‘Senior moment’, being an affectionate descriptor for the kind of harmless temporary memory failure which presages more serious cognitive decline, is a modern coinage for a phenomenon which has always been with us. But it doesn’t cover another, increasingly common age-related mental phenomenon; the feeling of hopelessness which is evoked by a glimpse into the abyss which separates the Australia many Speccie readers live in and the one their children inhabit. I recently experienced two such moments in the course of a single lunchtime. The first came after I confessed to the twenty-something couple sitting opposite me that I’d never heard of the artiste ‘Pink’, an admission which caused them to look at me with the kind of frank incredulity they would have evinced if I’d asked them to explain the meaning of the word ‘pizza’ on our menu. Exactly how the artiste they were talking about became one of the world’s biggest pop stars (selling almost as many records in the last decade as the Floyd of the same hue sold in the previous four) without my having heard of her is not, I suppose, a question which needs to be answered with any urgency: as a teenager I remember being equally astonished that my father had never heard of a man called Sting, a blind spot which did not seem to blight his subsequent life. But the second generational disconnect which revealed itself during my lunch was one which may have serious consequences for all of us. It happened when I heard the same young couple talking about the Voice. ‘Have you decided how you’ll vote yet?’ I asked them. ‘I didn’t know we could vote,’ replied the girl. ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘In fact you must. It’s not like same-sex marriage, where it was optional. Voting on the Voice is compulsory for everyone.’ Her boyfriend smiled indulgently. ‘Er, I think you might be wrong about that,’ he said, with the kind of deference you might show an elderly relative who has expressed a belief that the Queen is still alive. ‘I think you’ll find it’s just the people on the panel who vote.’ ‘No,’ I explained, ‘the panel will have a purely advisory role – but only if enough of us vote for it, of course!’ They exchanged puzzled looks, and then one of them said something about Jessica Mauboy, and the other said something about Guy Sebastian, and I suddenly realised that The Voice they were talking about was the eponymous Channel 7 talent show. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I laughed, ‘I thought you were talking about the referendum.’ ‘What referendum?’ said the girl, and now it was my turn to look surprised. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘the one on the Voice.’ Blank looks. ‘To parliament.’ Polite silence. And it was then that I got my second glimpse into the abyss. ‘The vote to change the constitution,’ I went on, intrigued now to learn just how unbridgeable was the gulf between us, ‘so that it acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.’ And then at last came the sound of a very small penny dropping somewhere in the distance. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the girl, ‘I did see something about that.’

It’s debatable whether this kind of confusion would be less likely to occur if the media had decided to refer to it as ‘A Voice’ rather than ‘The Voice’. But I can’t help feeling the Yes cause would have been helped if its proponents had avoided any vocal reference, and if they had labelled it from day one as a referendum on Indigenous Recognition. There can’t be many Australians who, asked if correcting an internationally embarrassing 120-year-old clerical error was a good idea, would say no. You don’t have to be a jaded adman like me to know that when you need millions of people to buy into something, what you call it really matters. Some may think, for example, that the 23 of ‘Yes23’ is surplus to requirements. It’s not, after all, as if it rhymes the way ‘Kevin07’ nearly did, and it’s not as if there was ever a chance that people might confuse this referendum with one that might happen in 2024 or 2025. There is, however, a very good chance that if they’d decided to call it the ‘Yes’ campaign, a lot of Australians, my young friends included, might have assumed the whole thing was just a multimillion-dollar attempt to persuade them to become Optus customers.