It’s hangover Sunday in the Allan household. Last night saw a complete and thorough repudiation of the academics’ and activists’ driven crusade to entrench identity politics into the world’s fourth- or fifth-oldest written constitution (aka ours). Queensland doesn’t do daylight saving, so by the time I got to our friends’ referendum results party Sky TV had already called it for No. It hadn’t even taken until 6:30 Brisbane time, such was the comprehensive and total rejection of this ‘modest little request’ (that being the patently untrue Albanese characterisation). Actually, I think those pushing this thing picked the wrong TV show title. Rather than ‘the Voice’ it was the ‘X Factor’. Lots and lots of metaphorical X’s in fact. Over 60 per cent of Australians opted for Team X. That makes this lost referendum one of the most heavily defeated in our country’s 120-plus year history. Over $350 million dollars of taxpayer monies thrown at this thing, plus the mountains and mountains of shareholders’ monies our virtue-signalling big end of town misdirected that way as well.  To absolutely no avail.

And speaking of X’s or crosses, I put in a few hours yesterday helping to man one of the voting booths for Team No. In front of all the AEC people I made a regular point of loudly telling all the punters that if they wanted to vote ‘No’ they had to spell it out. An ‘X’ or cross would not be accepted though a tick would be. The level of indignation from more than a few of the voters when I told them this was very heartening. A couple of voters flat out couldn’t believe that the Yes side could make a tick and that would be counted but the No side could not use an X. ‘That’s not fair,’ was the response.  No kidding! I don’t blame any of these voters for their indignation. And I don’t care what the AEC did in the 1999 referendum or whether they have a legal opinion that this one-sidedness is okay – remember, the legal caste broke for the Yes side on this to a monumental extent and it’s simply not that hard to get a legal opinion on all sorts of things.  Hence, yes, this stunk. I know. I know. It didn’t make any difference in the context of the colossal rejection. But it still stunk and shouldn’t be allowed to happen ever again.

You know what else was a giant furphy? The Team Yes claim that 80 per cent of Aborigines supported this Voice proposal. It will be noticeably below that. Just compare the vote tallies in the ACT and the Northern Territory. As of the morning after, as I write this, the NT had voted 62 to 38 per cent No while the ACT had voted 61 to 39 percent Yes. That tells you all you need to know about who was driving this cunning desire to constitutionalise a race-based (or, if you prefer, an ‘only those from 3 per cent of the population can benefit from it’ based) body with potential input into everything, that input going to both the parliament and to every part of the executive, and structured in a way (for instance, a separate chapter all to itself, the first such proposal ever) that positively invited judicial activism – an invitation our current top judges were most unlikely to decline. Put bluntly, a whole heckuva lot of Aborigines also disliked this proposal, enough to undercut or erode this Albanese Team Yes furphy.

And from the morning after vantage I, more than ever, want some accountability from all those virtue-signallers amongst the great and the good in society. Remember, this referendum was remarkable in that all segments of the elite were aligned on one side – the big end of corporate town which sent huge amounts of shareholders’ monies (not their own, their shareholders’) to Team Yes; many charities which sent money donated for their particular charitable purposes to this waffly exercise in progressive, feel good wankery; the preponderance of the lawyerly and judicial caste; the leaders of nearly all the churches; the various administrative elites such as ‘our’ Australian Human Rights Commission (which for the two-plus years of lockdowns and police thuggery never managed to find a single episode of rights-infringing behaviour by anyone, mirabile dictu); the university sector which saw well over half of our universities openly come out for Yes while the others stayed officially neutral, but it was the sort of Switzerland-at-the-start-of-WWII neutrality that had Voice symposia on campuses that were patently set up to favour Team Yes; the ABC which was so obviously favouring the Yes side that it was an embarrassment; and way, way too many MPs in the Liberal party, especially at the state level. Oh, and let’s not forget that Mr Albanese stacked every deck he could to favour a Yes outcome – for instance, this was the first contested s.128 referendum ever where the government refused to fund both sides (knowing the corporates would lavishly fund Team Yes to the tune of about $100 million while Team No limped by on maybe a tenth of that).

Put bluntly, this was Brexitesque in lining up all of the establishment on one side against the deplorables (ie. you and me and the regular voters) on the other. And the establishment lost and lost badly. I don’t know about you but I want some real accountability starting with corporate boards and university v-c’s and upcoming Liberal party preselections and moving on from there.

And if you thought this alone was all that we could ever hope for from one Saturday evening in October then think again. Because across the Tasman the Kiwi voters sent their Labour government to a crushing defeat. The safest Labour seat in the country’s history, one held in turn by Helen Clark and then Jacinda Ardern, went to the right-of-centre National party. Labour lost almost half of its support since the last election three years ago. To some significant extent it seems to me that more and more Kiwis have slowly realised that Labour’s thuggish, heavy-handed, and unctiously preachy response to Covid was incredibly wrong-headed. The Ardern thuggery seemed to save a few lives short-term but at the cost of more of them long-term. The insipid results of this NZ government and public health caste thuggery came at the cost of massive inroads on civil liberties, kids’ schooling results, a tanking economy, inflation (including insidious asset inflation), wealth transferred from young to old and from poor to rich, and a significant loss of trust in government and in public health experts, heck in experts generally. And so the punters sent a very clear message to the political party that did this to them. Something well worth copying on this side of the Tasman Sea.

Yep, it was a very good morning-after in the Allan household, hangover notwithstanding.