Akerman: Yes campaign team’s not coming clean as chances of success appear to be Going, Going, Gone

Yes voters are boasting You’re the Voice as their campaign anthem but, the way the opinion polls are trending, Going, Going, Gone would be more apt, writes Piers Akerman.

Yes voters are boasting You’re the Voice as their campaign anthem, but the way the opinion polls are trending, the song that more accurately reflects their elite team’s strategy was on the B-side of the original 1986 John Farnham single, Going, Going, Gone.

The B-side has another advantage – it was written by Farnham with Australian musicians Ross Fraser and Dave Hirschfelder while his big A-side hit was by the English team of Andy Qunta, Keith Reid, Chris Thompson and Maggie Ryder.

If the virtue-signalling deep-pocket Yes donors in the teal suburbs and corporate boardrooms had any courage, they could have opted for Indigenous band Yothu Yindi’s Treaty, but that might have awakened too many voters as to the true nature of the demands contained in the full Uluru statement.

The simple Voice, Treaty, Truth displayed on supporters’ T-shirts is less than half the truth as readers of The Daily Telegraph would have discovered if they had read the three pages the newspaper courageously printed this week. There were the guts of the document that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says he hasn’t read (“Why would I?”), which is precisely why a majority of Australians think installing this racist document’s powers permanently in the Constitution is an atrocious idea.

Anthony Albanese wears a Midnight Oil T-shirt with the slogan ‘Voice, Treaty, Truth’. Picture: Daily Mail/news.com.au

As the nation’s foremost historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote in The Australian in July, the Uluru Statement from the Heart “is sometimes silent when Aboriginal failures are visible, but vocal in condemning Australian people for misdeeds that never happened”. He goes on to point out untruths contained in the document (and repeated by Albanese and other Voice advocates), including the claim that Aborigines represent the world’s “oldest living culture” and that they were “crippled by powerlessness”.

There are literally hundreds of agencies representing Aborigines, ranging from health services to the overarching National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) listed by the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC), which published a list of the Top 500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporations for 2015-16.

Australian historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey. Picture: Mathew Farrell

It no longer does, however, and a call to ORIC this week was greeted with the recorded message “reports are now overdue”, which would indicate some tardiness in filing. But maybe more than a few of those corporations aren’t doing that well, as indicated by a March release from the Registrar that 324 corporations were deregistered for failing to lodge reports, with a June note the Bularnu Waluwarra Wangkayujuru Aboriginal Corporation RNTBC had been placed under special administration.

Blainey nailed the Uluru statement’s true sentiment with his blunt statement it “is militant. It offers no sentence of respect or gratitude to the Australian people”. Those first settlers and the waves of migrants since January 1788 deserve praise for creating the modern Australia whose taxpayers now pay more than $40bn a year to descendants of the prehistoric people eking out a Stone Age living on this continent 235 years ago. Voters are turning against the Yes campaign for a variety of reasons.

Many are learning more about what’s involved, though they won’t find the facts in the Yes campaign literature that is being pressed on them or from your ABC.

This farrago of misinformation should be sent to the foreign-funded RMIT FactLab, if it hadn’t already been suspended by Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, for possible bias or unfairness in some of the fact-checks with respect to content relating to the referendum.

The sooner this ordeal is over the better, and while Send in the Clowns might work for the Voice and Qantas, Farnham’s Sadie, the Cleaning Lady would be my favourite.