Forest Lake voters narrowly rejected the proposed Constitutional change to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Voice to Parliament, with the Oxley wider electorate returning a resounding “No” vote on the issue.
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”.
We have a breakdown here of how Forest Lake and the wider Oxley electorate voted; These figures do not include postal votes, which have not all been tallied yet but will not change the results in any meaningful or significant way.
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.
While the vote was definitively “No” at an electorate level, it was much closer in Forest Lake itself, with Forest Lake Central polling booth returning a “Yes” majority with 193 votes, against 186 for “No”.
The three other Forest Lake booths had fairly close splits between the two camps;
Forest Lake East booth returned 1,020 “Yes” votes against 1,190 “No” votes, while Forest Lake South booth recorded 1,004 “Yes” votes and 1,389 “No” votes; Forest Lake booth had 969 “Yes” votes and 1,317 “No” votes.
A number of other booths throughout the wider electorate also had “Yes” majorities, including Brisbane City Hall with 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”).
Passing Constitutional Amendments in Australia is notoriously difficult – only eight have passed out of the 45 proposed in the nearly 123 years since Federation.
