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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

A month out from the Voice referendum, the ‘Yes’ campaign is struggling, according to the polls.

Across the board, the polls show a big lead for ‘No’ advocates, with many in the media already all but calling the outcome of the vote.

But beneath the headline numbers there’s a glimmer of hope for ‘Yes’.

The number of undecided voters, not fully locked in to either side, is currently in the millions - and both campaigns are doing all they can to win them over.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Mike Seccombe, on what we know about the undecided bloc, and what the polls really mean.

It’s Tuesday, September 19.

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ANGE:

Mike, a lot of people are hearing about polling for the Voice referendum, and you've been looking into how accurate the polls really are. So, can we trust the polls?

MIKE:

Well, yes, by and large, we can. You know, there seems to be a lot of distrust about polling around these days. And I guess that's been fuelled by the idea that the polls missed a number of big things. You know, they missed the Trump election, or they missed Brexit, or here, they missed the 2019 election result, in relation to that one I would say even Scott Morrison thought that was a quote “miracle”, unquote. But in general, they usually get things right, and when they don't, usually there's an explanation. You know, during Brexit, for example, the polling trend was actually showing that Brexit was likely to win, but the media just couldn't believe it so they weren't reporting it that way. In the case of Trump, he actually lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. But he won because he got votes right in the right small states. So, you know, that was very hard to predict. Furthermore, since those things happened, you know, polling is only improving all the time. And I've been speaking to a lot of pollsters this week, you know, digging through their methodologies. And I think it has to be said that, you know, good as the polls tend to be, in this particular case, there are wide variations in the results they're getting. And the reason for that is that this particular event, it's a very different event to most political polling. You know, it's a referendum. And that really shakes up the way we should be reading these numbers because there are still unpredictable ways in which those numbers could move before polling day.

ANGE:

Right. And so with that in mind, the polls are likely a pretty good insight into what people are currently thinking about the Voice, how should we be reading these polls? Are they really clear cut or is it a lot more complicated than that?

MIKE:

It is a lot more complicated than that.

The first thing to say about the complication is that unlike in a general election where you just have to win the most votes, here you not only have to win the most votes, you have to win a majority of the states as well. There's a double hurdle for them to jump. Obviously, the headline finding of the polls at the moment is that the ‘Yes’ campaign is losing ground.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“The Voice to Parliament is headed for defeat in every state and territory.”

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“The poll shows only 39% of voters, nationally, say they will vote ‘Yes’, while 61% are intending to vote ‘No’.”

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“...Nationally, ‘Yes’, is sitting on about 45.3%, according to the polls.”

MIKE:

The average level of support across the polls is sitting at a bit over 43% for ‘Yes’, 57% for ‘No’. The most concerning thing for ‘Yes’, I think, is the trend. The trend is down and it shows no signs of ceasing its downward momentum.

Shortly after Anthony Albanese was elected Prime Minister and he said that the voice would be, you know, his number one priority. And then he quickly announced a draft of the change that was being proposed at the Garma Festival last year.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice? A straightforward proposition.”

MIKE:

At that time support was 65%.

Then Peter Dutton, the Opposition Leader, announced the Liberal Party would oppose the Voice, and that was in April this year.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“But there was a resounding no to the Prime Minister's Canberra voice. It should be very clear to Australians by now that the Prime Minister is dividing our country.”

MIKE:

By that stage support for ‘Yes’ was at 58%, so it was still in front. Then the bill that facilitated the referendum passed the Parliament in May. By that stage, support was down to 53%. By the time the pamphlets were going out to households in July this year, ‘Yes’ was behind, support was down to 48%. So there's a clear trend there. And as much as it pains me personally, because I think that the referendum is a good idea, the trend is yet to turn around. In fact, it has been accelerating.

