What does one say about the Julian Leesers and Greg Cravens of this Voice debate? I refer to the way they paint themselves as superior moral beings because they are going to vote Yes. And make no mistake that is precisely what they are doing. ‘For me the moral logic of the Voice flows deeply from my Catholic faith,’ says Craven. So all the millions of Catholics who’ll vote No are what, Greg? Morally blind? Stupid? Ill-informed? He goes on to claim that ‘the moral payload is inescapable’. If you set out to wallow in moral self-regard and sanctimonious blather you couldn’t do better than that. Oh, and best of all Craven describes himself as a conservative too. Well, when I first got to this country to teach law I read a few of Craven’s constitutional law writings. The man was funny. He was deeply sceptical about the pernicious effects of judicial activism. The same went for Julian Leeser when it came to any proposed bill of rights (or for him, not Craven, the proposed Republic too).

Today, neither Craven nor Leeser seems to care one hoot about the sort of judicial activism this constitutionalised Voice body will unleash on our democracy. (Ditto Chris Kenny on that point.) Every single claim Leeser made about a bill of rights or Craven made about the High Court just making up the implied freedom of political communication doctrine (both of which claims are correct in my view) applies equally to this Voice body. And they know it. Both have read the Love case. Either they’d have to recant their earlier positions or they today don’t care about judicial activism. I ask myself, ‘in what sense are Craven and Leeser actually conservatives, the former being pro-Republic, pro-Voice, insouciant about judicial activism and the latter being against s.18C repeal and also insouciant about judicial activism and neither, as far as I know, saying a word in three years against the lockdown authoritarianism that Lord Sumption rightly called the biggest inroads on our civil liberties in 300 years?’. Moral self-regard should be made of sterner stuff.

This suggests that for both these men the moral position is to ignore likely future bad consequences in favour of empty symbolism – empty in the sense that supposed good consequences in tangible terms are just not there and all we hear is vague, amorphous prattling about how this Voice will (in some never explained way) allow Aborigines ‘to live life to the fullest extent’. Really? Once in place this body will carry with it a huge bureaucracy. As the wording stands at present it will have input into every law mooted (not just ones directly aimed at Aboriginal people). Law-making will become sclerotic.  Rent-seeking is almost certain to become a feature of political life. This constitutional amendment will hand the High Court a tool it can use in known-unknown and unknown-unknown ways. It will be a body that is far more likely to diminish good outcomes for Aborigines than improve them because the activist, left class will soon take it over. (And if you want a comparison, this past weekend a well-known political commentator visiting these shores, Andrew Neil, pointed to the Scottish parliament. Since its coming into being it has built up a huge bureaucracy of massively paid hangers-on and the like; meanwhile the Scots have gone downhill against the English on just about every social statistic going – higher percentage working in the public service than anywhere else in Europe, even worse NHS results than in England, more thuggish than England during the pandemic, education results now below England’s and for the first time in history it is today harder for a poor Scot to get to university than for a poor English kid, undoing centuries of good old-fashioned Scots Presbyterian concern for education.

I point all that out, by the way, as a Scots-Canadian myself descending on both sides from generations of Calvinist Scots. (It’s an embarrassment that the land of David Hume, Adam Smith, and the better version of the Enlightenment has descended to Nicola Sturgeon and an inability to know what a woman is.)

Oh, and worst of all the Voice will undermine the core concept of equal citizenship that lies at the heart of any liberal democracy. Some will get rights others do not, and on a group-rights basis. That’s not conservative Julian!

In a democracy each of us can vote as we wish. But when people start advertising their own moral superiority you need to point out a few home truths. Likely future facts on the ground shape the morality of proposed actions. Looking inside oneself and wondering what you will tell your kids or making high-falutin’ claims about ‘moral logic’ (as if you’ve just overdosed on a bit of Immanuel Kant) does not automatically or self-evidently put you on the side of the angels, not even if you yourself proclaim that it does. Here’s something else that doesn’t obviously align with the best moral position. Both Craven and Leeser have pointed out a good few of the problems with the Albanese wording of this amendment. I believe Craven went so far as to call it ‘awful’. But both are going to vote for it anyway. That being the case, why was it moral for Leeser to accept the position as shadow minister? I mean, you can’t really negotiate can you, if in the end you’re prepared to accept what Albanese rams down your throat however many flaws you point out it has. And likewise Craven on the Expert Panel. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest negotiator to see this emasculates you in any bargaining sense. You might even say that it undermines your moral position.

I’m sick and tired of so many people on the Yes side calling those who are opposed to this Voice body ‘racists’ – people like top barrister Bret Walker and Noel Pearson who seems these days only to deal in name-calling.

But now we have to listen to self-righteous, sanctimonious pridefulness. So let me be blunt. I don’t believe the Yes side and those on the Yes side are more moral. I know for a fact (having done a doctorate in moral philosophy) that none of them could cash that argument out in a way that would get them a passing mark in an undergraduate essay.  And need I point out the obvious, that many, many Aborigines are themselves against this proposal?

Here’s the thing. No campaigners like me are saying that this amendment will deliver a racist constitution, not that Yes people are racists. That it will undermine equal citizenship in a way you can’t find anywhere else in the democratic world. That it will subvert and sabotage the fourth-oldest written constitution in the democratic world. That’s not an overly moral prospect.