Arguments about the drafting of the Voice referendum make more sense if you travel back to 2014 when the idea was first formed. After Tony Abbott attacked an earlier proposal as a “one line bill of rights”, the Cape York Institute engaged with conservative thinkers to devise an alternative.

The idea was to flip the approach from using litigation to attack laws and policies after they are made, to using political influence before the law or policy is made to seek to achieve better outcomes. The requirements were that parliamentary supremacy must be maintained unaffected, and the process should be kept in the political domain and out of the courts.