The Voice: Constitutional ransomware for Australia. By Janet Albrechtsen.

The usual leftist hallmarks, such as calling people racist and cancelling opponents:

Appeals to emotion easily slide into emotional blackmail. The implication is that failure to adopt the Voice is racist, or at best lacking in moral sensibility and empathy. Those who don’t want a new untested and unknowable institutional structure inserted into our highly effective Constitution are not merely wrong but bad.
A Voice forced on us by emotional blackmail and without careful, dispassionate logical analysis will not heal racism.

From there, of course, it is easy to justify stern measures against opponents of the Voice. The cancellations have started in earnest with Facebook’s recent action to de-platform a video opposing the Voice by two Coalition senators, Jacinta Price and James McGrath. Prominent lawyers refuse to go public with their significant concerns about the legal consequences of the amendment to the Constitution proposed by the Prime Minister because they know it will put their professional careers and prospects at risk. The government is testing ideas to ensure the “no” case receives no public funding and its proxies are examining ways to amend the law governing constitutional referendums to ensure the Voice gets up. The government seems committed to forcing the Voice on us by hook or by crook. There is more than a faint hint of thuggery in all this.

How did that go for South Africa?

This is, of course, all hugely counter-productive. A Voice forced on us by emotional blackmail and without careful, dispassionate logical analysis will not heal racism. It will exacerbate it.

It was always dubious to assert that we could reduce racism by giving one race preferential constitutional privileges over all others. But to crowbar the Voice into the Constitution by saying, to quote Greg Craven, that “Indigenous souls would be broken” if we don’t agree to the Voice is a recipe for future anger and division. …

Recognition of Indigenous peoples certainly is not synonymous with conferring constitutional privileges on them not shared by non-Indigenous Australians. Recognition need not mean an end to equal treatment under the Constitution. One could revisit the proposed preamble, adopt a legislated Voice able to be abolished by parliament if it becomes unnecessary or ineffective, or adopt any of the moderate suggestions for constitutional amendment that until recently were the preferred options even of activists. …

Why does this even need saying? Yet it does:

The fundamental premise that we should divide our population up into Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians with different rights and privileges dependent on their race only needs to be stated to understand why many Australians, probably most, may object to it. …

Activists dream: “do as I say ‘cos the first nations say…”:

The Voice would in effect become a piece of constitutional ransomware able to be activated almost at will, and with the opportunity for enormous pay-offs. Voice activists pooh pooh this analysis, saying it can’t happen and that the Voice is not justiciable, in other words, beyond the reach of the courts. But the best evidence that leverage and lawfare is precisely the purpose and effect of the Voice is that when pressed to insert some self-destruct language in the Albanese amendment to dissolve the Voice if it ever becomes justiciable, activists angrily reject any such safeguard. …

More power over the rest of us:

The language of the amendment makes clear the Voice will give Indigenous people an extra say not only on matters affecting Indigenous people only but also matters affecting non-Indigenous people (provided some relevant nexus with Indigenous affairs is found). Again, one could clarify this by inserting into the amendment a provision saying the Voice has no jurisdiction over matters which can affect non-Indigenous Australians, and again, activists angrily reject any such attempt to curtail the Voice’s extraordinary reach.

The Voice is another example of the new left’s nuttiness and hypocrisy, in their mad virtue signaling and lust for power over the rest of us.