MATES, IT’S A REALLY NICE DAY ALL OF A SUDDEN. Australia has voted, and it’s a resounding ‘YES‘ on the issue of Marriage Equality. But, in slightly less good news, the results in NSW are a little more troubling.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has revealed that 61.6% of all Australians voted in favour of allowing LGBTQI to marry the person they love. Fuck yeah.
Every state and territory in Australia returned a majority Yes vote. Every single one. More to that, they all returned a Yes vote of greater than 60%.
All, that is, except New South Wales.
Somehow, NSW returned the lowest percentage Yes vote in the country at just 57.8%. That’s lower than Queensland. It’s even lower than the Northern Territory, which had a 58.4% participation rate.
It’s not a statistical error, either. Check the national map.
Not only did NSW return the lowest Yes vote in the country by a fair margin, it was also the only state in the country to return a vote of No greater than 40%.
And curiously enough, that’s not the fault of rural regions either. Every single one of NSW’s 11 regional electorates returned majority Yes votes. Every single one.
https://twitter.com/AlexDruuuce/status/930576228498661376
The issues, as it turns out, comes from Western Sydney, where a cluster of inner suburban seats returned massive votes of No, including the Division of Blaxland, which returned a 73.9% No vote, the highest of any seat in the country.
The cluster of No voters in Western Sydney is unlike any other group in the country; no other state had any more than 3 electorates returning a No vote of greater than 50.0%. Five – Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, the ACT, and the Northern Territory – had zero.
New South Wales had 12.
Twelve.
All of them, the whole lot, clustered in the Greater Western Sydney region.
Thankfully, though. The overwhelming majority of the rest of the country did the right thing, and returned a Yes vote. But regardless, if there’s any worrying aspects to come from a positive result, the concentration of Western Sydney votes is definitely it.
