An architect of the Voice to Parliament has conceded the referendum is headed for defeat while taking aim at ‘hard’ Australia for its failure.
Leading Yes campaigner Noel Pearson made the call while addressing a private function, run by the Yes23 campaign and law firm Gilbert + Tobin, on Monday.
He said he would ‘keep pushing until the final hour’ of the campaign but ‘it appears that nothing we can do can shift the numbers’, the Financial Review reported.
‘They [Australians] see the Constitution as entirely belonging to them and no amount of obsequiousness on our part, humility, love, seems to ever melt their hearts,’ Mr Pearson is reported to have said.
‘The thing that completely confounds me is how resistant the vote is out there for us.’
Noel Pearson (pictured) addressed a function organised by the Yes23 Campaign and law firm Gilbert + Tobin on Monday, conceding the Voice referendum is headed for defeat
Australia is ‘a hard country’, he said, adding that he feared having to tell fellow Indigenous Australians that ‘the faith I implored them to place in white Australia was misplaced’.
Pearson was also critical of leading No campaigners Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine, claiming they did not ‘have their own mind’ in the campaign having been influenced by conservative think tanks the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies.
Both Mundine and Price have career links to the Centre for Independent Studies.
‘I don’t blame Jacinta and Warren,’ Pearson added.
‘Forgive them Father, for they do not know what they do.’
The Voice architect then went on to say the pair were being used as ‘front people’ for the No campaign, with the ‘real power’ coming from right-wing think tanks.
Public opinion towards the Yes campaign has been impacted by ‘front people’ for the No vote such as Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price, Mr Pearson said
‘All of the strings are so visible,’ he said.
The Yes campaign was originally confident of media support both nationally and worldwide before it ‘slipped away’, Pearson added.
He also reflected on the six-year journey since the Uluru Statement from the Heart was issued and at the path the Voice campaign had taken.
‘If you were me, and you represented a minority who were the original peoples of the land, would you have been satisfied with a Voice to the bloody parliament?’ the campaigner questioned.
Pearson said in the event of defeat on Saturday: ‘There will be no path to the kind of reconciliation that I believe is underpinned by justice’.
Current polling reveals the Yes side has an estimated 41.6 per cent support nationally, the Guardian reported.
Although the downward trend in support for the Voice has slowed, the need for a double majority to pass a referendum means the yes vote needs to be closer to 53 per cent to succeed.
Six per cent of voters are still undecided ahead of Saturday’s final opportunity to cast a ballot on the Voice proposal.
Well over two million Australians have already voted in the referendum, meaning the outcome of the vote may not be known on Saturday night.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
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