The Voice will likely fail. Possibly at referendum, but, if it succeeds at clearing that hurdle, it will fail in meeting its objectives.

What are its objectives? Ostensibly, its advocates say, to improve the lives of our Indigenous brothers and sisters, harmonising long-strained race relations, and paying due respect to the lineage of ancestry present in current-day Aboriginal people.

Conversely, and subversively – its opponents say – it seeks to upend the Constitutional order, to entrench racial prejudice within our governing apparatus, and to pave the way for the rise of a vindictive, self-loathing national identity – one that hates its British heritage, and the commensurate promulgation of a Western legal ethos.

‘The Voice’ as it appears in our national story, is a fatefully tossed coin – a national bet of sorts, flipping haphazardly through the air. It seems, from outward appearances, to be falling toward a neutral position. But the wager is fallacious. When it lands on October 14, pushed one way or another by the tempest winds of rancorous debate, we stand poised to win no benefit and to discover no great national fortune.

If either side sincerely believes our country is headed for a better future should their argument prevail at the referendum, then they are sorely deluded. This referendum, and the prevailing national psyche that birthed it, offer only a lose-lose scenario for Australia.

I am sympathetic to the ‘No’ case. Their retort to the ‘Yes’ camp – that it rests on a bed of emotional irrationality born of grievance and historical revisionism – is a well-founded one. The ‘Yes’ campaign has failed to conduct a rational exposition of its position. Their messaging stops at the gates of reason, and retreats always into platitudes of national atonement. The emotional response is their stock in trade. Their strategy is not to explain, but to conflate. ‘Yes’ to a complex, vague, and experimental constitutional proposal, has been abstracted into meaning ‘Yes’ to the binary question of whether or not we should want to improve the lives of Aboriginal people.

This is a laudably simple political strategy. But the consequences, were it to succeed, would be anything but. The ‘Yes’ camp has set up its constituent voters to expect a magic-pudding-like rise in spiritual and material circumstances for Indigenous people. If one is under any illusions as to the veracity of this claim, then witness the ecstatic contortions leading proponents performed in explaining that yes, actually, the mere addition of a pop song to the national discourse was the true game-changer in the debate.

Consider the scenario where on the back of this emotionally-driven argument, the Voice succeeds in passing at referendum. The advisory body is set up, and the ‘third chamber’ (to use now-advocate Malcolm Turnbull’s terminology) swings into action. What next? The Voice isn’t going to solve problems in the manner the campaign suggests it will. What will advocates do when issues manifesting as policy problems at the most local level simply can’t be solved by a national body? Whatever pretensions to ‘grassroots’ DNA the voice is purported to hold, it will be instantiated as a national, nay, constitutional body. How will competing factions reconcile within a wholly new national body, let alone cope with the complexity of challenges posed by a diverse indigenous polity that is far from monolithic in both its needs and worldview? The ‘Yes’ side, were it to succeed, has so dumbed down the rational exposition of its position, it will never be able to deliver results in line with expectations.

When the failures mount then, so too will the recriminations. Unreasoned argument always leads to unreasoned consequences – unreasoned consequences to unreasonable reaction. When the magic pudding of improved Aboriginal circumstance doesn’t rise, expect the blame to be placed not on the Voice itself, but on the electorate. All but the blindest of men should see the coming fury with which ‘Yes’ advocates will denigrate the Australian people, should their emoted prescriptions fail in moving from theory to practice. Take one look at the growing remonstrations of our self-anointed elite on Twitter/X, to see the peculiar hatreds they expressed toward everyday Australians on this issue.

Say though, that against the wishes of these elites, that the ‘No’ camp wins (as on all statistical probability, it is likely to). Will its captains – Abbott, Mundine, Price, and Co – sail Australia happily into a brighter national future? Those who think so have failed to read the room, or indeed, to take the global temperature. The seeds of further social division have been sewn deliberately into the fabric of this campaign, and a defeat for the ‘Yes’ case will throw petrol on the already inflamed passions of the social justice left.

Australia did not have a Brexit, a Trump, or a Trucker convoy. Instead, the Voice will be our proxy for the historical-cultural warfare that has hitherto expressed itself in the wretched dialectic of other Anglosphere nations. Australia is not fighting precisely the same battle over the Voice, but it needs to learn precisely the same lesson: That the vote itself will act as stimulus, not settlement of the dividing question.

The Voice’s tragedy is that it repeats the confrontation that manifests in the spirit of our age across the Western World. Like Brexit, there will be a ferocious attempt to ignore the will of the people. There will be framed to posterity a ‘right side’ and a ‘wrong side’ of history. Anthony Albanese, in the spirit of his ideological forebear Barrack Obama, has not even bothered to wait for the vote to declare it so. Like the Trump election, there will be the permanent staining of the man in the street, for having the temerity to try charting the unapproved path. You can bet with unbridled confidence that the moral (if not the mathematical) legitimacy of the vote will be called into question before the first exit poll is tallied. Like the Canadian trucker convoy, the permanent state and its appendaged, subjugated corporations will be infuriated with the effective delegitimisation of their endorsed position. They will find a way around the obstacle that an inconveniently-disposed general public puts in its way.

For an Australia that has slipped into the throes of unreasoned passion, the road ahead will be treacherous. The only way out will be through – our politics will ultimately fail at solving a problem that only local citizen competency and national civic virtue can remedy.