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Michael Bradley: “Dutton makes Tony Abbott look subtle, so it isn’t difficult to pick up what he’s doing, or whose idea he’s copying. The play is an attempted repeat of John Howard’s successful three-card trick that brought down the 1999 republic referendum: 1) demand the detail; 2) when it’s provided, demand more detail; 3) claim there’s now too much detail and advocate a ‘No’ vote on the basis that, if you don’t understand it, you’re being conned. … Dutton will defend his perfectly reasonable queries all the way to referendum day, and point to any reticence about answering them as an indicator of something sneaky or even malign. … The proof of Dutton’s disingenuousness is in the detail of his supposedly open-handed approach. One of the details he demands will suffice: will the Voice body be empowered to make decisions? No, one million times, no. Nobody has ever said, suggested or implied that it will or should be anything more than advisory in construct and effect. It is a big lie, fully known to those who peddle it, to keep pretending otherwise. Dutton is propagating the lie. He has no intention of engaging sincerely with the Voice. He will, sooner or later, drop the mask and tell us to vote no. And we will know why.”

Marcia Langton — who coauthored the official report to government about how the Voice should function — has little time for obfuscation by its opponents: “Now there is a new creed. Albanese’s alleged ‘refusal’ to provide details about the Voice proposal, so described by conservative constitutional lawyer … Greg Craven, has ‘doomed’ the referendum. Craven’s latest tack follows years of influencing constitutional reform for Indigenous Australians towards compromise and minimalism. … Former minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt said he brought the reports I prepared with Calma to cabinet while in government and asked his former colleagues to consider them. He even offered those in parliament now the exact page numbers of the summary, to help them out. ‘What is obvious with the National Party,’ he said, ‘is they have not read the report and not given an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament an opportunity to be aired and listened to … There’s no excuse to say you do not know the detail. It’s laziness.’ The bleating about ‘detail’ is clearly a sign of laziness among the opposition parties, but there is another tactic at play. … Politicians and columnists and whatever Andrew Bolt is are working hard to ensure that by the time we get to the referendum most Australians will believe there is no detail. Their claims about the deleterious impact of the Voice on our great nation fail one by one as they become wilder and wilder, answered in detail by former High Court judge Kenneth Hayne and eminent lawyers including Mark Leibler and Anne Twomey. As Twomey says, all that is important at the referendum is to know the scope of the power being enshrined. This leaves the function in the hands of the parliament, with the oversight of democratic process. ‘It puts democracy, not the devil, in charge of the detail.’”

(Twomey’s patient rebuttal of some of the No campaign’s early furphies is also worth reading, as are Ken Hayne’s and Mark Liebler’s [$].)

The Australia Institute’s Matt Grudnoff: ”In Australia, the previous three generations — the silent generation, the baby boomers and generation X – all voted left when they were young, on average. Now the silent generation and the boomers, on average, vote right and gen X voting habits don’t appear to have changed much over their lifetime. As they age, however, millennials appear to be going in entirely the opposite direction. Moving more to the left. … This is a big problem for the parties of the right as millennials make up an increasingly larger proportion of voters and it had an impact on the last federal election. According to data from the Australian Electoral Commission there are now four electorates where those under 40 make up more than 45% of the voters in the seat… As older generations die out, millennials will increasingly come to dominate a larger number of electorates. If they continue to vote left, this will be catastrophic for the Coalition. But why are millennials continuing to vote left as they age? There are probably three main reasons, and they are all linked to their economic wellbeing. … These three issues — insecure work, housing affordability and climate change — mean that millennials are sharing in less of the benefits of the economy and are less secure than previous generations. … The rising importance of millennials as a voting bloc is bringing a seismic shift in Australian politics. Political parties will need to stop just promising better jobs, more affordable housing and action on climate change, and instead actually deliver. Those parties that fail to do so face becoming irrelevant.”

In the inaugural Iain McCalman Lecture, Frances Flanagan calls for a realignment of priorities with the needs of future generations front and centre: “From the streets full of schoolchildren on strike for the climate to the Green New Deal movement to the language of ‘circular economies’ starting to be heard in business and government, new modes of thinking about what human progress means are emerging and beginning to erupt into mainstream politics all over the world. And just as it is premature to give up on the possibility of a new social order, so too is it hasty to abandon the idea that work can be a political site from which to fight for the reform. For there is a crucial link between ‘sustainability’ and work that is perhaps very obvious but rarely made explicit: the process of ‘sustaining’ requires human labour. It means more than simply saying ‘no’ to damaging acts of consumption; it also means saying ‘yes’ to the human activities that are positively necessary for the repair, renewal and regeneration of our soils, our oceans, our cities, our critical human systems and our human bodies. … [L]ike any parent, I hope their little lines of personal progress rise, and that they find occupations that are useful and interesting and that nourish and nurture the people and places around them. But as every parent knows, I can’t do that for them. What I can do, and what all of us can do, is fight for a system that doesn’t press impossible dilemmas on their slim shoulders. It is within our power to reshape our present order of work in a way that does not insist that the next generation must choose between work that renews the world and work that is materially secure. We can, instead, fashion a system that offers them a stake in a deep and expansive environmental politics. One that isn’t just about what they do or don’t buy, but that yokes together their private lines of progress with that other great line that determines and marks our collective fate.”