James Morrow: Why Albo is happy for Dutton to wear the blame if the Voice fails
With the Voice failing to fire the Australian imagination, it looks as though Labor is settling on Plan B: Let the thing fail, blame Peter Dutton for being a wrecker and ride a tidal wave of outrage to re-election, writes James Morrow.
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If you want to know why Australians are so cynical about politics, look at the way Labor is toying with the Voice.
When Anthony Albanese swept to power in 2022, everything was going swimmingly for the idea.
In his mind, “yes” vote would not only secure Albanese’s place in the history books but, oh yeah, also have the potential to hold a moral if not legal cudgel over the head of every future Coalition government until the end of time.
According to this first draft of what Labor hoped would become history – let’s call it Plan A – the Voice would get up unopposed, with only a tiny minority of rednecks voting “no” and the Coalition wedged harder than a Tiger Woods bunker shot at the Masters. Genius.
But now, with the Voice failing to fire the Australian imagination, it looks as though Labor and its acolytes are settling on Plan B: Let the thing fail, blame Peter Dutton for being a wrecker and ride a tidal wave of outrage to re-election.
The problem for Labor is that this is based on a faulty logic that goes something like this.
Peter Dutton is sinking in the polls. Peter Dutton opposes the Voice.
Therefore if the Voice fails, Peter Dutton will go down with it.
It’s the sort of thinking that comes from spending too much time in a Greens-Labor-Teal bubble, where the ABC’s Q&A and Pat Karvelas’s RN Breakfast act as a sort of Ministry of Truth and “no” is only said to the waiter passing the canapes.
Yet it is also entirely wrong because, if a majority of Australians think something is a bad idea, and that thing falls over at the polls, those who worked to topple it will not be hated but thanked.
And indeed that is the direction things are going.
Last week Roy Morgan, generally thought of as leftish-leaning polling outfit, released its latest findings on the Voice.
According to their surveys, support for the referendum had plunged to just 46 per cent.
Two states (Queensland and South Australia) were found to be firmly in the “no” camp with more people saying “no” than “yes”.
Just one more state would have to go majority “no” for the referendum to be dead on arrival.
Only hard left Victoria was a definite yes.
Note that this was before Peter Dutton reshuffled his cabinet, replacing Julian Leeser, who stepped down from the front bench over his different views on the Voice, with the fierce and articulate Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, one of the referendum’s most dogged opponents.
With Price leading the Coalition’s “no” push, Australians who would be happy to recognise Indigenous Australia in the Constitution but are suspicious of a bureaucracy they worry will divide the nation by race can vote against it without feeling like they are terrible people for doing so.
Amidst all this, the effort to drag the Voice into being continues.
Sympathetic politicians and media outlets keep trumpeting news that Albanese’s solicitor-general – essentially the PM’s barrister – has assured us this will all be okay while burying news like the Roy Morgan poll.
Never mind that solicitor-generals often get it wrong, as happened when Julia Gillard’s “Malaysia Solution” for asylum seekers hit a wall in the High Court when it ruled that her solicitor-general had not only gotten it wrong but come up with an argument that was “half baked”.
We also continue to hear that “experts” have called claims that the Voice could tie the country up in legal knots as being “too silly for words” (Bret Walker SC).
Less will be said about constitutional scholars who support the Voice yet concede that the wording as it stands is “far worse” than feared (Professor Greg Craven) and say that parliament won’t be able to “shut the Voice up” (Professor Megan Davis). Yet Australians are no dummies, which is why Plan B stands for “backfire” as much as “bubble”.
The more they hear about the Voice, the more they are suspicious that the likes of Craven and Davis are correct.
Many are also suspicious that the whole idea of a separate body for a separate group of people – whether defined by race or who got here first – cuts against the grain of the modern Australian project and the enviably harmonious society it has produced.
This was summed up eloquently in a submission to the joint parliamentary committee looking into the Voice by Terence Cole.
This is the man who served as a judge on the NSW Court of Appeal and led not one but two major royal commissions.
“Dividing Australian society permanently based on race is inconsistent with the great unified multicultural society Australia has established since World War II,” he told the committee.
“The potential for great irredeemable harm to Australian society means the Voice should never be incorporated into the Australian constitution, which should be amended only if such amendment advantages Australian society as a whole. The Voice does not.”
It is hard to sum it up more succinctly than that.
Yet in bubble world, it won’t matter. Because if the Voice goes down, they’ll still be happy to blame Peter Dutton.
Or failing that, the Australian people.
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Originally published as James Morrow: Why Albo is happy for Dutton to wear the blame if the Voice fails
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