James Morrow: PM’s teary announcement on the Voice is emotional blackmail

The long-awaited wording for the Voice to Parliament is finally here — and it’s not good news for Australia, writes James Morrow. TELL US WHAT YOU THINK.

Emotional blackmail.

It sounds harsh, but there is no other term for Anthony Albanese’s announcement of the final wording of the proposed Aboriginal Voice to parliament.

We now know that he has chosen to pursue a radical model for the voice, one which will be able to proactively make representations not just to parliament but the entire Commonwealth.

Yet on Thursday he stood up before the press gallery to tell voters that if they do not vote “yes”, people might feel bad.

It wasn’t just the Prime Minister’s sniffly, emotional performance that gave the game away. It was his words, too.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gets emotion at the press conference to announce the wording of the Voice to Parliament. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

“We will feel better about ourselves if we get this done. We will just feel better,” he said.

If that wasn’t enough, he said if we didn’t vote yes other countries might feel bad, too: “The truth is that Australia will be seen as a better nation as well by the rest of the world.”

Sorry, PM, but the rest of the world does not have to live with the consequences of dividing the nation by race and bolting a whole new bureaucracy onto a government that already takes advice from hundreds of other agencies, with billions of dollars to spend between them, helping Aboriginal Australians.

Had he gone with a more minimal model, one which talked only to parliament, and whose advice could not be leveraged by activists in the courts, Mr Albanese might have had a shot with this.

Yet now even some of the voice’s biggest supporters aren’t so sure.

Constitutional scholar Greg Craven, a major advocate for the Voice, was forced to admit that the wording “takes the problems that people have identified with the preceding drafting and multiplies (them)”.

That being the case, Peter Dutton should have no trouble saying that as much as the Liberals want to close the gap, they must vote “no” on the voice.

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