Noel Pearson and others have insisted the Voice referendum ‘is not about race’. Does that make sense linguistically? The word ‘race’ has been part of our language since the mid-1500s. It came into English from a Middle French word meaning a ‘group of people connected by common descent’. And according to the Oxford English Dictionary that remains the core meaning of the word: ‘An ethnic group, regarded as showing a common origin and descent’. The Merriam-Webster Third International Unabridged says the same: ‘the descendants of a common ancestor: a family, tribe, people, or nation’. Our own Macquarie Dictionary agrees – ‘race’ means: ‘a group of people sharing genetically determined characteristics’. In the light of those definitions, I can’t understand how anyone can claim the Voice is not about race. It is certainly about one group of Australians, not all Australians. And that group who are asking to have their Voice embedded in the constitution are defined by their race. End of discussion.

Be warned folks, ‘charge rage’ is coming. It takes a minimum of half an hour to refuel an electric vehicle – and charging outlets are limited because there is a limit to the number of high-voltage three-phrase power chargers any local electricity sub-station can support. The result can be a wait of an hour or two to get your turn for the half-hour refuel. If someone cuts in front of you, rage is the result. In the UK, electric car drivers were forced to queue for up to six hours at some service stations last Christmas. Marshals have been brought into police ‘charge rage’ between drivers of EVs. The compound noun ‘road rage’ is recorded from 1988. This variation ‘charge rage’ is not yet in any major dictionary – so far, only the online, hyper-hip Urban Dictionary records ‘charge rage’ (from December 2022).