Labor’s Voice – going down together

Appraising Peter Dutton’s performance here a fortnight ago (Return to the Fray, 7/01/23), I urged him to cut through the delaying tactics of his spokesman on the so-called Voice to Parliament, the member for Berowra, Julian Leeser. Instead of allowing Leeser to go on producing lists of questions on details of how any such Voice would be constituted and operate, Dutton should disregard such stuff as being irrelevant to the central issue. Should we contemplate inserting a race-based amendment into our constitution, thereby creating two categories of Australians, Aboriginal ones and non-Aboriginal ones? Dutton’s answer should be obvious. ‘So come on, Peter. Open your shoulders and heave that Voice over the square-leg boundary.’

By extraordinary coincidence, those words had barely entered the production process when a remarkable article, by Professor Emeritus Greg Craven, appeared in the Australian of January 2 under the headline, ‘Silence on details is already dooming the Voice to failure’. Craven is a director of a pro-Voice organisation (Uphold and Recognise), which has apparently been commissioning private polling to gauge public feeling towards the Voice. He is also a member of the government’s constitutional experts’ group, so his sympathies are clear.

To digress for a moment, I should say that Craven is well known to me, though it is many years since we last spoke. When I was, in effect, running The Samuel Griffith Society, I invited him to deliver papers to its conferences on no less than seven occasions. All were excellent, but I particularly remember those scarifying the performance of the Australian judiciary (notably the High Court), predicting also that the ‘progressivist’ tide then mounting in most of our university law schools would steadily worsen that situation. How right he was. Those papers are all available on the Society’s website at samuelgriffith.org, where they still make enjoyable reading. Indeed, since it would be the High Court that would have the last say on all matters pertaining to the Voice were it to be constitutionally entrenched, they remain highly relevant to the current discussion.

To return to my muttons, recall that last week’s article concluded that an outright rejection of the voice by Dutton would produce a ‘roar of approval from the crowd … little short of deafening’. That opinion, it must be admitted, was based not on polling figures, but simply on my faith in the good judgment of an Australian electorate that has always been, and remains, essentially conservative.

The first remarkable aspect of Craven’s article (apart from its huge size – about 1350 words!) is that it supplies a plethora of polling detail fully supportive of that view. He begins by saying that: ‘The Indigenous Voice has entered the slow, long death dive of Australian referendums’, from which ‘unless it cools out, it will crash and burn on polling day’. Statistically, ‘Recent polls show support for the Voice collapsing’.

Just what do these polls show? Consider the following:

• ‘A few months ago, boosters were trumpeting figures of 75 or even 80 per cent approval … Now support is down to about 50 per cent’.
• The other 50 per cent ‘is evenly divided between hard Nos and Undecideds’.
• Most of those Undecideds will end up ‘voting against the Voice’.
• Also, ‘about a third of the Yes vote is a “present inclination” rather than a firm vote’.

Importantly, Craven’s polls show support for the Voice ‘overwhelmingly comes from Labor voters and other progressives’. By contrast (Peter Dutton, please note), ‘support from conservatives is miserably thin’ – and coming, I suspect, from those coalition voters who aren’t really ‘conservatives’ in any case. Moreover, as Craven hammers home, even Voice supporters are strongly demanding more information about details: ‘Only half of those supporting… think they have enough information to vote’. Undecided voters go even further, ‘overwhelmingly demanding more information’. This gets us to the nub of Anthony Albanese’s problem.

The Prime Minister has recently uttered two strangely inconsistent opinions. On the one hand he has said that public support for the Voice is growing strongly, leaving us to assume that, unless he is lying, this must be what the government’s own polling is showing. (Craven’s article fires a broadside below the waterline of his credibility on that.) Yet why, on the other hand, if he truly believed that, has he sought to disassociate himself personally, and the Labor Party, from ‘ownership’ of the Voice? ‘It’s not my Voice, or Labor’s Voice – it’s the people’s Voice’. As Alice said, ‘Curiouser and curiouser’.

The only way I can make sense of all this disparate evidence is to assume the Prime Minister knows perfectly well that what he is saying about growing support for the Voice is untrue, but hopes that by saying it he may help it come true; yet fearing, at the same time, that it won’t, he is laying the foundation for future statements regretting the referendum’s failure. ‘Not me, m’Lud; it woz the people wot failed, not me’.

To peg down Albanese’s dilemma even more firmly, Craven points out that the only way he could hope to rally support would be by yielding to demands to provide more details about the structure and shape of the Voice. But this is precisely what Albanese is not prepared to do. As he (and others) have conceded, the more details are given, the fewer votes will be received.

To conclude: Anthony Albanese is now in a log jam of his own making. He can either proceed with the referendum, and almost certainly see it lost; or he can backflip, call it off, and suffer the fury of all its ‘progressive’ supporters. Either way, all his protestations about it not being his, or Labor’s, proposal will stand for nothing. Both the Voice and Labor, I’m suggesting, will go down together.