Why Peter Dutton might have wrecker’s remorse

Peter Dutton might just be experiencing a form of wrecker’s remorse. How else can voters make sense of his campaign this week for a second referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the Constitution while he undermines the referendum to be held on October 14 to give them a Voice to parliament?

Perhaps the opposition leader has allowed himself to think ahead to what the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians might look like if the Voice fails. What happens when the first welcome to country is given at an event after the referendum? If Dutton is in the audience, will he feel the room divided by his presence? If he is at the podium, will he acknowledge Indigenous leaders past, present and emerging, as he did for the opening of the federal parliament last year?

Illustration: Simon Letch. Credit:

Or was he was just spooked this week by the You’re the Voice ad from The Uluru Dialogue, which has surprised the official Yes campaign and many in Anthony Albanese’s government for its clarity of passion, and generosity of spirit.

Either way, the awkward attempt to deliver a positive message with a second referendum suggests Dutton understands that Australia will change in some fundamental way on October 15 if the vote is no.

He would not be alone in wondering how Australians would react to the defeat of the Voice. How do the AFL and NRL, for example, handle their respective Indigenous rounds next season and beyond? Both are supporters of the Voice, but are unwilling to actively campaign for it during their current finals series.

Will Indigenous players want to be “celebrated” again by codes that refused to take the field on their behalf before the referendum? Will former Essendon champion Michael Long – who is recreating his long walk to Canberra to speak to John Howard in 2004, this time to promote the Voice – want to join fans on the walk to the MCG for the Dreamtime game in his honour between his Bombers and the Richmond Tigers in 2024? Or will that walk be repurposed as a protest?

The next generation of Indigenous leaders will be absorbing the lessons of the past two decades. Will they subject themselves to the humiliation of trying to work within a system that couldn’t secure the change to the Constitution which, according to published polls, more than 80 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people want?

And what will the rest of the world say about us? If we have learnt anything these past few years, it is that Australia no longer enjoys the assumption of innocence in global opinion. Recall the pile-on of international coverage that Scott Morrison received during the Black Summer fires of 2019-20, and how the detention and deportation of Novak Djokovic before the Australian Open of 2022 shone a light on our treatment of refugees.

A no vote would revive both the colonial ghost of dispossession, and the federation ghost of the White Australia policy. Where the 1967 referendum to count Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the census and permit the Commonwealth to make laws on their behalf was seen internationally as a sign of Australian maturity, a no vote would be read in the reverse, a retreat from diversity – our version of Brexit or Trumpism.

Of course, Dutton might not care about any of these things, and just want to confuse people again, comfortable in the knowledge that any day that is wasted talking about something other than the proposal before the Australian people is a winning day for his side of politics.

But surely he understands the electoral maths? Referendums are easier to defeat than governments, and there are almost no precedents for a successful No campaigner from opposition bringing down an incumbent at the next federal election, with the exception of Robert Menzies, who opposed the 1948 Rents and Prices Referendum and won government in the same year.

Dutton has a second warning from history in the result of the 1999 referendum on the republic. Seventeen Liberal electorates across the five mainland state capitals voted yes back then, including Howard’s own Bennelong, in Sydney’s north-west. Twelve of those 17 seats have since changed colour, to teal, Labor red and Green. They won’t come back to the Liberal fold if Dutton is blamed for killing the Voice. How does the former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg, for instance, win back Kooyong, in Melbourne’s inner east, as the candidate for the party of No in an electorate where the Yes vote for the Voice is expected to match, or even exceed, the 1999 republican vote of 64.2 per cent?

The Coalition requires a net gain of 20 seats to form majority government. The outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne do not offer an alternative path to power to its former high-income heartland when migrant communities are among the strongest supporters of the Voice.

It must be said at this point that Dutton would be a figure of ridicule if our system still ran on the reform energy of the 80s and 90s, when major party leaders were expected to be across policy detail, and the press gallery still had institutional power. Howard saw his first election campaign as opposition leader in 1987 crumble because of a simple double-counting error in his tax policy. John Hewson is reminded to this day that he couldn’t explain in 1993 whether his GST would apply to a birthday cake, or just the candles.

Dutton is plainly trying to have it both ways, and without shame – decrying the cost of the referendum before the Australian people and arguing that the Voice represents a threat to our democracy, while offering another referendum on a question that Indigenous leaders have already rejected, as well as a legislated Voice of his own making.

But he is operating in a political environment that rewards those who make the most noise. A no, if nothing else, would embolden a Dutton-led opposition to campaign against any social or economic reform the Albanese government might pursue in the remainder of this term, or at the next federal election.

When the John Farnham ad was first screened to heavyweights in the Yes camp, some wondered whether the inclusion of Howard’s gun law reform was a mistake. But it provided the perfect juxtaposition with today’s generation of leaders who divide between those like Dutton who are prepared to say anything to stop change, and those like Albanese whose risk aversion leaves them saying nothing much in the end to inspire change.

There remains a narrow path to victory for the Voice, and it is in the central idea behind the ad that Australians will feel better about themselves if the answer is yes. Unstated in that ad is, if the answer is no, then we may never recover the spirit of reform that defined us a people when Farnham was in his glorious mulleted pomp in the 80s.

George Megalogenis is a journalist, political commentator and author.

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