October 14 was a great day for dinosaurs and dickheads. The epithet was coined by veteran reporter and leftist icon Ray Martin in a speech he delivered in the dying days of the campaign to enshrine an Aboriginal Voice to parliament in the Australian constitution.

Martin’s derogatory dismissal of his opponents was greeted with cheers from the audience and praise from the Prime Minister. Asked later why he’d used such inflammatory language Martin defended his words adding that Australians couldn’t ‘point the finger at the Chinese about the treatment of their minorities if we vote No on the 14th’. No doubt the Chinese Communist party cheered that effort.

Using the now usual sophistry Martin claimed he wasn’t talking about No voters just their ‘asinine argument’ that ‘if you don’t know, vote no’. Intelligent people, he said, simply Googled the information they wanted. In any event, he claimed, details don’t matter.

Details don’t matter to the PM either. He didn’t even bother to read the 26 pages accompanying the Uluru Statement from the Heart. ‘Why would I?’ he asked.

Details, it seems, only matter to dinosaurs who were increasingly disturbed by the vision of the Voice that emerged in old posts on social media made by its architects and advocates.

While the PM said the Voice had nothing to do with a treaty, indigenous leader Noel Pearson said the whole purpose of the Voice was ‘to negotiate a treaty with the Australian parliament’. Alywarre elder Aunty Pat Anderson also said the ‘Uluru Statement is about treaty’. In tweets posted between 2018 and 2021, Voice architect Thomas Mayo wrote that the purpose of a constitutionally enshrined Voice is to ‘properly pursue the rent that is owed and an abolishment of systems that harm us’. By ‘rent’, Mayo means payment for living on ‘Aboriginal land’ since 1788. Mayo’s demands also include ‘reparations, land back, abolishing harmful colonial institutions, getting ALL our kids out of prisons & into care, respect & integration of our laws & lore, speaking language, wages back – all the things we imagine when we demand a Voice’. He tweeted that Australians, ‘support a referendum to recognise our Voice,’ but acknowledged ‘they are much less likely to support what we may claim in a treaty’ and the Voice would be important to establish ‘the truth’ to support ‘treaty negotiations’ and ‘punish politicians that ignore our advice’.

Talk of rent and reparations inspired another slogan from the No campaign. ‘What do you get after the Voice? The invoice.’

Ray Martin discovered in the 1990s that his great-great-grandmother was a Kamilaroi woman. Would that make him eligible for a share of the rent, reparations and returned lands? More pesky details that no amount of Googling will answer.

Asked if his comments were similar to the moment Hillary Clinton labelled Trump supporters a ‘basket of deplorables’, Martin wasn’t sure but as the results poured in on the day of the referendum it was clear that Australians had delivered a rebuke to the antipodean elite even more resounding than the election of Trump or the vote for Brexit. More than 60 per cent of voters rejected the Voice. The virtuous were reduced to expletives. ‘F–k Australia,’ wrote ABC broadcaster Jonathan Green. ‘I mean seriously. What the Fk? How can you say no?’

ABC Indigenous Affairs Editor Bridget Brennan wondered whether a referendum without bipartisan support unleashed ‘a feral debate’ that exposed Aboriginal communities to unnecessary abuse. The feral attacks came largely from the Yes campaign. Professor Marcia Langton said the arguments of the No campaigners were founded on ‘base racism’ or ‘sheer stupidity’. No voters were called ‘racist dogs’ and ‘scum’. At least one was spat on. Aboriginal leader of the No campaign Warren Mundine said the personal attacks made him feel almost suicidal. Brennan wrote that ‘no matter how they voted, do not underestimate the sorrow and the burning hot rage among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people right now,’ ignoring the enormous achievement of the Aboriginal leaders of the No vote.

The headline writers at the Sydney Morning Herald said the referendum result was a ‘Devastating verdict’ which it interpreted as ‘Australia telling First Nations people, you are not special’. It was the nastiest construction that it could put on a vote in favour of treating all Australians as equal.

Patrick Dodson, the so-called father of reconciliation, said that following the referendum result what Australia needed was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission similar to the one created in South Africa at the end of apartheid.

Yet it is the left, starting with the Prime Minister’s hero, Gough Whitlam, that has championed paternalistic separatist policies such as inalienable Aboriginal land ownership. As a direct result, Aboriginal land can never be used as collateral for a bank loan because it can never be sold delivering the paradox that the vast majority of Aboriginal people in remote communities are land-rich and dirt-poor. Only a handful earn royalties from mining companies that they hand out to friends and family. Many more live in a nightmare of diabolical dysfunction where violence is fuelled by welfare benefits that fund the purchase of alcohol and drugs. Those who try to restrict alcohol’s sale in remote communities are branded racists. It is these voices – Labor’s Marion Scrymgour and the Country Liberals’ Nampijinpa Price – that the Prime Minister refused to listen to in Alice Springs as the town camps descended back into hell when grog bans ended under the Albanese government supported by the Northern Territory Labor government based in Darwin.

Territorians voted strongly against the Voice along with all the other states. Indeed, only the Australian Capital Territory supported the Voice. It’s hardly surprising since the Voice was a proposal to create more public servants and much of the money channelled to it would have been spent in Canberra.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong summed up the situation on Saturday when she said, ‘This isn’t the result we wanted.’ You might have thought that such a comprehensive drubbing would put an end not just to the constitutionally enshrined Voice but to the Treaty and the Truth the Voice was inevitably going to demand but you’d be wrong.

Mr Albanese is looking for a ‘new path’ to the same destination and refusing to rule out a Makarrata Commission to oversee treaty and truth-telling. He says Labor’s ‘commitment to listening to indigenous Australians is undiminished’, but nobody thinks he means Nampijinpa Price and the 60 per cent of Australians who voted No in the referendum. Some of those people voted for Labor in 2022 and the Coalition in 2019. Unless the government changes course (which may or may not involve changing prime ministers) and starts listening to those swinging voters, the dinosaurs and dickheads will be arming themselves with baseball bats for their next excursion to the ballot box.