As this magazine pointed out last week, there is no room for complacency in the fight to defeat the referendum for an indigenous Voice to parliament. It is still possible for the No campaign to snatch defeat from the jaws of positive opinion polls. And as this magazine has also pointed out on several occasions, ‘No means no’. Nothing more and nothing less.

In this referendum, No means no to two specific things: ‘No to a race-based change to our constitution’ and ‘No to an unelected indigenous bureaucracy with unspecified legal powers’. That’s it.

No does not mean, and should never mean: ‘If you vote No, you’ll get a second referendum anyway’, to paraphrase opposition leader Peter Dutton. Nor should No mean: ‘If you vote No, you’ll still get a treaty, in fact you’ll get a whole bunch of treaties, and we’ll throw in a change to the date of Australia Day as well,’ to paraphrase No campaigner Nyunggai Warren Mundine. Both those propositions, sadly, can only be described as own goals in this hard-fought campaign.

Peter Dutton was clearly bamboozled by backroom strategists (of the bedwetting variety) still fantasising that they can win Teal seats by moving the party ever-leftwards. If this referendum is defeated, the Liberal party must immediately proclaim that the question of indigenous recognition in the constitution has now gone the way of Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue parrot.Any dissatisfaction at the outcome must be directed squarely at Anthony Albanese. Let Labor propose another referendum and see how far it gets.

Warren Mundine, meanwhile, has done more than any other indigenous leader in this country to fight for a complete reappraisal of indigenous welfare, correctly recognising that it is business and education that are the keys to ‘closing the gap’, not race-based identity politics. Indeed, his superb Nyungga Black organisation (go to nyunggablack.com) and his television programs on Sky have actively and successfully promoted Aboriginal businesses. That is genuine and meaningful reconciliation which actually does ‘close the gap’. Mr Mundine deserves much praise. As he says, ‘commerce and private enterprise is essential to economic development and genuine self-sufficiency, and… indigenous communities will not move from poverty to prosperity unless the conditions necessary for private enterprise and commerce to thrive exist in those communities’.

And if Mr Mundine has concerns about the imperfections of native title legalities (as well he may!) then it behoves us to listen closely to his ideas, but the Voice referendum is not the time or the place to canvass them.

Both ‘own goals’ have been instantly weaponised by the Yes campaign, and will inevitably move some waverers from voting No to Yes. Which is a real shame. It is unlikely they will have shifted many votes in the opposite direction. Which means the No team must approach the final weeks of the campaign with greater discipline and mental toughness. There is no room for any more errors.

Both ‘own goals’ were also the result of the No campaign naively falling straight into Labor’s trap; namely, what is the alternative to the Voice? This is the greatest furphy of all. You do not institute a bad law just because you can’t think of anything better. That way lies disaster. The Voice is rotten through and through; it is abhorrent in principle and history suggests it will be disastrous in practice. Full stop. It is not the job of those who oppose it to spirit out of thin air a whole new raft of indigenous policies at the whim of ABC presenters and leftist journos. The Yes campaign’s lazy and intellectually bereft claim that ‘we’ve tried and failed at everything else, so we may as well try this’ is an insult to every Australian whose taxes have gone to help disadvantaged Aborigines for decades. Currently, that figure runs at a reported hundred million dollars a day. The reality is that every member of parliament who has served in a government and is now voting Yes should actually resign as a point of principle because it is they the parliamentarians, not we the voters, who have failed indigenous Australia. Abysmally.

The laughable claim, by the way, made by Yes campaigner Julian Leeser that the Voice is ‘Thatcherite’ is as asinine as any yet heard in this campaign.

Thank goodness for Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price who has had the mental toughness and adroitness to retain her laser-like focus on the issues and the principles at stake. Speaking the language of the average Aussie, she has forcefully pointed out that there can never be a treaty because we were never at war; that intergenerational trauma is not something that can be exclusively claimed by any one identity group; that pre-colonial Aboriginal society was not some ‘Pascoan paradise’; and that the benefits of British settlement far outweigh the negatives. Once upon a time these sentiments were regarded as common sense. Alas, the left has been eating away at these historic facts, one by one, through lies, fraudulent education, deception and dissembling.

The No campaign must re-focus its energy, ignore Labor’s tricks and trip-ups and bring to the field its very best game.