William F. Buckley said famously that: ‘A conservative is someone who stands athwart history yelling stop! at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.’

Halt! Screams Buckley, because prudence and good governance demands it so.

One of the criticisms most often leveled against Buckley is that within his prescription, there is no positive vision given to history’s march. Buckley, it is charged, represents conservatism’s alleged ‘instinct for negativity’. Leading reactionaries of our age are often found lamenting the fact that modern conservatism ought to do more than just criticise, reject, and refuse.

Contemporary criticisms of Buckley – modern conservatism’s great philosophical godfather – reflect closely Australia’s political-cultural battles. Gough Whitlam, in his post-parliamentary apologia, The Whitlam Government 1972-1975 (1985), said of conservatism:

‘A conservative government survives essentially by dampening expectations and subduing hopes. Conservatism is basically pessimistic, reformism is basically optimistic’

Not to be outdone in reformers’ bombast, Paul Keating spent decades assailing the supposed ‘smallness’ of John Howard’s public imagination. Speaking to the ABC’s Kerry O’Brien in 2013, Keating said of Howard, ‘He represented all that I stood against. He represented a return to the mediocrity of the past.’

Likewise ran Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s assault on Tony Abbott, which earned the 28th Prime Minister the conspicuous monikers ‘Dr No’ and ‘Captain Negative’. For Labor, Abbott’s refusal to give credence to quickly-conceived tax and border policies amounted to national betrayal – a failure, they claimed, to step boldly forward and grasp the mantle of necessary (and radical) change.

Not to be outdone, Anthony Albanese has arrived at the despatch box in 2023 with a charge so grave it might as well have been leveled at Buckley himself: Say ‘No’ this time, says the Prime Minister, and you deny history.

A train of petty despots follows Albanese’s lead. Companies, public and private, declare that an act of blind democracy – the referendum – has only one virtuous outcome and that this outcome lies in positive affirmation of the question. They have declared that to vote ‘No’ is to be wholly negative, to abdicate your very responsibility as a good citizen.

Shockingly, Albanese this week admitted to not having read the foundational document behind the ‘yes’ campaign. This is an appalling indictment of his judgment, but not one that should surprise: when history is on your side, why should reasoned debate have any need of intervention? The ‘feel good’ vibe ought to carry the vote, or at the very least, ensure your opponents desist with any ‘feel bad’ questions.

But Albanese and his fellow travelers make an equally shocking misjudgement in characterising opposing voices as ‘negative’. Like Gillard, Rudd, Keating, and Whitlam before him, the Labor Prime Minister has failed to recognise the positive vision in the negative answer. In their myopic, dishonest, and ideologically poisoned view of the conservative instinct, Labor’s Prime Ministers have consistently failed to apprehend the positive goodwill which lies beneath the stated ‘No’ on the ballot paper.

Proponents of the yes vote haven’t been able to resist framing a rising ‘No’ vote with the darkest, most sinister implications – of a racist, regressive and uncaring country. This deeply cynical estimation of their fellow countrymen will ensure the voice sinks. Aside from being grossly wrong, such conflation is also a disastrous tactical miscalculation.

The desire of conservatives to say ‘No’ in spite of an apparent rising ‘tide of history’ has seldom ever been coloured by the fear of change. On the contrary, it has arisen from the empirical evidence that hasty, radical, or incoherent policy proposals inevitably lead to irreparable harm being done to the body politic.

The Voice to Parliament is all three of these.

Though its genesis may lie in the pre-millenium past, the campaign for the Voice in its final form has been sprung upon the Australian people in the relative blink of an eye. Its face value, let alone its potential value for radical (and radically bad) change has been well established by constitutional experts and laymen alike. The ‘Yes’ campaign’s incoherence – mostly on the part of its leading proponents, who still can not articulate the true effect of the constitutional change proposed – has been breathtaking.

Saying ‘No’ to ill-conceived change was the prescription Edmund Burke laid out in the 18th Century in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke, more than anyone else, recognised the catastrophe that lay waiting for nations that too easily succumbed to the passions of radical change. William F. Buckley saw these passions rising again in the New World in the 20th Century, formulating anew the argument for the wisdom of saying ‘No’.

Contending with debates brought undone by ill-tempered passion is the burden of the clear thinker in the Democratic age. Saying ‘No’ has never meant being of all-consuming negative disposition, and it has certainly never meant turning away from an embrace of the future.

In Australia today, saying ‘No’ also doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to the plight of our Indigenous brothers and sisters. It means repelling the ever-present forces of haste, radicalism, and incoherence – forces that have existed as long as man has made laws. Saying ‘No’ clears this poison away, and makes space for a wiser, more prudent, more just polity to flourish.

Stand athwart history? It appears that in their inestimable wisdom, the Australian people have their feet firmly planted.

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Ben Crocker is a research fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington DC. His Substack is Crocker’s Columns.

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