The Voice referendum could be the start of a sea change in Australian politics.

As a modest contributor, in time and money, to the campaign to reject the proposal to enshrine in the Australian Constitution, I join what I now know to be a considerable majority of my compatriots in breathing a sigh of relief that this piece of sentimental, spluttering graffiti will not be allowed to deface our nation’s founding document.

The No campaign had, in Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the great advantage of a principled, articulate and tireless campaigner with direct experience of the disadvantage the Voice purported to address, and of the futility and waste that has characterised the decades-long history of earlier attempts to ‘close the gap’. Price clearly has formidable qualities of leadership, and I can’t be the only conservatively-inclined Australian to wonder whether, with her at its head, Australian conservatism might not be steered out of the wilderness into which it allowed itself to be led by the likes of Turnbull and Morrison. Peter Dutton is not the ratbag his adversaries accuse him of being, but neither is he an inspiring figure.

The Yes campaign, moreover, must take at least equal credit for losing the day. They took the Australian public for mugs, and then, when that public showed signs of not liking it, doubled down, telling them outright what mugs they were, adding a sider-order of accusations of bigotry to the rancorous dish.  They are, predictably, blaming their loss on foul play – it was Dutton wot did it, they bleat, by reneging on an early promise of bipartisanship, and by instilling in voters unwarranted fears that the Voice was a Trojan horse for aboriginal lawfare. Or it was the campaign of ‘disinformation’ waged by the No side, who heartlessly used a string of ‘ipso dixit’ quotes from Yes campaigners, predicting that the Voice would lead to reparations, to payment to aborigines (although precisely which aborigines, is never made clear), and thereby contradicted the Yes leadership’s attempts to pretend the Voice they proposed would be purely advisory in nature.

Or they blame the PM for his failure to manage the Yes campaign in a way that ensured victory. If only he had been more willing to compromise with the Opposition on the form of the question, or had been more forthcoming with details of how the Voice would work, then surely it would have succeeded. This is all fantasy. As the trajectory of opinion polled support for the Voice shows, the more Australians learned about the Voice, and the more they thought about it, the less they liked it. The Voice failed because it was a bad idea, through and through. Australians saw it was, and, given the opportunity, said so.

But, pleased as I am with the outcome, I’m left feeling I want more. It’s a feeling that has grown throughout the campaign.

I believe rejection of the Voice has the makings of a sea-change in Australian political life. One of Albanese’s signal errors was that, in a hazardous departure from what for twenty years has been settled practice, he actually allowed a subject of cardinal importance to the woke inner-city self-anointed elites to be put to a plebiscite. On a whole range of social issues on which the woke, bien pensant view has found its way into law, it has done so without ever being voted for by the Australian electorate. The Liberal Party having fallen into the hands of a succession of spineless, feeble-minded leaders who believed that the path to electoral success lay not in interrogating the more fatuous of their opponents’ ideas but in aping them, Australians have had to endure wealth-destroying, security-sapping, common sense-defying legislation on ‘climate change’, on the Covid pandemic, and on their freedom to express dissent, without ever being given the opportunity to vote on these measures. I suspect that Albo succumbed to the hubris that so often afflicts the self-righteous, and in an unguarded moment assumed he could count on the years spent morally browbeating Australians into quiescence to deliver a Yes vote for his absurd scheme.

It was a bad mistake. Not only has it allowed Australians to express their own opinions on the matter at hand, it has revealed to them the extent to which, contrary to the assurances of the elites, those opinions were shared. Australians have given themselves permission to hold and express a view which defied the diktat of those elites. The Emperor’s nakedness is manifest. We were told by every conceivable elite group that there was only one way to vote if we wanted to remain within the Pale of respectable citizenship. And yet we defied them. Having done so, my hope is that we will extend our defiance to the rest of the woke project.

Of course, we can’t expect projects like Net Zero and the identity politics of DIE to suddenly be the subject of referenda – if anything, the Voice referendum will have taught the luvvies to be all the more distrustful of mainstream opinion, and to double down on their efforts to keep their agenda away from the ballot box. But it may be that the extent of dissenting opinion revealed in the referendum may finally embolden politicians of what used to be the Australian right to stand up to their more spineless colleagues and insist that to oppose these manifestly silly ideas is to court, not disaster, but victory.

The road out of electoral irrelevance for the parties of the Australian right is along one, so let’s get cracking. Getting Senator Price a seat in the lower house, where her qualities of leadership can be, er, properly exploited would be a good start.