Ange, the other thing to look at is what the different polls are saying, the way it's being interpreted,I think, as people look at the sort of aggregated ‘Yes’/’No” figures, and a lot of people in the media have basically called the referendum as lost already. But there is not, as far as I can see, a robust consensus. While the polls are saying that ‘Yes’ is behind, the thing that makes this particular vote difficult to predict is that there's a much greater number than usual of what are called soft voters. That is people who lean one way or the other but haven't firmly made up their mind, or people who have not even got a clue at this stage as to how they might vote. And there are not that many of them at a regular election, but there's an awful lot of them about, in relation to this referendum.

ANGE:

Yeah, And why is that for a vote that, you know, it is a yes or no answer? Why is there so much uncertainty?

MIKE:

Well, because it's a totally new concept to a lot of voters. You know, as I mentioned, some people haven't even thought about this. In an election, of course, voters are dealing with well-established political parties. right? Are they Labor people? Are they coalition people? Are they Greens? If they are, they likely have been for a very long time. And it's the same question at every election. You know, which party do you prefer? So, you know, the political lines of ‘Yes’ and ‘No” are actually quite unclear. They don't necessarily follow party lines. And there's different estimates around exactly how many soft voters there are. It could be as many as 30% or more (or about 5 million voters). That's what the ALP national secretary, Paul Eriksson, said in his briefing to the Government party room last week. He was there citing non-public polls done by the ‘Yes’ campaign, Yes 23 and by Labor itself. So that's a big, big lot of undecideds. Other polls, there was one from Redbridge last week which estimates that it's even more than that. According to Redbridge, there's about 37% of voters who are not rusted on ‘Yes’ or ‘No', at this point. You know, in other words, they're still in play.

And of course, that number is plenty big enough that it could change the outcome of the referendum, regardless of what the polls are saying at the moment. And so right now there are focus groups happening all across the country trying to figure out how those soft voters are going to break and how they might be better persuaded.

ANGE:

So, what’s most likely to convince a soft voter to switch sides, or make up their mind? That’s coming up, after the break.

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ANGE:

So, Mike, it seems like soft voters are now very critical to this campaign for both sides. What do we know about what soft voters are thinking about and how their views will be swayed one way or another?

MIKE:

Well, that, of course, is the purpose of focus groups. I mean, they call them qualitative rather than quantitative polling. They don't just ask you how you're going to vote, they engage in discussion about why. And I spoke to Rebecca Huntley, director of research at 89 Degrees East, and she's been holding these 90 minute focus group sessions, and she's also been advising the ‘Yes’ campaign. But, her job obviously isn't to be partisan in those things, it's to glean information about how people are thinking. And the one thing that stands out, she says, from her focus group work, is that most people actually accept that there's a real problem of indigenous disadvantage in this country that should be addressed. And she says that's quite different, for example, from the last referendum we had as to whether we should be a republic, because in that case a lot of people didn't think there was a problem, so they voted ‘no’, no problem, will vote ‘no’. Here, people accept there is a problem to be addressed. And she says when the facts of the voice proposal, you know, what it is about, and what it isn't about, are explained to people, she says, those who are genuinely uncommitted are apt to gravitate to the ‘Yes' side. But, her experience also suggests that there's a difference between those who identify as soft ‘Yes’ and soft ‘No’ voters. Soft, ‘Yes’, she says, are exactly that. They're leaning ‘Yes’ and the eminently persuadable in that direction. In a lot of cases, she says, people who claim to be soft ‘No’s are actually hard ‘No’s. You know, that those people want to be seen as being persuadable, but they really aren't. And the reason is that they're terrified of being described as racist. That's the way she put it. And as a result, that's distorting to some extent, the outcomes pollsters get when they ask people where they sit. So, you know, Huntley freely acknowledges the ‘Yes’ campaign faces a tough uphill battle, but she still doesn't concede that it has lost.

ANGE:

And polling has become something we all look at as a kind of sport, but it's obviously most useful for campaigners, right, because they can look at who they're not reaching. And the campaigns of each side are going after those soft voters. How are they going about persuading them?

