Kimberley Caines: Why Labor needs to look beyond Saturday’s Voice to Parliament referendum vote

The Labor Party doesn’t want to talk about October 15. The Prime Minister and his MPs say they are “focused on Saturday” — the day Australians decide if the country will enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in its Constitution. Polling shows the referendum is set to go down in all six States. Labor knows a Yes vote is slipping away, which is why it needs to look beyond Saturday and have a plan B in place. If the nation votes No, a history war will break out. Anthony Albanese will blame Liberal leader Peter Dutton for running a scare campaign and for creating confusion about what the advisory body would have done by having the slogan “if you don’t know, vote No”. The Coalition will take the vote against the Voice as a vote against Albanese. The failure of the Voice will also turn into a debate on the PM’s political future. We’ll see a lot of this in question time next week. Albanese won’t resign as the leader of the country or even possibly lose the next Federal election, but the defeat could be his downfall. He will need to reset his focus — not so much on how his party will invest more money into Indigenous communities but on what the Federal Government is going to do to ease cost-of-living pressures. This is what Australians care about most. Unfortunately for Albanese, Australians aren’t feeling generous at the moment. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to hold a referendum. There’s anger with the Government over what it is doing to help the household budget. That’s directed at the Prime Minister so by voting No, Australians are sending him a message. That message will be known loud and clear on Saturday.