Here’s the new Voice ad:
I am voting YES, and I hope it passes.
But I don’t think it will. And not because of the Voice itself:
How did this happen? A kind of pre-poll vivisection is already underway in the iMSM:
ALP campaign veterans are now trying to work out how Albanese’s leadership has managed to diminish a potential Yes vote of 65 per cent across the polls late last year to its current desperate position in the low 40s.
For clues, you could do worse than ask Father Frank Brennan. Brennan has been a widely respected and fearless advocate for refugees and Indigenous Australians since the early days of Mabo, even earning the honorary title of “meddlesome priest” from former Labor prime minister Paul Keating.
You can sense the desperation from Brennan, when he wrote to Albanese on November 9 last year, in effect, pleading for the prime minister to set up a parliamentary committee process allowing anyone and everyone to have their say on the proposed words of the Voice amendment, and to return to formal bipartisan co-operation between the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, to maximise the prospect of Coalition support for the referendum.
No consultation before or after the election is one factor, but this points to a more structural failure within the Albanese government.
It has no political process for any of its policies. Other than to announce them for the minority winners. This has resulted in shocks across the polity that have alienated the majority.
Nobody voted for Voice at the election. They voted for lower immigration, higher wages, less corruption, and respect for women.
Yet, in eighteen months, Albo has betrayed all by crashing living standards at the fastest pace in modern history:
- real wages are trashed;
- kids can’t get a roof over their heads;
- emergency patients are piling up in ambulance queues;
- classrooms are crush loaded;
- everybody is stuck in traffic;
- the environment is being destroyed.
- the nation is in per capita recession.
In this environment, making any minority policy the centrepiece of politics is to invite feelings of abandonment, resentment and anger in the majority.
The footy codes are onto it:
“Top government figures had said privately earlier this year they expected the AFL and NRL, who both declared support for the referendum in May, to capture the millions watching their grand final events to bring home the Yes message,” the story says. One Yes campaign source told the newspapers the AFL had decided grand final day was “sacrosanct”: “People just want to watch the footy”.
Albo has turned Voice into a referendum about whether he should be condemned.
“Yes” is winning by a country mile.
