ACT 'yes' majority in Voice referendum deeper than university education

If so was it that your university learning experiences made you a pillar of wisdom enabling you to see the innate wisdom of the "yes"? Was it also that your university experience (all that scholarly reading and thinking and exposure to fine minds!) tenderised and sensitised you to all that is True, Humane and Just?

Because I am Ian Warden BA (Hons), I pricked up my ears whenever during the Voice campaign a pollster piped up that Australians with university degrees were going to vote "yes".

The authoritative pollster Kos Samaras voiced this apparent truism (a truism for pollsters who know their stuff, who know their Australians) again and again. It always came in the same breath with the corollary that those without a university degree were going to vote "no".

The morning after the shameful national vote, media diagnoses of the ACT's contrary "yes" (everywhere else in Australia growled "no") mentioned the freakishly large proportion of Canberrans who have a university qualification.

Samaras always delivered these observations (that those with degrees were "yeses", those without were "noes") matter-of-factly, in the way in which one might observe that the sun rises in the east. Nothing he said implied a judgment that the university-educated are an especially better and brighter species.

But, neither did he ever offer a word of explanation of this "yes/no" dichotomy. And thus was left in the air the implied notion that going to university somehow works elite-creating educational wonders. It seemed to suggest (but in polling and political science senses didn't mean to) a kind of elitist snobbery. It has been widely misunderstood, generating a lot of resentful seething among those who have not been to university. Their seethings are along the line of Oscar Wilde's observation that "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

At first puzzled I have been seeking to explain this education/voting phenomenon, certain that my own four, happy, cerebellum-polishing years of university had nothing to do with my "yes".

It is a proven truism of polling and political science that the disgruntled always vote crankily in referendums, always kicking their governments.

An unremarkable general finding about Brexit "leave" voters was that they were disgruntled about things in Life. They were embittered against the pro-"stay" Conservative government and as well had a vague sense that membership of the foreigners-infested EU was somehow to blame for their discontents, even to blame if their sex lives were disappointing.

Meanwhile serene Britons, content with and successful in Life, were far more likely to be Stayers. Again, university educated Britons overwhelmingly voted to "stay" while those without degrees voted to "leave".

Here as our referendum loomed, pollster Samaras found that what he called "unsuccessful" Australians were overwhelmingly "no" disposed.

But what we see in these gruntled/disgruntled dichotomies is not that going to university has worked ignorance-banishing wonders of wisdom and humanity. No. Rather it is that having a university degree has helped the graduates to be employable, well-paid and successful, with all the contentments that can flow from those happy advantages.

The idea that a university education works intellectual and ethical-humanitarian wonders is disproved by the way in which almost all university learning now is utterly, pragmatically, ruthlessly vocational. It is meant to make graduates glossily employable. There is nothing taught at the University of Canberra, say, that even pretends to somehow improve, enlighten and humanise minds.

In the olden days when I was at university doing Arts, no one in my cohort ever gave any thought to vulgar things like the jobs our studies might equip us to apply for. Learning was bliss in its own right. We did beautifully useless subjects like Philosophy and English Literature, welcoming Plato and Kierkegaard, Chaucer and Shakespeare into our lives.

But those halcyon days are gone.

READ MORE IAN WARDEN

And so what having a university degree means and indicates today is not that its possessor is somehow a superior being but only that he or she is a luckier being.

A university degree's possessor is more likely to live a plushly comfortable, Chardonnay-lubricated life, thus feeling relatively few resentments about anything. With less to fear from the unknown, from change, during the Voice campaign the well-to-do university graduates enjoyed an immunity against the "no" scaremongers' knavish tricks.

"Successful" in Kos Samaras' sense, we resentment-proofed graduates have been less likely to seethe about others (in this referendum's case, First Nations' peoples) being assisted by the Voice to enjoy a fairer share of the luck available in this Lucky Country.

Meanwhile here in Canberra to the eerie strangeness of most Canberrans not knowing a single Aboriginal (Aboriginals after all being the whole point of the referendum) was added the strangeness of never meeting a "no" voter even though they turn out to be the dominant socio-political species everywhere else in Australia. One would have liked the Museum of Australian Democracy to have a "no" voter as a living exhibit so that one could go and see, listen to and marvel at one.

Canberra is a foreign country. We do things differently here.

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