(Image: Gorkie/Private Media)

The Yes campaign has the stink of death about it, and its supporters are pinching their noses and pretending otherwise. The polls have mysteriously reversed overnight (it seems to some), and a hint of panic trickles through the ranks of the politicians, advocates and commentariat who were so certain of a win not one year ago. Somehow a campaign designed to appear like a chess wunderkind launching a late-game play is instead reminiscent of a drunken, pot-bellied, elderly uncle struggling to rise from his armchair before his nightly laxative kicks in.

The only thing worse than a filled nappy is one that refuses to be changed.

Despite the shock of disappointment, there is an air of inevitability to the whole thing. The Voice has morphed into a reckoning for a certain strain of Australian liberalism, one that has spent the better part of the past decade reluctant to acknowledge its own decay. Anthony Albanese and the ALP are both the product of and proponents for this creeping rot, which spreads to all that it touches — the Voice being no exception.

The Voice is not a particularly radical or revolutionary piece of policy (if anything, it’s 30 years overdue) when considered beyond the bounds of culture war tribalism. But it has been boxed and marketed by Albo and co as a vague fix-all that will undo that which cannot be undone, a one-sip healing potion that can magic away the stoppages that make reform in this area difficult, while empowering those our nation’s very existence depends on disempowering.

From the start, Albanese has been intent on making this his trademarked Labor PM “light on the hill” moment. What he forgets is that his party privatised said hill and outsourced the lighting to contractors somewhere back in the 1980s. It is the dilemma that has faced every modern Labor prime minister since Rudd fumbled the ETS: how to reconcile the soapbox legendarium you love roleplaying with your reality as the consolidator of capital-friendly centrism.

The answer, deduced from an eternity of stage-managed nothingness, is to call for humanity while acting completely inhuman. The post-Howard years have seen the ALP bend towards an algorithmically steered semi-cognisant logic that has left its politicians as little more than bet-hedging androids, self-administering daily Voight-Kampff tests via consultancy firms who repeatedly play them for rubes.

We can see this play out in real time with a prime minister and government who appear detached from the reality of the referendum, especially the public’s perception of it. Decades of outsourcing difficult decision-making, ideology and even identity have meant that any nationally significant call to arms from a Labor government now feels defined by its removal from it. The ALP approaches its policies with a dog-poo bag already reversed over its hand like a glove. When it comes to something as significant as the Voice, the result of this approach is calamitous.

You get the sense with Albanese that he is playing to a base that hasn’t really existed since Howard’s first term. His and the ALP’s habit of self-mythologising has trapped them in a Whitlamian Neverland, a world where the apathy of our times is as graspable as fairy dust is in our own. That apathy, and the confusion it breeds, is the Voice’s biggest hurdle — and it’s a hurdle modern Labor is all but incapable of jumping because the party is as reliant on as it is terrified of it.

This is what opens Plibersek’s coal mines, keeps the dole below the poverty line, fuels the housing crisis, maintains our gulag archipelago, and pays off Qantas. Labor has come to depend on what it sees as the indifference of the average voter, an indifference that is actually closer to confusion, frustration and fatigue. It is terrified of this perceived indifference exploding into something less manageable, and so it makes every move with a baked-in timidity. It has paid a fortune to the bandit camps of focus groups and thought leaders who repackage the ALP’s cowardice on its behalf and sell it back to the party as courage.

And so we have an ALP in a perpetual crisis of self, incapable of doing little more than self-flagellating while blaming others for its sore back. Wearing Labor wonk goggles, this timidity is actually sensible apoliticism, a useful buffer between one’s ideology and one’s disappointment with the results it produces. This self-delusion is strained by something like the Voice, which requires a certain level of engaged, gloves-off proactiveness that tests the limits of neo-Labor’s ability to affect coolheadedness while desperately wanting things to get done.

This leads to an undeniable weirdness, made unremarkable only by its overwhelming presence across Australian politics. From Albo’s teary introduction of the Voice to a photo spot with Shaquille O’Neal that hummed with absurdist-comedy energy. The performance ends up looking like disengaged engagement, which has naturally rubbed off on the punters in the stands. And who can blame them?

Among what feels like five separate Yes campaigns tripping over each other on their way to a future parliamentary inquiry, Albo has positioned himself like an Ernst & Young Gandalf, appearing when needed to let off a few fireworks, before receding into some distance subplot in his government’s appendices. If the Voice fails, Albo will be able to dust his hands, shrug, and walk away whistling. If it succeeds, he’ll be like Leonard Nimoy at the end of the monorail episode of The Simpsons.

What we’re seeing is another brilliant example of the thinktankitisation of modern Labor, and the glue-sniffer’s strain of enlightenment dubbed “radical centrism”. By committing to this schtick of market-tested neutrality, the ALP has hamstrung its ability to make even the measliest bit of progress here or anywhere else. As we’ve seen again and again, this empowers the Duttons and co of this world to knock Labor arse-flat over even the mildest policy contention, let alone one with as much blood in the water as the Voice. If the ALP should have learned anything from the embarrassment of the Abbott years, it’s that a loud and rabid “NO!” will always trump a self-assured and smirking “Well, actually …”

But it’s a lesson the ALP can’t learn because learning it requires a lot of hard work — hard work being anathema to this middlebrow, middle management, middle road it’s dedicated to driving 20 kilometres under the limit on.

Those left pissing in their tepid tailwind will be those with the most to lose — those who put their necks on the chopping block under the darkly comical belief that Albo had their back. The repercussions of this wholly avoidable failure will be an intergenerational echo that the ALP will wave off as tinnitus.

There’s still time to change the nappy, but only if Labor admits things stink.

Labor: sensible and steady or timid and terrified? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.