The Prime Minister now hangs around the neck of the Labor party and leftist politics in general like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s legendary dead bird. To stretch the metaphor, when Labor sailed into government in May last year, the new Prime Minister brought with him an omen of leftist good fortune, the Voice. Eighteen months later, the cursed crew of a very leaky ALP vessel look starved of political capital and thirsty for progressive succour, floundering as they take on water and head for the rocks of the next election; the Voice now an omen of ill fortune.

This magazine was the only mainstream publication in Australia to oppose the Voice holus-bolus, in principle and in practice, and support No from day one. Over the past year, many of our covers and articles have led the way in presenting the numerous arguments against the Prime Minister’s ill-conceived project of constitutional vandalism and bureaucratic madness, and in this issue we feature some of our favourites. We were the first to unequivocally use the word ‘apartheid’ to describe what the Voice architects were creating, and we unashamedly depicted Anthony Albanese presenting a blank cheque to the Aboriginal grievance industry. Both covers earned the ire of the Yes advocates, with one well-known ‘conservative’ commentator taking to Twitter to announce he was cancelling his subscription. In response, we were flooded with people offering to subscribe. Those who criticised our campaign of course could not present any credible counter-arguments; nor rebut the many other worrying propositions we put forward. Indeed, the formula for the entire bizarre Voice campaign was one of perpetual triple-negatives: the Prime Minister would refuse to give any details as to how such-and-such an aspect of the Voice might work in practice; the No campaign would extrapolate what the negative ramifications were likely to be without sufficient protections; and then the Yes campaign would scream ‘Misinformation!’ This formula has now been adopted in defeat, with Yes leader Dean Parkin screeching the M-word on the night of the doomed referendum and leftist journalists subsequently accusing the No camp (ourselves included, presumably) of peddling untruths.

Little do such scribes appreciate that it is nigh impossible for anyone to tell an ‘untruth’ or indeed ‘the truth’ about how a new bureaucracy or any other new legislated government entity will or won’t work when the legislation as to its powers and checks on its power has not yet been drawn up or even outlined in any meaningful way. In such circumstances, the role of the media must be to tease out the potential legal or constitutional ramifications, the scarier the better, based on sound reasoning. The role of the advocates is to allay those fears or concerns with hard facts, not with bland assurances. If Covid taught the electorate anything, it is that governments are not the fonts of all wisdom they proclaim to be.

On a related note, we share the relief of our cousins across the ditch who have rid themselves of the vestiges of Jacinda Ardern, that well-known undergraduate socialist who declared of her government and its bureaucracy, during Covid, ‘unless you hear it from us, it isn’t the truth’.

Since the defeat of the indigenous Voice to parliament, there has been much debate about whether the failure of the referendum spells trouble for Mr Albanese’s prime ministership. Predictably, his supporters claim the electorate will have forgotten about the Voice in a few weeks and Albo will soar again to dizzying heights of popularity as he focuses on the ‘cost of living’. This strikes us as a ludicrously optimistic suggestion. The reality is that, unlike the republican referendum in 1999, Mr Albanese treated the choice of how to vote not as a simple academic binary proposition as did Mr Howard back then but rather as a test of each individual’s moral worth and value as a human being. Albo was perfectly happy to stand by and see No voters described as ‘stupid’, ‘racist’, ’dickheads’ and ‘dinosaurs’, as Rebecca Weisser reminds us in this week’s issue. Rather than the good old Aussie knockabout bloke next door Mr Albanese so earnestly pretends to be, the Prime Minister has been exposed for what he really is: a lazy, posturing and moralising politician with an arrogant authoritarian socialist’s disdain for the lives of ordinary working people. His world is the Marrickville bubble of student politics and the ABC echo-chamber. Having made the Voice project so personal, he cannot escape the negative emotions about his own values, prejudices and judgment that now linger like a bad smell.

Disgracefully, after all the virtue-signalling about helping indigenous Australians, Labor voted against an inquiry into child abuse in indigenous communities.

The obvious question that must now pop into the mind of even the least politically engaged person is: if the Prime Minister got it so wrong on that Voice thing, what else is he getting horribly wrong?