It has become clear that talk during the referendum about the Voice being used to close the gap was nothing more than an empty sales pitch.

This explains the rejection, after a peremptory and supercilious debate, of urgency motions by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Peter Dutton. These were to take the essential first steps to closure – an audit into the billions spent and a royal commission into child sexual abuse in the remote communities.

In an interview for a recent Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (ACM) conference, free on-demand on ADH TV, John Howard said the 2007 intervention was a recognition that the Northern Territory government had ‘completely failed in its responsibilities’ to protect children.

It did not appear, he said, that ‘a lot has changed over the last 15 years’.

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 95.5 children per 1,000 in the Northern Territory were the subject of an investigation by or notification to child protection services in 2020/2021, 346 per cent higher than the national average. The Territory, incidentally, voted No by 60 to 40 per cent.

Why is the government, its allies and the vast well-endowed Aboriginal industry so determined to hide both the extent of child sex abuse and where billions to close the gap actually went?

People are beginning to ask who they are protecting.

At the ACM conference, John Howard was joined by others warning not only about the Voice but also the rest of a sinister constitutional change agenda. They included Tony Abbott, Alan Jones, Nick Cater and two new NSW politicians making a mark – John Ruddick and Rachel Merton.

Despite the landslide rejection of the Voice, there is still a determination to impose ‘the full’ Uluru agenda – Treaty,  ‘Truth-Telling’, and Reparations.

The referendum was Albanese’s attempt not only to lock this in, but as Tony Abbott accurately saw it, and this column explained last week, a power grab. The elites do not accept the people’s decision. Instead, they complain ominously about ‘misinformation’, declaring the rank and file uneducated and unintelligent. Actually, the people’s considered decision demonstrated a healthy immunity to indoctrination.

There is, sadly, no need to introduce legal advantage based on race. It’s already here.

One leading example is in a raced-based land law invented by activist judges and consolidated, without any mandate, by the politicians with a vast part of the country now subject to native title. It also exists in legislation, such as that in NSW, where Crown land can be taken to benefit those with no proven relationship with the land.

Meanwhile, racial preference has been introduced into other aspects of life. In one example I am aware of, a student not only with significantly higher qualifications but with a most abiding vocation to heal, was denied a place in a medical faculty in favour of another student ticking the indigenous box. There have been reports from New Zealand that, in determining priorities for surgery, race would be relevant.

These practices are increasing with the import into Australia of communist-derived critical race theory. In the long-overdue elected convention to undertake the first general review of our constitution in almost a century and a quarter, it would be reasonable to expect that a provision invalidating race-based laws would be high on the list of proposed amendments.

In the meantime, the Albanese government, now challenging the Rudd government as the nation’s worst, is fulfilling its leader’s declared ambition to change Australia. This is being effected by a vast pincer movement. Apart from enriching themselves and their clique, on any objective assessment, the result will be Australia’s decline.

One side of the Albanese pincer is internal. It is first to divide Australians by race while returning control of much of the economy to what is left of a once vigorous trade union movement that now principally represents some of those in the public sector.  As a result of deals and ideology, it is making a range of essentials from car and air travel and energy prohibitively expensive, while stopping or reducing proscribed energy excepting only those renewables which enrich Beijing. It is also destroying the long-held Australian dream of home ownership and reducing incomes through an overloaded out-of-control migration scheme as payback for its Big Business allies. Having joined in handing over manufacturing to its communist friends and betrayed its original constituency, Labor is no longer the workers’ party.

One of the few good things about the Voice referendum – apart from being a forum for  Australians to demonstrate yet again that they are indeed, as Labor man Dick Mc Garvie declared, ‘a wise constitutional people’ – was the coming out of the ideological hard left who, while never underpaid, have swept onto the boards of Big Banks, Big Business, Big Tech and Big Sports.

Undoubtedly, they now regret revealing what they are up to at a time when they naively thought the people would blindly follow their self-evident superior wisdom. They have demonstrated two things. First,  they just do not know the Australian people and, second, there is an urgent need to complete our democracy by extending the dose of Swiss-style direct democracy the Founders introduced in the constitutional referendum and which the great South Australian prime minister Charles Kingston would have extended.

The latest application of the other, external side of Labor’s ‘destroy Australia’ pincer was hidden from the view of most except the truly observant.

Hoping few would notice, a departmental statement was quietly released on the Friday afternoon following the referendum. This revealed that for the price of securing a banal photo opportunity for Albanese with dictator Xi, his government would leave untouched (despite his criticism from opposition) the handover by the hard-left government of the Northern Territory, approved by the Turnbull government, of the crucial port of Darwin to the ultimate control of the Chinese Communist Party.

Extraordinarily, this is to continue beyond the end of this century. How can this betrayal be accepted by a free people?