Andrew Bolt: Is Anthony Albanese our prime minister or merely a puppet?

The theory that Australians voted against this Voice because they were tricked by misinformation is so sweet to Anthony Albanese that he’s toying now with censorship. Has he learnt nothing?

Is Prime Minister Anthony Albanese deaf, or just a puppet? He still can’t accept Australians shouted “no!” to his agenda of racial division.

And I do mean shouted: 61 per cent voted no on Saturday.

Yes, Albanese has admitted his Aboriginal-only Voice is now dead, but he still won’t promise to now scrap another key demand of the Uluru Statement he promised to implement “in full”.

He refused this week to also scrap the Makarrata Commission he’s already spent nearly $500,000 to set up, to negotiate a treaty between Aborigines and the rest of us, to argue over sovereignty and reparations.

Isn’t that exactly the agenda that Australians revolted against? No to dividing us by race?

Yet Albanese told parliament on Tuesday he cannot think of giving up the Makarrata Commission until he’d asked some unnamed Aboriginal activists what to do.

But, alas, they were off on their “week of silence” and he’d come back to us about his plans when he’d consulted them after that.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese must wake up and be a leader, not a puppet. Picture: David Beach

Good god, has this man learnt nothing? These faceless leaders pulling his strings seem to be exactly the same people who urged Albanese not to compromise on their radical model of the Voice, even though their legal advisers warned voters would never buy it.

Now he’s waiting for these race-mongers to give him his next orders?

Wake up, man: you are the Prime Minister, not a puppet. You give orders, don’t take them – and certainly not from an unelected bunch of activists whose names are kept secret from the rest of us.

This is not leadership. It’s certainly not democracy.

But Albanese seems to let them write his lines, without him checking if they’re true or in the public interest.

There’s nothing to fear, he assured parliament: Makarrata “is simply a ­Yolngu word for coming together after struggle”.

No, not literally. Merrikiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, principal of Arnhem Land’s Yirrkala School, says: “Makarrata literally means a spear penetrating, usually the thigh, of a person that has done wrong ... so that they cannot hunt anymore, that they cannot walk properly, that they cannot run properly; to maim them, to settle them down.”

Channel 10’s Waleed Aly, for instance, declared if you had ‘high levels of tertiary education, bachelor or post, you were at the very top end of the Yes vote’.

That actually seems the true agenda of Albanese’s Makarrata: to maim our pride in our past and our present, and punish non-Aborigines for the alleged sins of their “race” so they cannot walk properly.

But there’s something else, just as dangerous, that Albanese is considering after his humiliation. Like: censorship.

That’s because he and fellow-travelling journalists can’t accept Australians were smart to reject the Voice. They’d rather believe Australians are so stupid, that they got all confused by “misinformation”.

Channel 10’s Waleed Aly, for instance, declared if you had “high levels of tertiary education, bachelor or post, you were at the very top end of the ‘Yes’ vote.”

But people with the “lowest levels of socio-education” struggled with this “idea that’s quite abstract and complicated”, responding instead with “instinct”. And voting no.

Actually, a plan to divide us by race isn’t abstract or complicated, but the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas, a Voice supporter, ran the same smug line.

Albanese and he and fellow-travelling journalists can’t accept that Australians were smart to reject the Voice. Picture: Martin Ollman

Seats which voted Yes was “where you find educated people who know”: “if you’ve got a bachelor’s degree, chances are you know something about government, our structures, you take an interest in the kind of way things happen”. But the uneducated voted no.

Actually, the vote map tells an alternative story. The Yes vote was strongest in rich urban areas with very few poor Aborigines – Sydney’s north shore, for instance, and Canberra. The No vote was strong where there were many poor Aborigines, such as the Northern Territory, where voters could see the problems and work out if the Voice would really fix them.

Or consider this: people on the outer – geographically and financially – voted No, because didn’t want to slip further down the queue for help, just because they’re of the wrong race.

But this “d---heads theory” that Australians voted against this Voice because they were tricked by misinformation is so sweet to Albanese that he’s toying now with censorship.

Independent MP Zali Steggall on Tuesday asked him to pass laws to “protect’ voters from deceptive TV ads, and Albanese said he “certainly” understood her concern about “misinformation”.

And what luck: Albanese already has a bill to give his Australian Communications and Media Authority the power to ban internet posts it considers “misinformation”.

We sure know what the Prime Minister calls “misinformation”: everything that made stupid Australians vote No. This time.