Andrew Bolt: The Voice is dead and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese helped kill it

Just admitting the Voice is dead won’t save Labor, Albanese must change — he must realise his own arrogance and laziness helped kill it.

Nothing will now save Labor’s Voice from a massive defeat, and the Albanese Government must now save itself from dying with it.

For a start, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s leadership is finished unless he starts – today – to think with his brain and not his heart. To stop preaching and start listening.

Prime Minister, your ways no longer work. Crying when you announced in March the wording of the Voice question was a warning to voters, not an appeal.

Shouting passionately at us to “vote for an idea” when you last month announced the referendum date just confirmed your idea was all dream and no details.

Gleefully quoting the lyrics of John Farnham’s You’re the Voice – now the Yes campaign’s anthem – to claim Aborigines would no longer “live in fear”, just reminded us how much you rely on emotive exaggeration to push your plan.

Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is a man of passions, not plans. Picture: Tauseef Mustafa

It’s over. Albanese started the year with almost two-thirds support in polls for his Voice, a kind of Aboriginal-only advisory parliament, cemented into our constitution,

But every poll shows the more that Australians heard about it, the more they hated it – less for its lack of detail than because it will divide Australians by race.

Newspoll last week has Yes vote cratering to 38 per cent, with the No vote at 53 per cent and undecided at 9.

The Redbridge poll last weekend was even worse for the Yes campaign. It forced the undecided to decide, and found the Yes vote was 39 per cent and the No at 61 per cent.

So the Voice is stone dead, and there’s nothing left in Albanese’s tank except tainted money from the corporates to buy more of the ads few believe and many now resent.

In fact, voters now hate such nagging and bullying so much that the pro-Voice AFL decided not to push the scheme at its grand final.

But just admitting the Voice is dead won’t save Labor. Albanese must change. He must realise his own arrogance and laziness helped kill it.

Those same failings even threaten to cripple the economy. Albanese’s ambitious rivals are jostling for attention by designing devastating policies on global warming, industrial relations and the environment, while Albanese jets around the world, not paying attention to the details that turn a dream into a disaster.

Iconic anthem You’re the Voice has been employed to help the Yes campaign. Picture: Supplied

Incredibly, he last week admitted he didn’t even know his Transport Minister had blocked extra Qatar flights and kept airfares high to the benefit of Qantas, until Virgin’s boss rang him days later when he was overseas.

With the Voice, Albanese’s performance has been astonishing.

He didn’t compromise with the Liberals. He instead let an advisory panel stacked with Aboriginal radicals, former Marxists and race baiters push on him a model for the Voice that went for broke – a say over every issue that this Voice of 24 selected activists would choose, plus the power to “make representations” to every federal public servant, from the Reserve Bank to the army, before a decision was made.

And all these powers would be in the constitution, so unelected judges – not our politicians – had the final say on how this would work.

When asked for details on how it would all work, Albanese just asked for the voters’ trust. And to sell the Voice, he signed up the elites – corporate leaders, the big sporting codes, union bosses and celebrities – even American basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal and wildly loathed Qantas boss Alan Joyce – triggering a furious revolt from grassroots Australians.

Mr Albanese signed up elites like outgoing Qantas boss Alan Joyce to help sell the Voice. Picture: Getty Images

So here’s what will happen come referendum day. Albanese will be savaged for forcing on us a hopelessly racist idea that’s just incited more division, anger and resentment.

Many voters will blame him for wasting $360 million and the best part of the past year on his crazy crusade, when Australians are struggling to even pay for their petrol, groceries, mortgages and power bills.

Aboriginal activist who designed this toxic Voice, like Noel Pearson, will blame Albanese instead for not selling their poison.

And Voters will question Albanese’s other crusade – on global warming. They’ll see the same weaknesses in their Prime Minister: the emotive dreaming of a green future where your power bills fall, while in this real world your bills rise, your power starts to fail and every green scheme blows out.

Albanese will then be typecast as a man dazzled by his dreams, too lazy and bored with details to figure how to make them work. A man of passions, not plans.

In short, worse than Whitlam. Watch the polls sink for him, too.