Peta Credlin: Voice’s Yes campaign full of deceit and double standards

As the debate around the Voice gets more abusive, with Ray Martin joining the fray this week, what is even more evident is that PM Anthony Albanese is clueless, writes Peta Credlin.

While the Voice debate is getting more abusive, the closer we get to referendum day, the strongest emerging impression is that we might have a prime minister who’s comparatively clueless.

And by that, I’m not even talking about his radio interview last week where he called Ray Martin’s “dinosaurs or dickheads” speech “very powerful” but more his conduct through this whole Voice campaign where he just hasn’t been straight with the Australian voter.

Martin has been a genial presence on our TV screens for decades. But like so many “yes” advocates, he turned nasty. The name-calling at the Sydney event with the PM was bad enough but to then double down on it by insisting that it was the “No” argument he’d attacked, not the “No” voters; and then to claim that you can abuse the argument without also abusing the people making it, is typical of the “Yes” campaign’s deceit and double standards.

Essentially, Martin replayed the convoluted logic earlier displayed by Marcia Langton, who first called “No” voters racists, and then claimed that it was actually their arguments that she’d called racist, only to have footage emerge of her saying that “hard no” voters are indeed “spewing racism”.

Anthony Albanese and Ray Martin on stage at the Factory Theatre. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Max Mason-Hubers

But it wasn’t just Martin’s abusive and dismissive comments that are the problem. It’s also his claim that the detail is irrelevant. As if anyone would ever buy a car, or a house, without knowing all the key facts. And as if people should ever be asked to do something akin to signing a blank cheque on the constitution. How can we be expected to endorse a change to our constitution when its advocates have deliberately not said exactly what it would mean? And then try and deny that it means exactly what they’ve previously admitted in speech after speech, in document after document?

Another nasty aspect of this debate was a cartoon last week in the Australian Financial Review that had Warren Mundine, Jacinta Price and Peter Dutton walking past “No” banners touched up with Adolf Hitler’s facial features. It was a pretty transparent bid to frame the “No” case as guilty by association. It earned a rebuke from the Australian Jewish Association which called the cartoon “despicable”, “a new low in political commentary”, and noted that “the No case opposed race-based divisions. This is the opposite of Nazism which is characterised by extreme race-based division.”

The unedifying rancour from a “Yes” push that fears it’s lost, is making this one of our most divisive public debates ever. It appears that the Prime Minister initially thought that he couldn’t lose with his Voice referendum: either he would have authored a historic change to start down the path of Aboriginal co-governance under the guise of reconciliation, or he would have managed to portray his opponents as anti-Aboriginal. Instead, by implying that all “No” voters are somehow disrespectful towards the First Australians (or worse), he’s managed to upset and defame the majority of voters as “racist”, at least if the current Voice polls are right that a majority of the country will have voted “No” by this time next week.

News Corp columnist Peta Credlin.

There’s little doubt that the PM has well and truly ended any honeymoon that might have been lingering from last year’s election. Worse than that, though, it looks like he was willing to risk our social harmony on the most sensitive of topics with a partisan proposal that was always likely to fail. And in the process, not only to show how out of touch with the general public this inner-city leftie really is, but to leave voters wondering about his basic competence, and even honesty.

When the polls were better, the PM said no fewer than 34 times that he was committed to the Uluru Statement “in full”. And as the activists have been saying for years, that means Voice, Treaty, Truth. Yet the PM now insists that treaty has nothing to do with the Voice, or even the Uluru Statement. On Radio National just a few weeks ago, he was pushed on whether his government is prepared to negotiate treaties between the Commonwealth and so called First Nations. He did everything he could to dodge giving a straight answer before finally making the extraordinary statement that: “it doesn’t even say that in the Uluru Statement from the Heart … It doesn’t speak about the Commonwealth negotiating treaties”.

Even though the full Uluru Statement, that the PM still insists that he hasn’t read, says that Makarrata, or treaty making is “the culmination of our agenda”. And the PM’s own website says (or did as of Saturday) that a Makarrata commission, or a treaty commission, is a “priority” for the Albanese government. Indeed, the government has already committed $6m in the budget to set it up. This commitment, the PM’s own website says, “sits alongside Labor’s commitment to a referendum on a constitutionally enshrined Voice”.

Peta Credlin says Anthony Albanese has not been up front with the Australian public regarding the Voice. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Max Mason-Hubers

His own website says that the job of the Makarrata commission is “overseeing processes for Treaty-making and Truth-telling”. How can the PM deny that he wants a treaty between the Commonwealth and Aboriginal people when his own website says that’s exactly what he wants?

But the deception doesn’t stop there. A couple of nights ago on air, I showed an exclusive leaked text exchange between a Yes23 volunteer who was calling undecided voters trying to win them over, and Yes23 campaign HQ. In the exchange, the volunteer asked what the pitch should be if treaties were a sticking point with voters. And the response from the official Yes23 campaigner Jonah said: “If they are pro treaty, you can say that the Uluru Statement from the Heart asked for this before treaty. If they are anti-treaty, you can say it’s a purely advisory body.”

Any wonder the PM almost exclusively refers to the Voice now as simply “an advisory body” ever since talk of a treaty started to tank the “Yes” vote in the polls. Or that the left threw the kitchen sink at me when I revealed the truth behind the Uluru Statement’s radical agenda – all 26 pages – rather than the PM’s pretence it was nothing more than a mild, one-page poster.

We know that the now-PM often couldn’t answer even basic questions about economic statistics or about Labor’s own border protection policies in last year’s election campaign. Combine that with his slippery to the point of being disingenuous answers on the Voice, and there’s a real pattern of underperformance here. Anthony Albanese comes across as “hail fellow well met”, everyone’s mate, but it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that he’s simply not doing the work that the job of prime minister demands. Or perhaps he’s just not up to it?

But worst of all, from his obfuscations and denials of what’s plainly there on the record, of what’s in the documents, on his website, or on the public record in statements from activists in the past, it’s almost inescapable that the Prime Minister is more than happy to be loose with the truth. And that’s the real worry.

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