Before the end of the year, more than 17 million Australians will get the chance to vote in the first national referendum of this millennium.
The referendum — expected to take place within the — will look at whether Australia should enshrine an in its constitution.
It will be the 45th referendum in the nation’s history and the first in 23 years.
A referendum is a public vote taken to determine whether a specific part of the Australian Constitution will be changed. A question is posed and voters are given two options: Yes or No.
The outcome is binding, meaning the government must act to make the change. This is unlike a plebiscite, such as the one held on in 2017 where the government was not bound by the result, but legislated to make the outcome of the postal vote a reality.
Australia has actually voted Yes in 13 referendums — but not all of them carried
A majority of Australians have voted Yes in 13 Australian referendums. Many of these have dealt with relatively minor matters, such as who can replace a Senator if they resign or die before their term is up.
But among the most significant successful referendums were the 1946 referendum in which the Yes vote helped establish the basis of the national government-provided social security system we know of today delivered via Centrelink, and the 1967 referendum to recognise Aboriginal people in the constitution.
Source: SBS
Australian National University history professor Frank Bongiorno said that is “to ensure that you couldn't end up with a situation where a majority of voters said yes, but those majorities were concentrated in the more populous states”.
All states and 54.39 per cent of Australians voted Yes in the referendum on social security in 1946. The 1967 referendum on recognising Aboriginal people in the constitution was the highest Yes vote of any Australian referendum, with . It allowed for Aboriginal people to be counted as part of the population and enabled the Commonwealth to enact laws for Aboriginal people.
A double majority will be required for legislative change following the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum.
Source: SBS
“Five referendums achieved a national majority that fell down on the state level, the second hurdle."
Some referendums have contained more than one question
There will only be in the Voice to Parliament referendum. This is how it will be worded: "A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?"
But while the Australian public has answered 44 different referendum questions, some have been bunched together, with people asked to answer them across only 19 different occasions.
The first-ever referendum in Australia in 1906 contained one question and it resulted in the date of the beginning of the term of members of the Senate being moved from 1 January to 1 July.
Australia's next referendum will take place in 2023. Source: Getty / SAEED KHAN
The referendum with the most amount of different questions to be answered at once came in 1913 when the two questions that failed to be carried in the 1911 referendum were broken down into six questions. They sought voter approval to increase Commonwealth powers over trade and commerce, but none were carried.
Out of five single-question referendums, only two (1906 and 1928) have received a double majority Yes vote, but Professor Bongiorno said posing more than one question can also “muddy the waters” and influence the outcome of a referendum.
Former prime minister “John Howard did that in 1999; he put up a proposal for a new preamble to the constitution at the same time as the republican issue and was widely criticised for that. In fact, some people saw it as an attempt to confuse the issue,” he said.
Dr Kildea said it was a big ask for voters to become informed about multiple proposals and feel comfortable approving so many changes.
“And on a number of occasions there's been a reasonably uncontroversial proposal but there's a temptation to run a blanket No campaign,” he said.
Why the wording of the referendum question really matters
Referendum questions need to be specific as they must detail the exact changes to the constitution that would be made if they are carried. More straightforward matters such as providing a retirement age for judges and allowing those in Australian territories to take part in referendums have had success.
Professor Bongiorno said a question in the 1944 referendum would have led to similar changes as those proposed in the 1967 referendum to recognise Aboriginal people but the questions were posed in different ways.
Before the 1967 referendum, Aboriginal people were not counted as part of the Australian population. Source: Supplied / National Gallery of Australia
In 1967 voters were instead asked to approve alterations that would “omit certain words relating to the People of the Aboriginal Race in any State and so that Aboriginals are to be counted in reckoning the Population”.
“There is overlap, and you could also even say that the 1944 referendum had proposed that the federal government would have control or power over Aboriginal affairs,” Professor Bongiorno said.
He said this suggested another referendum on Australia becoming a republic was not out of the question sometime soon, despite a referendum on the matter being held in 1999.
