Peter Dutton has made the right call. As people of goodwill, most Australians want to do the right thing. Instead of offering us the right choice, however, the proposed Voice amounts to an abuse of public goodwill. The refusal to provide details is in contempt of citizens’ right to informed consent in return for popular legitimacy for a constitutional change. Constitutional entrenchment would be racist in design, implementation and consequences. Co-governance will exacerbate challenges of making decisions in the national interest in timely fashion, with activist judges able to thwart the will of parliament. Dutton explained the decision to promote the ‘No’ case: ‘It should be very clear to Australians by now that the Prime Minister is dividing the country, and the Liberal party seeks to unite the country’. The personal invective from Noel Pearson portraying Dutton as an ‘undertaker, preparing the grave to bury Uluru’ follows his earlier disrespectful smearing of Jacinta Price for being ‘caught in a… celebrity vortex’ involving ‘right-wing people’ whose strategy is ‘to find a Blakfulla to punch down on other Blakfullas’.

The Albanese model is neither symbolic nor modest but powerful and open-endedly expansive. Once embedded in the constitution, it will be impossible to remove, no matter how deleterious it proves and how much damage it causes, without closing the outcomes gap. Going by experience elsewhere, power, resources and influence will be concentrated in a parasitical elite while doing little to deliver practical outcomes where most needed in the remote communities. The open appeal to the feel good factor notwithstanding, the divisions and bitterness it has already generated is a small foretaste of the rancour we can expect once the poison of race-based preferential status has been injected into the constitutional heart of the Australian body politic. It will create a massive new bureaucracy with a powerful vested interest to keep feeding the grievance and victimhood narrative as the most effective means of growing its size, budget, powers and tentacles into every sector of Australian life. A constitutional Voice would also, in a final coup de grâce, entrench inequality of citizenship. As someone who has been critical of the Modi government’s efforts to impose unequal citizenship on India’s Muslims, it’s surreal to have to engage in the same fight now in Australia. Rather than Dutton reducing the Voice to a whisper, it’s Albanese who risks turning it into tears.

Dutton is right to warn that the Voice would risk being disruptive to Australia’s stable governance model. Greg Craven’s mockery may be cruel but is not necessarily inaccurate: ‘the Prime Minister has two problems selling the referendum. He cannot understand any question. He cannot give any answers’. The scope of the Voice seems to be as fluid as that of gender these days, depending on who is asked, when, where and by whom. It’s hardly to be wondered at then that there is widespread confusion on the public understandings – I use the plural advisedly – of the Voice. Albanese has tried to downsize the scope of the Voice and talk up the primacy of parliament to allay pubic fears about its potential to jam the workings of government. But Megan Davis, a senior member of the referendum working group, insists that parliament will not be able to ‘shut the Voice up’. It will speak to all parts of the government: cabinet, ministers, statutory offices and agencies like the Reserve Bank, Centrelink and the Great Barrier Marine Park Authority, and public servants.

With a trigger warning to those afflicted with Tony Abbott Derangement Syndrome, the former PM has proposed a pragmatic, sensible and simple solution. Just insert a new clause (shown in bold) in the very first sentence of the Preamble: ‘… have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth with an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation and an immigrant character under the Crown’. On the last, Asian-Australian voices are conspicuously missing in the public discourse.

A legislated choir of local and regional voices will preserve the vital distinction between dignified and symbolic recognition in the Constitution and the efficient functions of government. This would avoid many of the most vexed problems, lessen the chances of judicial activism and be open to amendment and repeal by future parliaments. It also gives an opportunity to rationalise the multiplicity of existing advisory bodies, simplify, increase transparency and accountability, and require measurable indicators of progress.

Dutton can also win the long-term politics. He should make the point, clearly and eloquently, that the symbolic need is satisfied by the constitutional recognition offer. Then explain repeatedly, with frontbenchers singing from the same hymn sheet, that the PM has been demanding bipartisan support for a partisan policy proposal. Absent bipartisan support, the proposal will be divisive yet most likely fail, a high cost for no good outcome. Instead, Labor can agree to a simple change in the preamble that satisfies the symbolic need and increases the chances of passing. He should offer to work with the ALP in good faith to design a model for a legislated voice that all parties can live with, even if they are not equally happy with it. If Albanese refuses, he will own the failure of a No vote.

On the culture wars as much as on the Voice, climate and energy, Dutton needs to clearly differentiate Liberals from Labor in the marketplace of ideas and not be shy of a fight: no contest of ideas was ever won by running away from the fight. He must find a way to cleanse and wash the party of the stain and smell from John Pesutto’s train wreck over Moira Deeming. Protecting women’s rights to dignity, safety and fairness is a huge issue that gives Dutton an opportunity to shift the culture war onto a conservative battleground; possibly the defining culture war of this generation, one that intimately affects the majority of the population and is also an opening to court Asian-Australians. He should demand Albanese support the rights of women to speak on women’s issues without being assaulted and abused. He should also commit to exploring nuclear power and keeping coal and gas going until we have reliable baseload and dispatchable power in a national grid. Dutton could seize the initiative to lead the debate and in the process reaffirm core principles and values about individual responsibility, importance of family, priority of jobs over virtue-signalling destruction of our industrial base and manufacturing capacity, etc. The Liberal party should stand up for an Australia in which no group defined by race, religion or gender has special rights and privileges not available to all other groups. Instead, all groups are equal under the constitution. That is a high-principle hill worth dying on.