When you ask people in Melbourne, Sydney or Australia’s capital of Canberra whether they vote, the answer is almost always an enthusiastic “yes.”
But head deep into the country’s interior to a remote town like Yuendumu (pop. 740), and you hear a very different story.
“Never voted,” says one man.
“To me, voting isn’t the right way to do things,” says another.
“I’m a free man,” says a third. “I’m not in the system.”
Yuendumu sits on the edge of the Tanami Desert more than 1,000 miles from Adelaide, the nearest major city. To get there from the central Australian hub of Alice Springs (pop. 28,000), you drive three hours through a tableau of red dirt and rock, mountains and cattle ranches on an unimproved road that narrows to one lane for much of the ride.
Since Australia enacted mandatory voting a century ago, nationwide turnout has been 89% or higher. But the people who live in Yuendumu, most of them Indigenous Australians from the Warlpiri tribe, vote at much lower rates than the rest of the country. In the 2020 territory election, day-of turnout was only 28%, according to the Northern Territory Electoral Commission.
Voting challenges in remote places
The Northern Territory — home to Yuendumu and Alice Springs — is bigger than Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Kentucky, Missouri and Iowa combined but has only about 250,000 people.
Most people in the territory who live outside a handful of larger towns are Aboriginal, and they speak languages from more than 20 language groups, including Pitjantjatjara, Arrernte and Warlpiri, which is spoken in Yuendumu. English is many people’s second or third tongue.
Poverty rates are high in remote Australia. And many Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory regularly move from place to place to visit family and friends, hunt and forage, take part in cultural practices and seek health care and other services that aren’t available in their remote towns. Distance, language, poverty and mobility all contribute to lower voter turnout.
‘Out of the matrix’
In the mid-1500s, European colonists and conquistadors already were spreading through present-day North America, decimating Indigenous populations with disease and appropriating their lands. In Australia, the first contact with British explorers didn’t happen until 1770, when Capt. James Cook landed on the Eastern seaboard. So that same cycle didn’t begin to play out until centuries later than it did in North America. Some Indigenous people in the Northern Territory were still living as they always had well into the 20th century.
Today, Otto Sims, a Warlpiri elder, says he has no interest in voting. He wants nothing to do with the government. He doesn’t accept Centrelink, a government service that provides social security and other payments to Australians.
“My jurisdiction is tribal law, not the other law, the Crown law,” he says. “I used to have a passport. I destroyed it. I destroyed my birth certificate, so I’m unbranded.”
‘Hope for the future’
The federal, territory and local governments haven’t delivered for places like Yuendumu, a town of dirt roads, subpar housing stock and few resources.
Karl Hampton of the Warlpiri Project calls the Northern Territory “constitutionally vulnerable.” As one of the country’s two territories, it doesn’t have the same checks, balances or clout that Australia’s six states have, and faraway officials, not local leaders, run the show.
Hampton is working to create what is effectively a fourth tier of government, built from a tribal constitution based on Warlpiri skin groups, beliefs and codes of conduct.
He is establishing a Yuendumu cultural authority under which skin groups will choose community leaders who could then broker a treaty with the government.
“Voices in bush communities are not being heard,” Hampton says. “Decisions are made in Alice Springs or Darwin or Canberra, and they’re not the real representation of people out here.”
In 2008, the territory government reduced the number of local councils from 59 to 17, creating regional councils to oversee huge areas, a move some Warlpiri view as an example of how the government is disconnected from the people.
“The next step is to negotiate with the territory and Commonwealth government around what part of the self-governance can this new corporation take on,” Hampton says.
He says he hopes the Warlpiri Project and a Yuendumu cultural authority can help address high imprisonment rates, racism in the police and the court system and services such as housing and employment. That way, even without voting in federal or territory elections, Warlpiri would have a clear avenue to improve lives through self-government.
“That’s my hope for the future,” he says.