This region could be crucial to the Voice to parliament either passing or failing – but many residents are still undecided.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.People travel from everywhere for Joseph Vongsaphay’s needles. He presides over a booming piercing parlour in Cabramatta, lined with steel and sparkle, and is too busy poking at tongues and noses to follow complicated politics.
With three states leaning No and two Yes, NSW will be crucial to achieving the majority of states required to embed the Voice to parliament in the Constitution. And to win NSW, the Yes campaign needs western Sydney, home to a third of the state’s electors. “This is where votes are won and lost,” says pollster Jim Reed, director of Resolve Political Monitor.
Multicultural leaders are lining up behind the Yes side – more than 150 groups have signed their support – but that doesn’t mean their communities will follow. “[The Yes camp says] ‘we’ve got all the migrant organisations locked up’,” says No campaigner Nyunggai Warren Mundine. “But they haven’t got their members.
So does George Hondros, who presents a Greek language radio show. “Someone called me a wog. I said if I’m a wog, you are too; you came here from England.”Yet Kalvin Biag, a No campaigner with Filipino and Maltese heritage, argues migrants come to Australia because it’s a land of opportunity. “They come here to be equal – you have Vietnamese, you have Assyrians who left war-torn countries to be equal,” he says. “They don’t understand the premise of one group being amplified over another.
“Not a lot of the campaign material from either side overtly addresses that audience … it is a very significant untapped cohort,” he says.publication, suspects a lack of information will make migrants who arrived in the past decade vote No. “There haven’t been too many efforts to engage them,” he says. Biag says No campaigners are translating pamphlets into Vietnamese and Hindi.
As they sip coffee at a Macquarie Fields shopping Centre, Evelyn and Cecily, both retirees who want to be known only by their first names, discuss their plans to vote No. “We are all one, we should not be separate,” says Evelyn.
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