The article rumoured to have seen an indigenous magazine slated for closure

Does publication of the article below see NSW Aboriginal Land Council's Tracker Magazine closing under pressure from NSW Indigenous Affairs Minister Victor Dominello?

VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE: How black Australia rejected Tony Abbott

BY TRACKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2013

Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

NATIONAL: Tony Abbott is the new ‘Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs’. One problem: no-one bothered to ask Aboriginal people if they even wanted him. It turns out they didn’t, if the most in-depth analysis of Aboriginal voting intentions ever staged is anything to go by. CHRIS GRAHAM explains.

Somewhere in Wreck Bay – a tiny Aboriginal community on the NSW South Coast – a blackfella is hiding a deep, dark secret.

He or she voted Liberal at the recent federal election. I’m not kidding.

Wreck Bay is in the bellwether seat of Eden-Monaro, an electorate which, since 1972, has always fallen to whichever party forms government.

2013 was no exception – it was held by Labor’s Mike Kelly, a rising star in the ALP, but by the end of counting had fallen to the Coalition’s Peter Hendy, a virtual unknown.

Hendy certainly doesn’t have the Wreck Bay community to thank for his success.

An analysis of the results from the community reveals that of the 62 votes cast, all of them bar one were directed towards Labor.

That stunning statistic earns Wreck Bay the distinction of the highest anti-Coalition vote of any Aboriginal community in the nation, at 98 percent.

But Wreck Bay was by no means alone in its strong anti-Coalition stance. Tracker magazine analysed 23,515 votes from voting booths in 277 communities around the country.

We looked at communities which were ‘identifiably Aboriginal’ – towns with Aboriginal populations higher than 80 percent.

Wilcannia in the far west of NSW, for example, fits this profile. Other communities include Toomelah, Murrin Bridge and Wreck Bay in NSW, Woorabinda and Cherbourg in Queensland, and a host of discrete Aboriginal communities across the Northern Territory which have populations close to 100 percent Aboriginal.

The analysis reveals that all but seven of the 65 booths returned more than 50 percent against the Coalition.

Nationally, 64 percent of Aboriginal electors directed their vote – either before or after preferences – to the Labor Party. But even that figure is likely to be understated.

There’s no way to discern the black vote from booths in, for example, metropolitan Sydney, where anecdotally at least, the anti-Coalition vote is even higher.

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