Let’s start with this prediction. If the Voice referendum gets up, gets a ‘yes’, then Peter Dutton is finished. The base will demand he go and rightfully so. Now I don’t think the referendum can succeed unless Dutton comes out in favour. But should he do that (or even if I’m wrong and it gets up after very lukewarm and half-hearted opposition from Dutton) then the Liberal party will be in the wilderness for a decade or more. They may even be finished as a party. Be honest. Does any reader really have any idea what today’s Liberal party stands for? They were in office for nine years and delivered virtually nothing other than stopping the boats, and that was done at the start of their tenure before Mr Abbott was defenestrated. I couldn’t help but chuckle when Mr Dutton recently complained about the ABC’s coverage up in Alice Springs. He let rip at the ABC chair Ita Buttrose. But know what? It was the former Liberal government, the one in which Mr Dutton was a leading member, that appointed Ms Buttrose to the position. They also appointed the managing director. Heck, the former Coalition government appointed the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) and all of the commissioners. These were the very same people who said not a word during the pandemic about the biggest inroads on the civil liberties of Australians in the country’s history. Nada. Nothing. Zippo. Couldn’t find a single aspect of Morrison and co.’s enabling of despotism (the weaponising and brutality of the police, the mandates, the picking which businesses could open, the locking Australians in and out of the country, the pretending the young weren’t a thousand times less at risk of dying from Covid than the elderly and then restructuring the economy accordingly to take from the poor to give to the rich and take from the young to give to the old via asset inflation and massive, massive debt and spending, the list goes on) which warranted even a passing mention. Who can take seriously any of their sanctimonious bleatings about comparatively minute and supposed rights infringements now? Or for that matter the claims of any of the myriad self-styled ‘human rights brigade’? Last year the President of the AHRC was invited to give one of the talks at the Samuel Griffiths Society conference and it amounted to her account of her own personal voyage of self-discovery towards realising she was in favour of a bill of rights for Australia. I kid you not. I even asked her a question at the event about the AHRC’s total abdication of any and all concern about the huge erosion of Australians’ civil liberties during Covid and got basically only evasion and self-justification in reply. Douglas Murray in Britain likes to point out that conservative parties across the Anglosphere are congenitally unable to appoint any of their core supporters – those who hold actual right-of-centre beliefs, including about the importance of individual freedom – to anything.  And when one or two such people surprisingly slip through and make it onto some body or other then at the first attack from the political left these people are left dangling on their own – which is why Murray suggests so few are even willing to put their names forward given conservative parties have the backbones of amoebas (amoebae for the language purists).

At any rate, I will never vote for the Libs again if they don’t come out hard against this Voice. Let’s be blunt. It’s hard enough already to vote for any of these Liberal MPs who were part of the Covid thuggery and authoritarianism. I hold in particular disdain those MPs – they know who they are – who made such a big deal of their commitments to freedom, free speech, the competition of ideas and scepticism of Big Government when going for pre-selection but sat silently without saying a peep during the whole pandemic thuggery. Heck, they voted to censure a colleague with a dissenting set of views (views that turned out to be correct).

Let me turn now to an observation. This Albanese government plays fast and loose with established legal conventions more than any I have seen. They play to win. Start with last July’s decision to end the appeal in the Montgomery case. This was a case that had reached the High Court of Australia; it had, in fact, been argued before the High Court justices and their decision was pending when Albanese won the election. The decision was expected soon thereafter when the new Albanese government just announced out of the blue that they were pulling the government’s appeal. Remember, this Montgomery case had been brought on the explicit basis that the 2020 Love case had been wrongly decided and that the High Court needed to reverse itself. (You’ll recall that in Love the majority judges – all but one Coalition appointees – decided on the basis of such bizarre notions as ‘otherness’ that non-citizens claiming Aboriginal links could not be deported if those links passed some amorphous tests.) Love is in the running for the worst-reasoned decision in our country’s history. But a reversal in Montgomery would have been bad politics for Labor. So just when a decision was imminent – and I’m betting the High Court was going to reverse – Labor pulled the plug on the case. By way of context, I asked top legal friends in Canada, the US, Britain and New Zealand and none could think of anything comparable happening there ever.

Then there’s the way this Labor government simply handed Brittany Higgins millions of dollars. This pay-out appeased some of Labor’s core supporters but came at a huge cost to taxpayers. And on the evidence at trial it was a disgrace that this pay-out was made.

Governments quite often ‘run dead’ or bring about desired changes through the courts and elsewhere by not really trying all that hard in a court case or by settling a case when it’s advantageous to make a political point. But this settlement took cynicism to a whole new level.

What you can at least say for Labor is that it plays to win. Albanese ran on a small target basis and then he just proceeded to do all sorts of things he could not have advertised before the election. The Liberals, by contrast, stand for nothing and in office do nothing. Well, that’s not wholly true. During the pandemic they delivered the most big spending, big government, anti-freedom, anti-civil liberties ‘Labor’ government since the second world war.

Coming out against the Voice would be a good first step back towards redemption.