MIKE:

Well, you're exactly right. These focus groups are a useful tool for working at your messaging. And it's quite interesting to see how different the two campaigns are in terms of the messaging they put out there. I spoke with Andrea Carson, who's a professor of political communication at La Trobe University, and she's been working on this and looking at the media reporting it, the social media interactions, all that sort of stuff. And she notes that the ‘Yes' camp has been very scattergun in its message. Her analysis found there were 33, she reckoned, different ‘Yes’ messages running in the paid media. The ‘No’ campaign, on the other hand, had about six key messages, and even more than that, it had two that it had on really high rotation. And those two messages that the ‘No’ camp is really hitting hard, are the lines that the voice is divisive, and that not all indigenous people, in fact, want this. And of course, on that key message that the voice is divisive, it is actually in the interests of the ‘No’ case to make it divisive. I guess that's the point here. As to the other one, that indigenous people don't support the voice, well, of course, not all Indigenous people support the Voice. You know, there are minority groups in every community, but the polling seems to indicate that it's maybe 20%, maybe a little bit more. But, we have a number of very high profile people on the ‘No’ side, Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price, on the conservative side, and of course Lidia Thorpe, the former Green now independent on the left, who says the voice doesn't go far enough. So that tends to give the impression, I think, that there's a greater opposition among Indigenous people themselves than there is. And I think to some extent there's kind of a false equivalence that happens in the media that accentuates this, because every time they have a ‘Yes’ Indigenous person to talk about it, they feel obliged to have a ‘No’ one, even though ‘No’ doesn't represent anywhere near as many people. So the ‘No’ camp is banking, I think, on the fact that the more people engage with the anger in the division, and the more they listen to the negative voices from Black Australians, the more likely they are to jump into the ‘No’ camp. As for the genuinely undecided, who tend to be low information voters, well, they're likely to vote against what they don't understand, According to Kos Samaras from RedBridge. The way he put it, he said the problem is that as these people tune in, they will jump straight on the ‘No’ pile.

ANGE:

And Mike, finally, I think people can feel quite angry about the polls, because it can feel really disempowering, as if the outcome of the vote is already decided ahead of time. Do you think polls do actually have a negative impact on the way we as a country engage in these questions?

MIKE:

Well, I do. I certainly think there's a negative impact that comes not so much from the polling data itself as from the horse race way they're reported in the media. And let's face it, some of the media are quite partisan. The other thing is there's also kind of a bandwagon effect that you see where some voters who don't have a well informed opinion of their own are apt to just, you know, look and see what they perceive to be the majority opinion and then go with that which which doesn't augur well, I have to say, for ‘Yes’. So, yes, I think there is a bit of a problem here that people see the polls as a foregone conclusion, and it becomes kind of self-fulfilling if you want. The truth here is that the polls are accurate in as far as they go, but they're having a lot of trouble measuring that undecided cohort.

But I think more broadly what is reflected here is that these polls also tell us something about society and where it's at at the moment. And unfortunately, as a number of pollsters told me, it's very hard to sell a positive message at a time when people generally aren't feeling very positive. And obviously at the moment Australians aren't feeling all that positive, given the state of the economy, given growing inequality. They're a bit inward, focussed on their own woes and less likely to be, I would suggest, feeling sympathetic, to those who are, you know, let's face it, the most disadvantaged in the country. So, you know, about a month from now they'll face a black and white question, yes or no. But as we've said, the vote will be decided in the grey. It's looking bad for ‘Yes’, but it's not over yet.

ANGE:

Mike, thanks so much for your time.

MIKE:

Thank you.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today…

Scott Morrison has announced he’s releasing a memoir that will seek to answer a series of questions - such as ‘Who Am I?’ and ‘How should I live?’

The book will be released by Thomas Nelson, a division of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, with the press release saying it will be less of a political memoir and more about “encouraging others to discover how they can access and see the many blessings of God.”

And…

The Matildas have been given a stadium upgrade for their Olympic qualifying match against the Phillipines next month in Perth.

The Matildas were due to play at HBF Park, with a capacity of about 20,000 spectators. Organisers have moved the game to nearby Optus Stadium, with triple the capacity, due to the high demand from fans.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back again tomorrow.

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