Albanese will wear the blame for the Voice failure, regardless of fairness

The defeat of the Voice referendum leaves the prime minister a diminished figure. Reconciliation, let alone Indigenous recognition, is wrecked for the foreseeable future, and it happened on his watch. Moveover, his political enemies will work hard to make him wear the blame. The Greens — many of whom sat out the campaign despite the party’s ostensible support for the Voice — have already flagged they want Albanese to be responsible for what they call a “disastrous campaign”. And Peter Dutton’s strategy has always been driven by political opportunism. He has never been interested in the merits or otherwise of the Voice, merely in how it can be used to damage Labor.

That Albanese will wear the blame for the defeat is manifestly unfair. Dutton was always going to oppose any referendum Albanese proposed. Some pretext would always have been confected. The criticism from The Australian last week that Albanese had been insufficiently bipartisan was particularly high-octane nonsense — there is literally nothing that the prime minister could have proposed that would have drawn Coalition support. And there was always a No campaign ready and waiting for anything relating to First Peoples, funded by mining magnates and wealthy right-wingers and fueled by malignant racists online.

Nonetheless, the myth will now take hold that if Albanese had been a better campaigner, had proposed a different question, had delayed the referendum, had been less ambitious, or more ambitious, or somehow done something different, the result would have been Yes. Similarly, the Yes campaign will be decried as ineffectual — that if a smarter, better-targeted campaign had been run, the forms of intolerance, racism and obscurantism that fueled the No campaign could have been defeated.

All of that is alternate history now.

The damage to Albanese needn’t be permanent. Not a single vote cast at the next federal election will be dictated by perceptions of his poor Yes campaign. Instead they’ll be decided on the same basis as elections are always decided — on economic management, on jobs, on the cost of living, on health, on tax. And that election remains half a term away. But the recriminations for failure won’t be limited to outside Labor. There’ll be plenty of criticism, some scathing, of Albanese from within — and question marks about his political judgment. The referendum result might not be high in voters’ minds at the next election, but the resulting disunity might.

For Dutton, it’s a triumph. His opportunism has been vindicated, and he has likely secured his leadership until the next election. The message he will take from his victory is that scare campaigns, appeals to fear, invoking resentment and stoking division remain strong political tactics in Australia. There was literally no substance to Dutton’s campaign against the Voice; it was based entirely around a conspiracy theory of an elite plot to do something bad — never really articulated — to white Australians. But he and the No campaign didn’t need substance. It just needed fear, and downward envy, and the repetition of the claim that a Voice was “divisive”, when Australia is now divided more than ever before as a result of its success.

The result will be a further shift toward MAGA Republican tactics by the Liberals, fueled by the belief that they work, even if not necessarily as well as they do in the US. There’ll be more division, more targeting of groups for demonisation, more conspiracy theories, more insistence that ordinary Australians are the victims of an elite plot. Will it work at the next election as well as it worked on Saturday? Dutton and his senior colleagues are determined to find out.

As for the Greens, by keeping their heads down and generally avoiding being prominently linked to the Voice, they’ve managed to get through a difficult issue on which they’re bitterly divided without too much damage. True, they lost Lidia Thorpe along the way, but that was always going to happen and in any event was a blessing for them. Apart from some coverage from Nine newspapers, the MIA status of several prominent Greens from the referendum has gone unnoticed, freeing them to assail Albanese for failing to achieve something they were decidedly half-hearted about themselves.