so watch this space.
Interestingly, Victoria is the state that has voted with Tasmania the most.
The DLP No campaign in the 1967 Parliament Referendum might have been a contributor to that, given that the DLP was strongest in Victoria and none of the other Senators opposing it were from Victoria. Had the referendum happened without the DLP existing, it might have passed in Victoria and Queensland.
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