Mark Kenny | Indigenous Voice to Parliament 'Yes' campaign must reach into Australia's cold heart

First Australians will have been banished back to the margins. Told to stay silent and accept unjust terms. Sixty-thousand years of custodianship rendered not worthy of constitutional reference. Imagine that. Modern Australia, the land that forgot time.

Opinion polls suggest the "yes" case is stalling. Nine's Resolve Political Monitor last week reported a majority "no" sentiment for the first time.

Explanations that the Yes23 campaign has not yet ramped up are wearing thin.

Anthony Albanese would be weakened of course, as will tacticians of the "yes" side who, bizarrely, have not risen to the scare campaign they confront. There'll be finger-pointing and 20-20 hindsight, too.

But before it comes to that, is there the courage to alter course? To out-flank the fear-mongers by removing perceived risks and emphasising the Voice's brilliant potential for national advancement?

The biggest hurdle for the Voice is the denial of bipartisan backing. Liberal senator Andrew Bragg believes insufficient effort went into building this.

"Unfortunately, this has been treated more like a routine political issue than a constitutional reform," he told Parliament. "I hope they do."

A second challenge is that proponents feel compelled to stick to process arguments aimed at the head, eschewing rhetoric, while opponents feel no such constraint.

For the months leading up to Peter Dutton's rejection, it seems he pretended to have an open mind, studiously camouflaging his negativity in leading questions. His main one went to unknowable aspects of the Voice's final design.

"Where is the detail?" and "don't sign a blank cheque" quickly became the naysayers' mantra.

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The "yes" side counters with wordy reason. A successful referendum would merely enshrine the Voice's existence in the constitution. Its actual form would be left to the Parliament to which it would remain wholly subordinate.

Dutton's questions, however, were always about feelings not facts. This is a proven strategy.

Recall the internecine warfare between minimalist republicans and direct election in 1999. The latter case resonated because, it just felt wrong in a democracy, to be appointing a president rather than electing one. Hello, King Charles of Australia.

An equally powerful suspicion arises from the perceived withholding of fine print about the Voice. To ill-informed voters relying on the vibe, this just feels iffy.

Anxiety is an emotional response to uncertainty. Every day we experience it when we click to "accept cookies", sign consent forms, or provide credit details for goods and services. We do it, but we don't like it. So why add another one, especially when the gains are vague at best or will accrue to others?

Viewed from this end, the onus on Voice advocates is twofold: to reduce this nagging sense of danger, while stressing the positives.

So far, neither has been done successfully.

This is the task now. Removing barriers to supporting the Voice, and enlivening people to the brighter future it promises for the Australian nation.

While justice, listening, and truth and are among the best things about the constitutional Voice, its greatest transformative impact lay in its embrace by a non-indigenous majority. AKA, recognition - which polling suggests is more widely understood than the Voice mechanism anyway.

Speaking of which, imagine for a moment if the government declared up front, it would only create the Voice with the opposition's support, forgoing its own slender majority in favour of a super majority.

Unthinkable? Yes, within the standard adversarial orthodoxies. Reconciliation however, can transcend such noise.

Lingering fears of hidden powers and unknown consequences would be neutralised if the opposition was promised joint authorship of the Voice's final design. And by building public trust through cross-party involvement, the referendum's prospects of success may also be improved. This is the concept of safe change.

In practice, this dramatic surrender would probably occur anyway because even the Dutton opposition could not credibly block the Voice legislation after a successful referendum.

Further, it would protect the new body from tinkering with each change of government - a process that has bobbled previous agencies.

While the best time to propose this was before Dutton cemented his own position, it could still fashion a kind of after-the-fact or quasi-bipartisanship.

If this seems too generous, Voice proponents should remember the degree of difficulty here. Happy surprises like the 2017 marriage equality survey are irrelevant and may already have fuelled undue optimism. The toxic, subterranean outsider-insider dichotomy of Brexit might be more instructive.

Labor has proposed 25 changes to the constitution and been successful just once - and that was with Coalition support. All eight of the 44 questions approved have relied on bipartisanship.

A pledge to a cross-party bill would do the next best thing by reassuring voters that they won't need to trust one side of politics alone.

Such ego-detached leadership is unheard of in Canberra because it involves ceding status, sharing power, surrendering bragging rights.

But if we are serious about seizing a more just and inclusive future, this right here, is our moment. There will be no second chance and no second prize. Only insult and failure.