The leaders of the Yes campaign should stop throwing blame and take some instead

Five key figures in the Yes camp are the biggest losers of this referendum and they’re already shifting blame and making excuses as their Voice heads to defeat.

We must already ask: who is the biggest loser? Who in the Yes camp did most to kill Labor’s Voice, an advisory parliament just for the Aboriginal race and cemented into our constitution?

It’s critical to ask now, because we’re already hearing the excuses from the guilty as their Voice heads to defeat on Saturday week.

You’ve heard them: this shows Australians are racists. Fools, tricked by the lies of the No campaign.

Voice architect Marcia Langton even says this whole referendum “taps into a deep well of historical racism”.

Who in the Yes camp did most to kill Labor’s Voice? Picture: AFP

But none of that makes sense. How could Australians be racist for now saying no to the Voice, when just last year ago two thirds said yes to the idea of it, before they looked closer?

The leaders of the Yes campaign should stop throwing blame and take some instead.

It’s in Australia’s urgent interest that they stop trashing their country and pushing us closer towards race riots.

So let’s ask: who did really kill this Voice?

First candidate for biggest loser: Linda Burney, the Indigenous Australians Minister, in charge of selling us this Voice.

Linda Burney. Picture: Martin Ollman

I spent a couple of weeks with Burney on a shoot for a documentary. She’s very nice, but also the most incompetent federal minister I’ve met.

Burney said from the start the Voice was part of a three-part race revolution. There’d be the Voice, and then “truth-telling” and a “Makarrata Commission” to negotiate a “treaty”.

So from the get-go, voters were saying, hang on, what’s this big plan? Treaties, even?

Yet Burney has since refused to answer questions in Parliament about how any of this would actually work.

In Question Time she repeatedly dodged even the most basic question about the Voice, sometimes filibustering by slowly reading out the referendum question.

Nor could she explain how the Voice would actually make a difference. At one stage she ludicrously suggested we needed the Voice to stop Aboriginal mothers giving their children neat cordial rather than water.

Not surprisingly, the suspicious spread: what was the government hiding? Was there a secret agenda?

Candidate two for the biggest loser: Thomas Mayo.

Thomas Mayo. Picture: Brendan Radke

Mayo is an official from the hard-line CFMEU building union, yet Burney picked him for a committee to advise the government on what the Voice should look like. He’s also an ambassador for the Uluru Statement that inspired the Voice.

Mayo has proved to be very articulate, but also destructive. He’s been filmed gloating about that the Voice would be “a black political force to be reckoned with” which could “punish politicians”, “abolish colonialist institutions” and “pay the rent, pay reparations and compensation”.

Reparations now? That’s compensation paid by people today who didn’t do the harm to people today who didn’t suffer it, because long-dead people of their “race” did something 250 years ago to long-dead people of another race.

That crazy appeal to race guilt must have cost the Yes campaign votes.

Third candidate for the biggest loser: Professor Marcia Langton.

Marcia Langton. Picture: Martin Ollman

Langton, a former Marxist, is co-author of the report that designed this Voice of 24 activists – activists she says should be selected, not elected.

But just how they’re to be selected, Langton cannot say. Worse, she’s made the Voice seem driven by hate, and a weapon in a race war.

Her abuse is amazing. She’s called the No campaigners liars who “appeal to racism and stupidity”, and accused Liberal Opposition leader Peter Dutton and Nationals leader David Littleproud of preaching to their parties’ “racist base”.

That must have put a lot of Liberal and Nationals voters off-side.

Fourth candidate for the biggest loser: Noel Pearson.

Noel Pearson. Picture: Tertius Pickard

Pearson is the Cape York activist who co-wrote the Uluru Statement that demanded the Voice, and is on the government committee which approved the final proposal.

He’s been vicious in this debate. For instance, he abused Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a No campaign leader, as a kind of race traitor caught up in a “celebrity redneck vortex” and used a puppet by white racists whose “strategy was to find a black fella to punch down on other black fellas”.

Abusing a woman is not a winning strategy. But worse was Pearson’s disgusting appeal last week to migrants to vote Yes, and not side with white Australians: “Are you with the mob from the UK? Are you kind of honorary settlers? Because some of you are the wrong colour.”

Making whites your enemy isn’t a way to win.

And the final candidate for the biggest loser of the Yes campaign: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. He’s also the winner.

Anthony Albanese. Picture: Martin Ollman

That’s not just because he, too, won’t say how this Voice would work, can’t show how it would help, and won’t now talk about that radical agenda he pushed just last year, including a treaty.

What really makes Albanese the biggest loser is this.

It was Albanese who decided to hold this referendum that’s so divided the nation.

It was Albanese who decided to make us vote on a Voice with absolutely no details.

It was Albanese who decided on this Voice without any idea how it would in practice make anything better.

And – the big one – it was Albanese who decided we should vote on a change to our constitution to forever divide Australians by race.

Did he really think Australians would vote for that? Or should?

That’s shame on him, and not on his country.

Originally published as The leaders of the Yes campaign should stop throwing blame and take some instead