Greater Springfield voters comprehensively rejected the proposed Constitutional change to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Voice to Parliament, with the Oxley electorate returning a resounding “No” vote on referendum day.
The proposed amendment required both 51% of the popular vote and the majority of votes in all States to pass, and failed to secure either element with 60% of the voting population nationally choosing “No” and none of the States having a majority of votes for “Yes”.
That trend was echoed in Greater Springfield as well – we have a breakdown here of how the Oxley and Blair electorates voted. These figures do not include postal votes, which had not all been tallied at time of writing, but were not expected to change the results in any meaningful or significant way.
Oxley
69.93% of voters in Oxley marked “No” on their ballots, with 30.07% voting “Yes”.
A total of 86,641 formal votes were cast, with 52,154 for “No”, 34,487 being for “Yes”, and 904 informal votes.
The largest number of “No” votes in the electorate were polled at the Inala Pre-Poll voting centre (7,600 votes) , which also had the greatest number of “Yes” votes (4,372 votes)
While “No” was the unquestionable majority across the Oxley electorate as a whole, a number of booths throughout the electorate had “Yes” majorities, including Forest Lake Central (193 votes for “Yes” and 186 for “No”) and Brisbane City Hall (681 votes for “Yes” and 576 for “No”), along with Acacia Ridge (114 for “Yes” and 83 for “No”), Oxley (447 votes for “Yes” and 386 for “No”) and Oxley South (390 for “Yes” and 313 for “No”).
Blair
79.04% of votes in Blair were for “No”, with 20.96% being for “Yes” and 944 votes being informal.
95,663 formal votes were cast, with 67,127 for “No” and 28,536 for “Yes”.
The highest number of “No” votes was recorded at the Ipswich South Pre-Poll voting centre (9,828 votes), with the highest number of “Yes” votes (2,680) also being reported by the same booth.
Although the “No” vote was an overwhelming majority throughout the Blair electorate, it was much closer in some Greater Springfield polling booths, with the Springfield Central booth reporting a 47.77% “Yes” vote and the Springfield Lakes booth reporting a 44.13% “Yes” vote..
No polling booth in the Blair electorate returned a majority “Yes” vote.
Passing Constitutional Amendments in Australia is notoriously difficult – only eight have passed out of the 45 proposed in the nearly 123 years since Federation.
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