Wooley: It’s hard to hear how the ‘No’ vote has taken up poll position

As the countdown continues to the Voice to Parliament referendum, it doesn’t sound good for the ‘Yes’ campaign, writes Charles Wooley.

With less than six weeks to go, the most recent Newspoll showed that support for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament has fallen to 38 per cent, while the No vote has risen to 53 per cent.

Now we must remember it is true, as Malcolm Fraser of the Dismissal fame (or infamy, depending on your politics) used to say when the portents looked ominous: “There’s only one poll that counts.”

And that’s still the case. We won’t know for sure until Australia votes on October 14. But there are 10 independent polling companies on the job, and although it is hard to get a suitably large sample of voters from all of the six states, the indications are not good for the Yes case. Across all the pollsters, support for the Voice has fallen below a level that at this stage would ensure success.

Generalising across the age groups, the older Australians are, the less inclined they are to vote Yes. The same mob who voted down the republic in 1999, now older and grumpier, are going to do the same thing to the Voice a quarter of a century later.

And you can bet that when Albo’s planned legacy (in reality a somewhat ill-planned thought-bubble) fails, Labor will not have the stomach to reintroduce the long overdue idea of an Australian republic.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks at the Yes campaign launch on August 30, 2023 in Adelaide. Picture: James Elsby/Getty Images

Had Albo gone for another republic referendum he might have fulfilled Australia’s destiny for all our citizens, no matter when they arrived here and no matter their ethnicity.

It would have drawn a line under our colonial history, at the same time as providing a reset to our divided political culture.

No need to pull down the statues of our former colonial masters. Leave them standing to remind us that it only took 235 years to finally get it right.

It would also have given us an uncontested national day.

Neither Australia Day nor Invasion Day.

Like the US whose missiles will be soon protecting our democracy, we would have Independence Day.

And you will note that no matter how discordant American politics are today, everyone celebrates Independence Day.

With the chaotic state of the English monarchy after the departure of the universally respected Elizabeth II, it is clear that what looks like the cast of a comic soap-opera now have the run of the palace.

Yes, they are amusing and provide the most salacious storylines. What will Andrew and Harry do in the next episode?

We can hardly wait.

Warren Brown’s cartoon on the Voice which was originally published in the Daily Telegraph July 19, 2023.

But come on Australia. It isn’t funny that the wacky Windsors of Buckingham Palace, 16,971km from Canberra, are our titular masters and provide Australia with a head of state.

Not funny, but it is a joke. A bad one.

You would have to have a very low opinion of the character and intelligence of this nation to think that having an English monarch is a reasonable state of Australian affairs.

A majority of state and federal politicians from all shades of politics are nominally republican in temper. The last referendum failed on a matter of division over the method of selecting the president.

We could have settled on a simple model whereby nothing changes, and the governor-general takes on the role.

But no, we over-complicated things, just like we are doing now with the Voice.

Witness the absurd argument recently over a tick or a cross and which is admissible, and which is not.

I was reminded of Jonathan Swift’s satire in Gulliver’s Travels where two nations went to war over which end of the boiled egg should be opened.

Over the past few weeks as support has declined, Albo has consistently failed to make a clear case for what should simply be a good cause. From day one he has failed to give us any detail.

And in that failure he has fed the worst aspect of the No case.

They have come up with the most mean-spirited and disingenuous slogan I have ever heard in Australian politics: “If you don’t know, vote No.”

Liberal Party Opposition leader Peter Dutton is a big advocate for the No vote. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

How contemptuous is their estimation of the intelligence of the Australian electorate?

On the other hand, perhaps how accurate, given the polling this week.

A Hawke or perhaps even a Keating might have sold the Voice.

Albo’s problem is that he is a charisma vacuum and a bloody awful public speaker.

I agree with him that voting Yes is the “decent thing” to do.

But there must be more to it, PM. You can’t just keep shouting “sixty thousand years of kulcha”.

So, it was hard to dispute Peter Dutton’s point this week, “I don’t think he’s going to shift votes unless he gives detail.”

Dutton was having a shot at the Yes campaign’s apparent coup in securing John Farnham’s classic anthem You’re the Voice.

Farnham is a lovely bloke and a national hero, so the Opposition Leader was very careful with his words.

And most respectful of Farnham’s words as he shaped this surprisingly effective backhander: “In a sense it’s the appropriate theme song for the Yes campaign, because remember that the key line in the lyrics is, ‘You’re the voice, try to understand it’.”

Peter Dutton should have left it at that. We knew what he meant.

But bizarrely, after criticising the $450m cost of the present referendum, he declared that if it failed, he would hold another one, not for an Indigenous Voice to parliament, but to enshrine the recognition of the First Australians in the Constitution.

The sorry truth is that by then the electorate will be so dark on referendums that even free beer wouldn’t get up.

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian based journalist.