The Queen remained Australia's head of state following the No vote winning the 1999 referendum. Source: Getty / Rob Griffith
“It largely went down because there were divisions among the Republicans about how to elect the president, essentially, " he said.
"A majority wanted a republic, but they were in disagreement about what it would look like and what the actual changes would be."
About 55 per cent of voters said No to the question on Australia becoming a republic in the 1999 referendum.
Source: SBS
This may have been the case in the post-war reconstruction referendum of 1944 when voters were asked to answer Yes or No about legislation covering a number of areas that the government wanted extended powers over.
“It was a single question all right, but it was Yes or No to 14 different changes, so it was pretty daunting and it went down,” Professor Bongiorno said.
Some referendums have happened alongside an election
More than 20 referendum questions have been posed across eight Australian federal elections, meaning people cast their referendum response at the same time as their national election ballot.
The last time that happened was almost 40 years ago, when voters in the 1984 federal election were also asked to vote in a referendum on the terms of Senators and also that elections for the House of Representatives and Senate were held on the same day. That referendum failed.
“If you look at the record, it doesn't suggest holding a referendum on election day or on its own contributes to success either way,” Dr Kildea said.
He warned that it can “take some heat out of a referendum proposal though".
“The idea being that the political parties will focus most of their attention on the election issues and have less time to focus solely on the referendum issue."
Anthony Albanese at Garma Festival in the Northern Territory last year. Source: AAP / Aaron Bunch
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the matter within his government’s first term, upon being elected as prime minister in May 2022. At the time he called for bipartisan support to make the changes to the constitution to see this happen.
Professors Bongiorno and Kildea agreed bipartisan support or lack of it had been an important factor in the success of past referendums.
“When you look at the ones that got up, they've tended to be things where the government of the day got the agreement of the opposition,” Professor Bongiorno said.
The Liberal Party headed by Opposition leader Peter Dutton announced in April it would While the party backs the idea of Constitutional recognition for Australia's First Nations people, it does not support doing this through the establishment of a Voice to parliament.
Mr Dutton has accused the Labor party of and has continuously called for more detail to be provided about the Voice proposal.
Dr Kildea said strong leadership had also contributed to referendum outcomes in the positive.
"You need to have a prime minister or a government that's willing to make the case and a good proposal that's debated over time that is addressing a real problem,” he said.
Professor Bongiorno said asking people to vote on a particular matter at the same time they were being asked to vote in an election could conflate the two.
“People could use it to protest against the government of the day by giving it a no vote,” he said.
Four of the eight referendum questions that have resulted in constitutional change have been posed alongside a national election.
Why context is everything
While factors surrounding how a referendum question is asked and presented to the Australian public may have some impact on the overall vote, experts agree referendum outcomes each tell their own story of the unique time and situations in which they were held.
“Every referendum is an individual event with its own issues and its own political and economic context,” Dr Kildea said.
History tells us well-considered questions that voters have been able to get their heads around, on topics that have cross-party support, have a greater chance to bring change to the Australian constitution.
Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney said both a referendum working group and a referendum engagement group were working with the government on the next steps toward the referendum.
Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney and Special Envoy for Reconciliation and the Implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Patrick Dodson. Source: AAP / Mick Tsikas
“They will provide us with advice about how to harness the goodwill in the Australian community on this important nation-building project," she said.
As with elections, all Australian voters will get a vote in the upcoming referendum and participation will be compulsory.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) confirmed to SBS News that people who fail to vote could risk receiving a $20 fine.
It said referendums generally cost almost as much as a federal election and while a final figure for the 2022 election has not yet been released, it has been estimated to have cost about $400 million.
While the government allocated funds for the Yes and No sides in the 1999 referendum to campaign, the Albanese government has indicated this would not be the case in the upcoming referendum.
The government introduced a bill to parliament to make changes to the referendum process, including new arrangements for public education and campaign finance.
to scrap the official Yes/No physical pamphlets that outline the arguments of both sides of a referendum question.
However more recently, to keep the documents, which are to be mailed out to every voting Australian
Mr Albanese has said the referendum would be held before 2024.
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