‘I believe the time for the Voice has come’: Leeser resigns from opposition frontbench

Shadow attorney-general Julian Leeser has resigned from the opposition cabinet after the Liberal Party resolved to oppose the Voice to parliament referendum in a move that bound frontbenchers.

Leeser, the Coalition’s most senior pro-Voice figure who also held the Indigenous Australians portfolio, will move to the backbench to campaign in favour of the referendum after the Liberal party room resolved last week to formally oppose it.

Leeser’s decision comes days after former Coalition Indigenous affairs minister Ken Wyatt, the first Indigenous Australian elected to the House of Representatives, quit the Liberal Party altogether in protest against its rejection of the Voice to parliament.

At a press conference in Sydney on Tuesday, Leeser said he and his party held irreconcilable differences on the Voice, and he was resigning as a matter of principle to campaign for an issue he had supported for almost a decade.

“I believe the time for the Voice has come,” the Berowra MP said.

“I believe in local and regional Voices. I believe in a national Voice, drawn from local and regional bodies, and support the referendum being put this year.

“I believe that Voice can help move the dial on Indigenous education, health, housing, safety and economic development.”

Leeser said he spoke to Opposition Leader Peter Dutton the day before last week’s party room meeting. He was pushing for a more pro-Voice position that altered the wording of the proposed constitutional amendment, but his colleagues ultimately decided to oppose the government’s model. He and Dutton agreed last week to allow Leeser to spend the Passover Jewish holiday to consider his position.

“It’s clear that the shadow cabinet and the party room and I have taken a different position,” he said.

He added that he resigned “without rancour or bitterness and I remain a loyal Liberal, fully committed to the leadership of Peter Dutton”.

The shadow attorney-general, Julian Leeser, has resigned from the opposition front bench to campaign for the Voice to Parliament.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Shadow ministers are bound by the party’s decision to oppose the Voice but backbenchers will be allowed to freely campaign in line with their personal views, as is the norm in the Liberal Party.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who is currently on leave, praised Leeser in an Instagram post, saying he had made a principled decision while claiming that Dutton had “underestimated the number of Liberal and National voters who will show generosity and goodwill and vote yes to constitutional recognition in this referendum”.

Speaking in Brisbane, Dutton said Leeser was a man of great character whose position on the Voice was “unique” due to his long-term advocacy, but said it was “at odds with the overwhelming majority of the Liberal Party partyroom”.

He repeated his criticisms of the Voice to parliament, deriding the proposal as a “Canberra Voice” that would not deliver change for Indigenous people on the ground, and affirming that his determination in campaigning for the No vote remained unshaken.

“The more you look at the Canberra Voice model, the more you realise that it’s going to change our system of government forever and not for the better,” Dutton said.

While Leeser has been highly critical of Labor’s handling of the referendum process and led calls for more detail about the Voice will operate, Dutton’s decision to bind his frontbench put his shadow attorney-general in an invidious position.

Leeser’s support for the concept of an Indigenous Voice pre-dates his entry into federal parliament, having worked with Indigenous leaders Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Megan Davis on early concepts, and founding the Uphold and Recognise organisation to build support for constitutional recognition in conservative circles.

Leeser said he would now focus on advocating for alternative wording for the Voice amendment, which he proposed in a speech to the National Press Club last week, as he claimed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had handled the referendum process poorly and needed to change course.

“The risk to our country and the risk to our shared national reconciliation project of failure needs to be recognised by the government,” he said, adding that the Voice was on track to fail with its current level of support.

“An all-or-nothing approach could deliver nothing,” he said.

“[My] changes will deliver a Voice that is in every way constitutionally safe, a voice that honours Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and gives them a place in our founding document. It will have a better chance of convincing more Australians to support this.”

At the National Press Club last week, Lesser urged for the second clause of the proposed constitutional amendment, which enables the Voice to make representations to the executive government of the Commonwealth as well as the parliament, to be deleted, arguing it was too broad and open to activist judges to expand its meaning. But he clarified on Tuesday that he would support the Voice even if he failed to secure this change.

‘It’s clear that the shadow cabinet and the party room and I have taken a different position.’

Julian Leeser

The Voice’s ability to advise the executive branch - that is, ministers and the public service - has been furiously opposed by some constitutional conservatives and lawyers on the grounds it would hamstring government decision-making by creating an avenue for High Court litigation if the Voice was not consulted. Other legal experts have rejected this, arguing the amendment poses a limited legal risk of litigation.

Liberal backbencher Andrew Bragg, also a Voice supporter, praised Leeser as someone who had done “more than any other constitutional conservative to advance the Indigenous Voice” and said a Yes vote would be more likely because of his support.

“He has invested a huge amount of his political capital in an issue which has been highly contested within the Liberal Party,” Bragg said.

“Julian has always understood a successful referendum would be considerably more likely with Liberal and conservative support. This referendum is too important to play politics and it is not good enough to oppose the referendum on process grounds.”

Tasmanian Liberal MP and Yes supporter Bridget Archer said Dutton was “speaking to a very narrow base” and needed to take some lessons from Leeser and Wyatt’s resignations.

“It should be a long-overdue wake-up call in my view, but I’m not sure it’s a lesson that will be heard,” she said.

She said it was shameful for the party to have put Leeser in the position of having to uphold the cabinet line “knowing all that work he has done for such a long time on the issue”.

Archer said the party had failed to heed the lessons of the 2022 election and this month’s Aston byelection, and the party was positioning itself “adjacent to people who do have inflammatory, divisive and in some cases racist views”.

Victorian Liberal MP Russell Broadbent, a supporter of the Voice, described Leeser as a “brave man”.

“It’s a decision each person has to make,” he said when asked for his response to Leeser’s frontbench resignation.

Broadbent said he would be among Liberals who have said they would not campaign either way on the Voice, after Far North Queensland MP Warren Entsch and frontbencher Simon Birmingham flagged they would not be publicly advocating a position.

“I’ve been pretty clear in my public statements and essays I’ve written that I support the Voice. I understand where the party comes from, I will not be prosecuting a case either way,” he said.

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