Yes campaign looks to win over voters in Wills and beyond

The Wills campaign for the Voice was launched in Brunswick in February but really began in earnest in the middle of the year. As momentum has grown it has set its targets well beyond Melbourne’s northern suburbs. Voters in Tasmania are among those to have been called by Wills-based volunteers in recent weeks. 

The objective of Saturday’s activity in Brunswick – on the day before the huge March for Yes rallies around Australia – was to increase visibility for the Yes campaign. The hope was that on Monday morning, commuters on the Upfield railway line would pass Anstey station on their way to work and look up to see dozens of windows displaying Yes posters. 

“One of the purposes of visibility is to normalise support for Yes, to normalise support for a voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders,” says McCann, a Coburg resident who works as a union organiser. 

“I think another purpose is a show of solidarity with First Nations people.” 

One of the key organisers of Saturday’s action in Brunswick was Jade Whittaker, who works for a local architecture firm, and only recently joined the Yes campaign. 

Apart from attending a few climate change rallies when she was younger, this is the first political campaign the 30-year-old has ever been involved in. 

Earlier in the week, Whittaker hosted eight friends in her home for dinner followed by a couple of hours of phonebanking to convince Tasmanians to vote Yes. On Sunday, she took her pub footy team, the Easybeats, to the March for Yes rally which began at the State Library. 

“It’s been really easy to be involved,” she said. 

“I was super, super nervous at first, and it was quite daunting, the idea of doing a phone bank. But the Wills group have been amazing, they’ve jumped on all of the ideas that we’ve been talking about and been incredibly supportive, sharing all the resources they can and very much held my hand through the process and made me feel well equipped and supported. So it’s been really great.” 

The campaign has every reason to be confident that Brunswick will say Yes. The area is considered one of the most politically progressive in Australia, and the Yes campaign has benefitted from being able to draw resources from the offices of Wills MHR Peter Khalil and Northern Metropolitan MLC Sheena Watt. 

A guide to how Wills is likely to vote is the 2017 marriage equality plebiscite – which unlike the referendum was solely a postal vote conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and was voluntary rather than compulsory.  

In 2017, Wills recorded a Yes vote of 70%, compared to the national average of 61%. The electorate had the 28^th highest Yes vote in the nation and 12^th in Victoria. Similarly, the Wills had a participation rate of 82.9%, 25^th in Australia and 11^th in Victoria. 

By contrast with the hundreds of Yes volunteers, the No campaign is invisible in Wills. Brunswick Voice was unable to find any evidence of an active grassroots campaign in opposition to the Voice to Parliament, and there was no response to attempts to interview a Wills-based spokesperson from the Fair Australia organisation that spearheads the No campaign.