If you had put money on the claim that ’sensitive new age’ Opposition Leader Peter Dutton would genuinely work co-operatively with others to actually improve Australia and the life of Australians until the next election, you would have lost your cash early in January. That’s when Dutton reverted to type as the feeder of red meat to his base constituency of right-wing conservatives by issuing a letter to the Prime Minister asking 15 questions about the proposed ‘Voice to Parliament’ referendum.

Like everyone else, Dutton has a right to ask questions about the proposed ‘Voice’, however he should also be looking for available information prior to making himself look silly. While he might claim he is making a valuable contribution to the debate, all he is really doing is spreading fear, uncertainty and deception; especially when he supplies a copy of his letter to selected (friendly) media outlets prior to the media announcement and sends the email to a generic email address in the Prime Minister’s Office afterwards, despite Dutton (you would imagine) having access to the Prime Minister’s official contact details.

It should be noted that the Federal Liberal Party Room has yet to formally commit to supporting or opposing the proposed referendum. The Federal Nationals have announced they oppose it, as a result Andrew Gee has decided to renounce his Nationals membership and sit as an Independent MP in federal parliament. No doubt the Liberal Party MP’s have a variety of views. Party ‘elders’ John Howard and Tony Abbott are publicly supporting the ‘no’ case. In Abbott’s case, he is an adviser to the conservative lobby group Advance who are promoting a ‘no’ vote using advertising material that has been banned from a social media provider’s products because it is false.

The fact is that Dutton and everyone else has access to the ‘From the Heart’ website where there is a lot of discussion on how the voice is planned to operate. Unlike us, Dutton also has access to Ministers in both the current and former government who would be able to clarify and explain anything Dutton was unsure of. If Dutton hasn’t taken this step prior to releasing his letter of demands, it demonstrates that he is clueless despite having an array of party hacks and political staffers around him to ‘help’ him search out what he wants to know. If Dutton does already know how the process would work and still released his ‘questions’ – he is duplicitous at best. The information isn’t hard to find using your preferred search engine.

Dutton’s claim that the questions were relevant is frankly rubbish. The only certainty in life is change and uncertainty. Five years ago, Scott Morrison was publicly praising Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, saying that no one could do a better job a Prime Minister and Dutton was in charge of concentration camps (amongst other things) as Home Affairs Minister. If Dutton had told people in 2018 that in 2023 he would be Opposition Leader, Albanese would be Prime Minister and would take nearly a year between ordering some Toyota vehicles and ‘enjoying’ the new car smell they would have thought him mad. Dutton has no better idea of the future than anyone else – yet he is asking for specific detail of how the future looks from others. Of course there will have to be legislation and administrative arrangements that will need to be made for the ‘Voice’ once there is a direction from the Australian public that the Constitution should be altered. Parliament is the correct place to discuss the specifics of how the organisation operates once the time comes. It is pointless asking at this stage the name of the person who will answer the phone at 9.56am on the first Tuesday of May in 2028 at the ‘Voice’ office (assuming there is one) because no one, including the ultimate phone answerer themselves knows the correct answer. If Dutton is as good at predicting with accuracy specific details in the future as he expects others to be – he is wasted as a politician.

This isn’t to say that the Government has handled this well either. Fear, uncertainty and desperation only thrives in a vacuum. As discussed in The Saturday Paper, Dutton’s letter is effectively 15 ‘gotcha’ questions and Albanese should have been in a position to demonstrate the ridiculousness of Dutton’s attack,  

Dutton had not one but 15 gotcha questions for Labor on the Voice this week. In response, Albanese waved garlic in the miraculously resurrected opposition leader’s general direction and volunteered his version of [Green’s Leader Adam] Bandt’s [at the National Press Club during the 2022 election campaign] “Google it, mate!”, except it was 41 words long rather than three.

“People can log on now,” Albanese told the ABC’s 7.30 on Monday night, “and look at the report of Tom Calma and Marcia Langton, and they can look at the interim report that the committee, co-chaired by Julian Leeser, who is now responsible for Indigenous Affairs in the Coalition.”

Some ABC viewers would, in fact, have done just that. They’d be a tiny sliver of the population willing to do so in these peak swimming, swilling and snoozing weeks of the January holidays.

There lies the problematic circularity in Albanese’s response. If widespread support for an initiative to ensure active listening to the voice of Indigenous Australians rests on voters being good-enough listeners to work out why it’s worth supporting, how likely is that to happen?

The Government has correctly determined that the introduction of a ‘Voice to Parliament’ for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is a worthwhile objective. The need for a referendum is to ensure that a future government can’t nobble or eliminate the ‘Voice to Parliament’ in the future. To get this done, they have to get a referendum passed by a majority of Australians and a majority in the majority of states of Australia. The government should have been far more prepared for a negative reaction from the conservative spear throwers of the Coalition ably backed and amplified by sections of the media. Adam Bandt’s ‘Google it. mate’ is a far better option that Albanese’s 41-word response to a question on ABC’s 7.30. Bandt’s response shows the questioner hasn’t done their homework and is looking for a cheap shot, Albanese’s doesn’t. 

Albanese’s Government does show potential, Chris Bowen’s turning the Abbott era environmental ‘safeguard mechanism’ into something that actually works – gaining praise from industry participants in the process – is brilliance. Foreign Minister Penny Wong has managed to organise a number of discussions with other governments in our region that wouldn’t have been seen dead talking to the Morrison Government’s Ministers and Emergency Services Minister Murray Watt seems very capable in organising assistance in natural disasters in contrast to anyone in the former Coalition Government. 

But every time a Government Minister forgets a statistic or fluffs the explanation of how a policy will work, some of the gloss rubs off the entire government. Crikey has published an article suggesting the Government will lose this referendum unless it develops a sentence that represents and explains why we need a ‘Voice to Parliament’ and uses it at every opportunity, which the current practice of rambling explanations and coming across as dodging the question doesn’t do. They should be doing better.