EDITORIAL: Let’s not pretend, Labor will never let the Voice go

Anthony Albanese choked back tears when he passionately announced the final wording for his push to enshrine a Voice to Parliament.

“I’m here to change the country,” the Prime Minister said in March 2023.

Barely a year earlier, on the very night he won the election, Mr Albanese stood defiant and proud, his first, swelling, words as prime minister-elect: “I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet. I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. And on behalf of the Australian Labor Party, I commit to the Uluru Statement from the heart in full.” While those words — “I commit to the Uluru Statement from the heart in full” — surprised everyone, including senior people in his own party, you could not deny their clarity and force.

This was to be Anthony Albanese’s legacy.

Three years later Mr Albanese would have us all believe that what he really meant that night — and in all the endless subsequent hours and days wasted talking about the Voice when middle Australia was worried about their declining living standards — was something else.

His commitment to the cause was conditional.

While for two years he wouldn’t shut up about the Voice, and truth-telling, and treaty, ever since it failed at the referendum he doesn’t want a bar of it. Wasn’t his idea, wasn’t his cause and certainly isn’t his problem.

In purely pragmatic, practical political terms, that is actually the right approach. Australians resoundingly rejected his idea for a Voice and were angry that he had wasted their time and their money. Devastated by the result, Mr Albanese went into denial, almost immediately.

He had done the right thing giving Indigenous leaders the chance for a Voice, they were gracious, he says, and the rest of the country, declined their kind offer to be included in the Constitution and be given special powers.

Mr Albanese has cleansed himself of any guilt over the failure of the referendum. A political decision, that most could see coming for months beforehand, that has set back the cause of Aboriginal recognition for decades.

Or has it.

While Mr Albanese appears more than happy to abandon his passion for the Voice, truth-telling and treaty in order to stay in the Lodge, that’s not how many of his mates in the Labor Party think.

They believe in stuff. And they don’t like letting their passionate causes drift off into political oblivion.

Guaranteed, once Mr Albanese leaves parliament, his love of the Voice will be resurrected, he will dust off his Yes t-shirts and be back on march. But until then power is more important.

Unless of course, to stay in power after Saturday he has to strike a deal with Greens and teals, who will quick smart slap the Voice back on the agenda.

Cabinet colleagues Penny Wong and Anika Wells have revealed what everyone knows instinctively. Labor will be desperate to revive the Voice in some form. They already have at a State level. And they will do so on the Federal stage. With or without Mr Albanese.