Opinion poll showing majority Indigenous support for the Voice is not fake

^{By Renee Davidson}

In a viral video viewed tens of thousands of times across social media, an anti-Voice campaigner claims a statistic showing that 83 per cent of Indigenous people support the Voice is “bullshit” because the majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were never consulted.

But an opinion poll is not illegitimate if it does not gauge the views of everyone in the target population because polls only represent a sample of people in the group.

In the 46-second video, Widjabul woman Mebbingarri Cindy Roberts who opposes the proposed Voice to Parliament, refers to a YouGov poll published in April 2023 that found 83 per cent of Indigenous people polled supported the Voice. 

“My people, we are three to four per cent of the Australian population,” Ms Roberts says in the video. “The majority of my people have not been consulted in regard to this Voice to Parliament.” 

“So you tell me how they got this bullshit", she says, pointing to the poll result displayed in the background of the video.

Social media users have shared her video on Facebook and Twitter, recording more than a combined 24,000 views across the channels. 

Comments posted by social media users suggest that many believe Ms Roberts’ claims. “Australians are waking up to the lies, at a rapid rate. Vote NO!,” one user wrote, while another similarly claimed, “It's A Big NO from ME all LIES.” 

But Ms Roberts’s claim that the poll result is “bullshit” because not all Indigenous people in Australia were consulted is nonsense, according to Associate Professor Ron Levy of the Australian National University (ANU) College of Law. 

“This claim is nonsensical because it asserts that an opinion poll is illegitimate if the poll does not gauge the views of everyone in the target population,” Dr Levy told RMIT FactLab in an email. 

“But that is how opinion polls work,” he said. “You can't poll everyone; that would be too hard and too expensive. An opinion poll asks just a sample of the target population for their opinion.”

“If you poll enough people, then you get a very high likelihood that the sample polled reflects the views of the whole target population,” he said.

What do the polls actually show? 

An opinion poll is a snapshot of public opinion gauged by questioning a representative sample of people at a given time. Polls are especially employed as the basis for forecasting voting results. Voting intentions can naturally change over time. 

The poll referred to in Ms Roberts’s video was conducted online by YouGov between March 1 and March 21, 2023. The company surveyed 15,060 Australians across the country and weighted them for age, gender, location, education and on how they voted at the 2022 election.

Of those surveyed, 738 were identified as being Indigenous from having answered a question on Indigenous identity either at the time or in a previous survey, a spokesman for YouGov told RMIT ABC Fact Check.

The poll found that 83 per cent of respondents identifying as Indigenous would either vote Yes or were leaning towards doing so, while 14 per cent said they would vote No or were leaning that way, and four per cent were undecided.

According to the YouGov spokesman, the margin of error for this sample was +/- 2.3 per cent. 

In addition to the YouGov poll, Ipsos also conducted an opinion poll specifically surveying Indigenous people's views on the Voice. 

The Ipsos poll, which was conducted online between January 20 and January 24, 2022, surveyed a sample of 300 Indigenous Australians and found that 80 per cent of respondents intended to vote Yes in the upcoming referendum.

Notably, according to psephologist Kevin Bonham both polls were "significantly out of date" and could not be relied upon for a specific determination of between 80 or 90 per cent. Moreover, there had been a slide in the Yes vote among the wider community since the polls were conducted.

Ms Roberts refers to the YouGov poll result as “this LABOR Statistics BS” in the caption to her Instagram video, however, while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has publicly shared the results of the poll, the government did not commission it. Both the YouGov poll and the Ipsos poll were commissioned by The Uluru Dialogue, a pro-Voice lobby group.

Were First Nations people consulted about the referendum? 

Not every Indigenous Australian was contacted for input into the referendum policy. 

Constitutional experts told FactLab that it would not be feasible for a consultation process to attempt to engage the majority of any population on the development of policy.

However, according to the Referendum Council, the process that led to support for a constitutionally protected Indigenous Voice to Parliament, “reflects the most proportionately significant consultation that has ever been undertaken with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”. 

The Referendum Council, whose eight Indigenous members and eight non-indigenous members were appointed in 2015 by then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten, held a series of consultation meetings, called The First Nations Regional Dialogues, around the country between December 2016 and March 2017.

The 13 dialogue meetings brought together a total of around 1,200 Indigenous Australians with the view of reaching an agreement on how to formally recognise First Nations people in the constitution.

Participants were selected to ensure they appropriately represented the local community, including a range of age and gender demographics. 

The regional dialogues culminated in the First Nations Constitution Convention in 2017, where delegates adopted the Uluru Statement from the Heart, calling for the constitutional protection of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament and sequential reforms of treaty-making and truth-telling. 

ANU’s Dr Levy told FactLab that it was not possible or desirable to engage a majority of a population, as it would set the bar unrealistically high. 

The regional dialogue process “was a wide consultation involving many Indigenous people from different places and with different views,” Professor Levy said.

“And importantly, it was not just an ordinary democratic consultation, but a deliberative democratic consultation,” he said. “This means that the people consulted learned about reform options extensively before discussing and debating, and eventually choosing the reform that seemed best after all of their discussions.”