Campbell: Dutton must now ensure Liberals prevail on Voice
Having finally revealed the federal Liberal MPs will oppose the Voice, how is Peter Dutton going to make sure they prevail, asks James Campbell.
Opinion
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So what happens next? Having finally come out with it on Wednesday and revealed that he and his fellow federal Liberal MPs will oppose the Voice, how is Peter Dutton going to make sure they prevail?
That the Liberal Party room has finally landed here isn’t exactly a surprise. Ever since the PM made it clear where he was going on this, despite the protestations of an open mind, the real division among Liberals has been how they should get to No.
Yes, there are a hatful of MPs who might end up publicly supporting the Yes case, but you can count them on one hand. For the majority of MPs, accommodating them in the name of unity has always been very much a second order issue behind working out how they can defeat this referendum without being made to wear the consequences at the next election.
Indeed I would go so far as to say that, until a few weeks ago, there existed a small number of MPs who were prepared to suck up their reservations over the Voice if they thought it would keep the party’s hopes alive in the nice tealy places they need to win back if they are ever to return to government. Since then, two things have changed.
The first was the dawning realisation that for some authors of the Voice, extensive litigation is, as the IT people say, not a bug but a feature. And the only thing that Liberals hate more than trade unions is activist judges.
In other words, a number of MPs – while disliking it – might have been prepared to put up with the Voice as long as they thought it was harmless.
This group has now decided it won’t be harmless and have concluded it needs to be defeated even if it costs the next election.
What is surprising is how long it has taken for some of them to grasp that this choice might not be choice at all, because on the available evidence, the chances are they’re going to lose the next election wherever they land on the Voice, if for no other reason than since World War II no party has returned to government after one term in opposition. Now having finally reached the No they were always going to reach, the federal Liberal and National parties need to find a way to make sure their side prevails.
Normally, one would have said last week’s decision doomed the referendum to failure. Most referendums since federation have failed, and all the ones that were opposed by the majority of the party in opposition.
Add in the soft nature of a lot of the Yes vote and you’d think that would be that.
It says a lot about the state of federal politics at the moment that no one is quite sure that this rule applies this time. Indeed, there are some people around the government who are prepared to whisper they think having Peter Dutton on the other side of the argument mightn’t be a bad thing for the Voice’s prospects.
Given there’s nothing they can do about it now, you can understand why they’re praying that if the public don’t like the singer, they won’t listen to the song. It’s also easy to see why, on his performance, so far they might think this to be true. Because, let’s be frank, until now he’s been all over the shop on the Voice – lashing out at the Prime Minister while refusing to say what he would do instead.
Even on Wednesday, as he was doing his big reveal, Dutton seemed incapable of laying out a principled reason why liberals – big L and small – should be opposed to the Voice, namely that it enshrines more racial differences in the constitution, when we should be removing the ones it already has.
Having made his tortuous way to No, why he couldn’t just make it clear that equality before the law ought to trump every other consideration is absolutely beyond me.
If he had opened his press conference with a restatement of that principle, he might have got our attention, instead we were told the Liberals said ‘yes’ to constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians, ‘yes’ to local and regional bodies, in order to achieve practical outcomes for Indigenous people on the ground. On the other hand, Liberals reject a national body because having a Canberra Voice “is not going to resolve the issues on the ground in Indigenous communities.”
Fair enough, I suppose. Dutton is a practical man who appears to be uninterested in the theory of things.
My point is, that even if this body could be shown to improve things on the ground – something the government will spend the next few months trying to do – it would still be objectionable because it will enshrine the distinction between indigenous and non-indigenous in our constitution forever.
Or, to put it more crudely, under this proposal, our constitution will give Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton two votes, while most of us will have to make do with one.
What’s fair about that?
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