OPINION
Like the political toddlers that they are, the left never takes a firm “No” and a smack on the bum for an answer. They just scream louder, stamp their feet harder, and throw their toys further, trying to get their way.
This is exactly what Anthony Albanese and the rest of the Australian left are doing after Australian voters overwhelmingly gave them an electoral hiding over the “Voice” referendum. They’re sulking, throwing tantrums — and trying to sneak their grubby little fingers into the cookie jar anyway.
On full display this week in Canberra has been the Albanese government’s tortured incomprehension at the rejection of what it had pitched as a clear moral imperative and its instinct to carry on regardless, as if the referendum defeat had never happened.
The Australian
The sore loser-ism started early Saturday evening when the sheer scale of the No vote made the result obvious within ninety minutes of polls closing. The tanties started on TV vote counting broadcasts and ramped up over the next few days. Yes23 campaign director Thomas Mayo set the tone, even before the result was unequivocally called.
“We’re not taking No for an answer, and we will continue.”
Mayo then offered this bizarre take.
‘The campaign has never been about just Yes or No, two diametrically opposed words,’ Mr Mayo told activists on Saturday night.
Daily Mail Australia
Except that that’s literally what it was about. Did Mayo even take note of the AEC voting guidelines: write Yes or No? Did he not read his own t-shirt: Yes23?
As has become standard for the Yes campaign, rather than accept defeat, Mayo whined about so-called “disinformation”. Which is the left’s new “fascism”.
People with whom you disagree are not guilty of peddling misinformation simply because they don’t accept an argument or put more weight on some facts than on others.
On the left, only Defence Minister Richard Marles had the grace and democratic sense to concede that Australian voters “got it right”. Everyone else, in the government and on the left generally, is clearly determined to carry on as if the referendum never happened.
Last Saturday night the Prime Minister said he accepted the result, and he agreed that Yes and No voters alike were all Australians, before basically relitigating the Yes case.
Instead of accepting defeat […] the Prime Minister seems inclined to push on with the rest of the Uluru agenda, even though it wasn’t just the voice that was rejected on Saturday but the whole separatist mindset that the Uluru statement exemplified. The Prime Minister may think it’s a sign of his political integrity to push on with treaty and truth, via a so-called Makarrata commission, but such hairsplitting is unlikely to impress the 40 per cent of Labor voters who said No to the voice.
Instead, it will look like exactly what it is: a government which lost a referendum and yet turns around and tries to implement it anyway. Albanese will be punished just as severely as Remainers like Theresa May, who attempted to force Brexit terms that were no different (if not even worse) than if Remain had won.
Indeed, almost nothing would maximise Peter Dutton’s chance to make this a one-term government than the Prime Minister again showing he has a tin ear, not just once on the voice but twice on so-called treaty and truth.
The Australian
Already, the Liberal National Party in Dutton’s home state, where it is poised to win government at the next election, is walking away from the “treaty” nonsense.
Queensland’s Liberal National Party has withdrawn support for state Indigenous treaty laws it helped pass this year that would pave the way for a truth-telling inquiry and hundreds of millions of dollars in reparations.
In a spectacular retreat, Opposition Leader David Crisafulli announced he no longer backs the Palaszczuk government’s legislation that enables separate treaty deals with up to 150 First Nation groups across the state.
The Australian
The fundamental flaw of the “treaty” idea is not just its naked greed — each of the likely 150 treaties in Queensland has already been confirmed to be worth tens or hundreds of millions apiece — as if the $34 billion Australia already spends, every year, on Aboriginal Australians (and that doesn’t count mining royalties) isn’t enough.
The fundamental issue is not only its historical ludicrousness (with which of the hundreds, if not thousands of tribal bands were the British supposed to make a treaty with, in 1788?), but what John Howard calls its “constitutional repugnance”. Nation-states make treaties with other nation-states. A nation cannot logically make treaties with its own citizens.
Anyone who blithers about “treaty” is saying, in essence, that Aborigines are not Australian citizens.
Do they really want to pursue that course?