How does one explain the following situation? The latest Newspoll and Resolve polls show support for the looming Voice constitutional amendment to be well below 50 per cent; they show those saying they will vote No to be six or seven points ahead of the Yes voters; and that is with undecideds at eleven per cent (Newspoll) and 22 per cent (Resolve), the point being that it would take heroic levels of Pollyanna optimism for any supporter of this Voice referendum to believe that undecideds will break more for Yes than No.

Be clear readers, I do not recite this poll data so any of us on the No side becomes complacent. This is a fight to the metaphorical death for good governance and for a functioning democracy in this country. And the Yes side has had corporate Australia and myriad charities – to my mind breaching shareholder obligations and charitable purpose duties – flood it with money, leaving the Yes team with probably over ten times the funding the No side has. Constitutional fairness should be made of sterner stuff! So take nothing for granted.

Still, bear with me as my intention is to make a point about the Liberal party at the state level. Oh, and this is an important last poll finding: the support for the Voice amongst Liberal and National voters hovers around 25 per cent, probably lower.

Got all that? Now look at the views of the nominally right-of-centre politicians at the state level. In Western Australia both the National party and the Liberal party have come out in favour of the Voice. The Tasmanian Liberal government is also pro Voice. In Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT the Liberals have no position. Up in the Northern Territories the CLP is again pro-Voice.  In Queensland the LNP is against the Voice but (call in the Jesuitical Sophists to explain this) in favour of a treaty. And only last week the South Australia Libs finally took a position, coming out against the Voice (thank you Alex Antic).

Notice anything odd about this readers? That’s right, there’s a massive disconnect between the core voters for the centre-right political parties and their elected representatives. The base is at least three-quarters against this proposed Voice amendment. Meanwhile the political caste in WA, Tasmania and the NT are out and proud in favour of it while in the two biggest states of NSW and Victoria (plus the city council of the ACT) they apparently aren’t able to pick a side. Too tough for them to choose, I suppose. Even putting Queensland’s LNP’s rather incoherent opposition to the Voice into the No column, if you ask which state or territory Liberal/National parties are explicit opponents of this Voice referendum it is just two out of eight.

And yet not even one in four of those who regularly vote for these parties is in favour. That’s not a disconnect between the Liberal party base and its political representatives at the state level. It’s a gaping chasm of metaphorical Grand Canyon proportions.

I’ve said more than a few times that this upcoming Voice referendum is very reminiscent of the 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain. When I say that I generally point out that back then almost all of the corporate money poured into the Remain coffers; that the vast preponderance of the lawyers, the judges, the bankers, the entertainment luvvies, the civil servants, the doctors, pretty much all of the great and the good were on one side. The losing side as it happened. And that is precisely what we are seeing here in Australia too, along with the personal invective and abuse doled out by the elites onto the deplorables. But there is another thing that makes the analogy to the Brexit referendum eerily analogous. In the Brexit poll the conservative political party’s core voters were overwhelmingly for Leave while the Westminster Conservative party caucus or party room MPs were estimated to be three-quarters Remainers. (For what it’s worth the top judges were almost unanimously Remainers, including each and every one of those who heard the two big Miller cases that made it so exceedingly difficult for Boris to drag even a mutant Brexit over the line.) And it’s again precisely that disconnect we’re seeing here in Australia, at least at the state level.  These Liberal and National state politicians who would struggle to win a reality TV show election are overwhelmingly lining up on the side of the bureaucrats and activists and leftists who will never vote for them come what may. And they are shunning the view of the people whose votes they want and need to win elections. And we know this gaping disconnect is not just as regards the Voice but on net-zero fantasies, free-speech concerns, culture-war issues, etc. Look, an even halfway competent Liberal opposition that stood on the ‘we don’t treat people differently based on inherited characteristics’ principle along with a few other core values – not having to wait to see what the bloodless advisors told them the focus groups said – would soon be back in power. I’ve done enough debates on bills of rights and other legal matters to tell you that you can turn a room if you know your stuff, have a principled position and a bit of passion about it. Focus groups don’t measure how these people will vote after you’ve made your case to them. They tell you what they think now, a fair few only ever having heard the ABC. Politicians ought to be in the game to make the world better, even if that requires a bit of work explaining to people why such things as this Voice proposal are woefully bad ideas – because it’s morally wrong based as it is on unequal citizenship; because it’s politically bad as it will make governing even more sclerotic, lead to rent-seeking and buying off the activist class, and create a huge new bureaucracy that will never tire in finding new problems. Worse, it is legally and constitutionally exceedingly dangerous and will almost certainly empower the top judges and lead to democracy-enervating activism galore (think the Love case and be very afraid).

Over in Britain the Tory party Remainer MPs have fought a rear-guard action making it oh so tough to fix Northern Ireland or even to get rid of any of the myriad EU regulations. That’s a lesson to Mr Dutton. Should this Voice referendum fail, as I fervently hope it will, do not give any shadow (or eventually real) ministerial jobs at all to any of those MPs who came out for ‘Yes’.  If they can’t see the problem with unequal citizenship and are out of sync with three-quarters of the party base there ought to be a heavy political price to pay. All this talk of the Libs being a ‘broad church’ seems to me to be hogwash. Since Abbott was knifed it’s been a Labor-lite outfit that does nothing at all for conservatives, that went down a thuggish, brutal path during the pandemic, that won’t fight the important cultural battles and that has far too many parliamentary representatives that belong in Labor or the Greens, not the Libs. Heck, just consider that last month John Roskam was rejected for preselection by the Victoria Libs, leader Pesutto favouring a 22-year-old.

So maybe this Voice referendum will end up doing the Liberal party a favour, by exposing the cuckoos in the nest.