As I’ve reported for The BFD, Anthony Albanese’s “Indigenous Voice” referendum is in deep trouble. Successive polling shows support collapsing as voters confront the reality of inserting racial separatism into the Constitution. The referendum is on a trajectory to match the 1999 Republic referendum: despite across-the-board support from the elite of politics, big business, celebrities and sports, voters are walking away.
The panic on the left and in the race-industry elite is getting palpable.
Eminent Indigenous leader Mick Gooda says he is terrified the Voice to parliament referendum will fail, and Professor Tom Calma, one of the architects of the proposal, has conceded support for change is not high enough.
Of course they’re afraid: afraid the gravy train will come screeching to a halt.
If the referendum were to fail, Gooda said, he would be “repudiated for all I have done and, as will every other Aboriginal advocate”.
The second claim is a lie, of course: plenty of Aboriginal advocates are firmly opposed to the voice.
As for the first: well, good riddance. Gooda is just one of a gaggle of “professional Aborigines” whose entire careers hinge on race-baiting for profit and advancement. It’s long past time their endless, yammering baiting and division was set aside. Freed of the yoke of never-ending victim-craving, Aboriginal Australians might finally get a chance at the future they deserve as just Australians, nothing more, nothing less.
Calma, one of the architects of the detailed Voice to parliament report and the Senior Australian of the Year, said Australians needed time to understand the details of the proposal and more information would be coming from the Yes campaign soon.
The only problem is that there are no details for the proposal. There is no draft legislation, no cabinet white paper: just a vaguely-worded referendum question that promises to be an activist judges’ picnic.
The more Australians learn about the “Voice”, in fact, the more they’re walking away from it. This is what happened in 1999: all the airy-fairy guff about a republic crashed on the reality of the proposed model. “Voice” proponents are doing their damnedest to avoid having to come clean on exactly what a “Voice” will be, and how it will work.
Not even Liberal wets are saving it.
Liberal MP Julian Leeser will move amendments to a government bill this month in a last-ditch attempt to remove the reference to executive government from the constitutional amendment.
“I am concerned about the trend … It’s not just one poll, it’s a trend over time,” he said. “The government needs to change the amendment in order to win the referendum.”
But that’s just what “Voice” campaigners won’t do, because they know that it will cut off their chance to weaponise the courts for decades.
The sagging support for the “Voice” is also heading into dangerous territory for the Albanese government.
Labor strategist Kos Samaras argued the Voice campaign seemed to be targeting people who were already voting Yes, rather than undecided voters, and had to shift focus to the outer suburbs.
“When Resolve is giving Labor nearly 60 per cent of the two-party preferred vote and you’re not getting that in the Yes vote then it is clear the situation is pretty grim,” he said.
Because it shows how soft Labor’s supposed support really is. Remember, this is a government that scraped in on the lowest primary vote in over a century. If, as seems increasingly likely, the referendum fails, Labor’s reputation will be severely wounded. Perhaps fatally so in the case of Anthony Albanese, who “owns” this referendum every bit as much as David Cameron did Brexit.
Meanwhile, the left are going to keep doing what they always do: shout and scream at the rest of us in the hope that we just give up and give in.
JWS research’s John Scales said […] “You bang away with something with enough money repeatedly and enough people will start to believe it usually.”
But maybe not when the message you’re banging away with is so toxic and divisive.
Still, at least the left in New Zealand can look on in relief that they never even gave Kiwis a chance to vote on co-governance.
Lushington describes himself as Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. This article was first published HERE
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