Last Saturday I watched as a sandy-haired young supporter of the ‘Yes’ case earnestly endeavoured to give his leaflets away to shoppers entering the Top Ryde shopping complex.

When he attempted to give a mother shepherding her toddlers a leaflet, the woman did not pause, but instead muttered ‘no’ in Mandarin as she scurried away to the entrance.

Mandarin and Arabic are the two most commonly spoken languages at Top Ryde, New South Wales. It wasn’t surprising that our young Voice supporter wasn’t having much luck handing out his wares.

It is now becoming more and more apparent that Anthony Albanese and his government have become hostage to the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy, also termed by author Richard Dawkins as the ‘Concorde Fallacy’.

The Concorde was a supersonic airline and revered project of the British and French governments working in tandem at huge cost to taxpayers on both sides of the English Channel.

These governments suspected, long before the Concorde actually started to fly, that the aircraft was wholly uneconomical but both had invested too much time, money, and social and political capital to stop.

Concorde, as we now know, was a failure for both governments with the aircraft becoming a white elephant until its catastrophic accident which forced its exit from the world of aviation.

The Voice to Parliament is looking very much like Mr Albanese’s Concorde – something that has soaked up so much money, time, and the energies of so many, that it is now hard to pull back. He no doubt feels unable to re-set the ‘sunk cost’ of mounting this campaign for a referendum that voters are simply not buying.

The various big name sporting codes who jumped in with the start-up money and earnest protestations of support must now be wondering what the cost to their brands will be if the Voice turns out to be another Concorde. It’s a useful reminder that leaping into the virtue signal bandwagon of what Mr Albanese claimed was a ‘modest’ proposal and may turn out to be a mistake of Concorde magnitude, for which the Australian taxpayer will ultimately pay.

I think about that mother who refused to take a ‘Yes’ leaflet at Top Ryde Shopping Centre. Would her refusal have been different if she had understood what it was about? Or would she have refused even more vigorously if she understood how the ramifications of a ‘Yes’ vote would mean for herself and her children?

According to psychologist Gary Klein, quoted by Freakonomics authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, projects that may engender huge costs in money, time, and human energy should, before anything is agreed to, be put through a ‘premortem’ test.

(Levitt and Dubner dub themselves as ‘rogue economists’ but they often make much more sense than regular ones.)

The ‘premortem’ according to Klein, is the examination by major players to find cracks in the project and envisage likely outcomes, reasons it might fail. ‘Premortems’ can, with luck, flush out the possible failures of a project before it hits our screens and airwaves – or, as in the case of the Concorde, the runway.

Did Labor conduct a ‘premortem’ on the Voice? Evidence doesn’t seem to indicate they did.