Andrew Bolt: Why Liberal Party’s Voice campaign must change

Julian Leeser quitting the shadow frontbench should have made it clear as a car crash to the Liberals that the style of their campaign against the Voice to Parliament must change.

The Liberals are too kind to Julian Leeser. I haven’t heard one call him what he is – a quitter, a wrecker and a hypocrite.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton instead praised Leeser for his “great character” and “strength” even though he’d just suicide-bombed the Liberal’s campaign against Labor’s Voice to Parliament.

Yes, Leeser had just proved even he didn’t believe in the nitpicking campaign he’d foisted on the Liberals as their shadow attorney general and their Voice spokesman, a job I warned last year should have gone to Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

Just last week Leeser told the National Press Club that he and the Liberals were opposing the Voice – a kind of Aboriginal-only advisory parliament, written into our constitution – because the details were missing.

He complained the Voice could lecture every federal public servant and institution, and they could be forced to listen. It could be too powerful. The wording was all wrong. Details, details, details.

All true, yet this week Leeser proved the details really didn’t count. Not to him.

On Tuesday, he said he was quitting his frontbench positions so that he could – as a backbencher – campaign for the Voice he last week said we should oppose.

Julian Leeser is a quitter, a wrecker and a hypocrite. Picture: Ben Symons

“I believe the time for the Voice has come,” he declared. Sure, he still didn’t like the exact model Labor was putting up, but he’d still vote for it: “l support the referendum being put this year.”

But the Liberals’ problem is not that Leeser is a hypocrite. It’s that he designed a campaign against the Voice he’s just proved could never work, because it sure didn’t convince him.

It should now be as clear as a car crash to the Liberals that their Leeser-style campaign against the Voice must change.

Until today, they’ve refused to fight the Voice on principle, which is bizarre.

The Liberal Party was actually formed to make sure we were all judged as individuals and not members of some tribe, divided by class, race, ethnicity, gender or religion.

Yet the Liberals are now so scared or compromised they’ve refused to say the Voice is immoral. They’ve refused to say it’s fundamentally wrong to divide Australians by race in our constitution and give one race extra political rights for centuries to come.

I’ve had Peter Dutton on my Sky News show and asked him repeatedly to say he was against the Voice on heartfelt principle.

He wouldn’t, in part because he was still trying to keep Liberal Leftists like Leeser on the team.

How was Leeser ever going to admit the Voice he’d worked for over many years was racist at heart?

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton instead praised Leeser for his ‘great character” and “strength’. Picture: Martin Ollman

That’s why the Liberals argued just on the details instead, but Leeser has shown that argument won’t fly. The vibe trumps details.

One part of that vibe thing is that Leeser has gone overnight from a fascist to a saint.

Only last week, ahead of Passover, the vicious Noel Pearson, a key Voice activist, vilified the Jewish Leeser as akin to a Jew-hunting Nazi, asking if Leeser wanted Aborigines to wear a “tattoo” or have their clothes “adorned with some kind of badge identifying us as Aboriginal”.

But within minutes of Leeser quitting the Liberals’ campaign he found himself praised as a great soul by the Left.

Teal independents greeted him as a man of conscience; Labor’s Indigenous Australians Minister, Linda Burney, hailed him for his “principles”.

So for Leeser the war is over. He is now safe.

But for the Liberals still wanting to save Australia, the lesson must be learned: you cannot oppose a moral crusade just by arguing over details. You must also offer a competing and compelling moral vision.

So say it. Say you’re against the Voice because Australians should be treated as equals, not divided forever by race.

Say you’re against the Voice because Australia is a famously egalitarian society, a land of mateship, and must never become a land of tribes where our race determines our rights.

The Liberals can’t win this just by appealing to people’s brains. Time to engage their hearts.

It’s time, in fact, to replace Leeser as Voice spokesman with Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the brilliant Celtic-Warlpiri Senator who’s electrified the Voice debate by opposing Labor’s plan as racist.

She is against a Voice that will divide even her own family by race. In her person and in her arguments she is the advocate Leeser could never be, and – unlike him – she will never surrender to this new apartheid.