Voice to Parliament vote opens in regional and remote communities

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Polling for the upcoming Voice to Parliament referendum kicked off this week, in remote communities around Australia with two weeks left before the voters are tallied.

Transcript

00:00 This is a huge effort, Michael, like massive 750 locations that the AEC has to get to because

00:09 a lot of our population does live in remote or rural areas.

00:13 So this is probably the largest kind of remote polling that we've seen in a long time.

00:17 So you remember at last year's federal election, there were some concerns about whether or

00:23 not Indigenous voters were getting the kind of access and the information that they needed

00:28 from the AEC.

00:29 So the AEC has said it's done a massive effort since then to try and get out there, ensure

00:34 that people have accurate information about when the polling is happening.

00:38 But this is huge.

00:39 I mean, the AEC has to use car, boat, helicopter.

00:43 A lot of our population live on islands.

00:45 So they've got to get out to the islands to get this information to Aboriginal and Torres

00:49 Strait Islander residents, because arguably this is one of the most important votes a

00:54 lot of people have seen in a generation.

00:56 So it's important that people get the right information.

00:59 Look, one of the challenges is that I think this was mentioned earlier in the program

01:03 is that sometimes when there's sorry business, when there's been a death in a community,

01:08 it's really difficult to get the engagement because people are mourning or they've got

01:12 a lot going on in their lives.

01:14 So this is a consideration and we do hope that Aboriginal people, that the voting rate

01:19 for Indigenous people is high in this referendum.

01:21 It's so important.

01:22 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended