People do not often have the opportunity, on the national level, to indicate which of two distinctly different paths they want their governments to follow, especially when the Coalition these days can too often be Labor-lite.

With compulsory voting, the resulting annoyance can add to the widening of issues on which the vote will be cast.

This referendum was doomed from the beginning. As former judge, governor and good Labor man, Richard McGarvie, frequently declared, Australians are a wise constitutional people.

This proposal never came even close to our founders’ Plimsoll line. It was never ‘desirable, irresistible and inevitable’, with the average Australian sensing something was wrong.

Claiming to be a ‘life-long republican’, Anthony Albanese is more importantly a man of the hard left, posing as one in the centre. That is the bargain-basement price he paid for the leadership. The great camouflage for this hard-left government is its apparent support for Aukus, a fruitful source for endless international photo opportunities.

Albanese would only have gone ahead with the referendum about the tip of his radical commitment to the Uluru programme, a programme Keith Windschuttle long ago revealed is for the break-up of Australia, if he had not believed Australians had fundamentally changed as a result of the march of the hard left especially through the nation’s education departments.

Sadly for Australia and especially our youth, this worked. First, it produced alarming levels of illiteracy and innumeracy revealed by testing and international comparisons. That this has been tolerated by successions of Coalition governments demonstrates that the march through the institutions has extended to party organisations  who are consequently often in a state of war with the rank and file. Second, this march has converted education into indoctrination. The proof is in the polling which indicates the only strong support for the Voice is among the young, especially those exposed to university education.

But even there, support is falling.

Multi-million-dollar advertising based on white guilt is proving counterproductive, as is campaigning by celebrities and from the more recently marched through boards of Big Banks, Big Business and Big Sports. One good thing about the referendum is it encouraged the new managerial class to come out and reveal their far-left agenda. Not content with their truly remarkable massive financial returns, they could not resist signalling their moral superiority by supporting the Yes case with shareholders’ funds.

That Albanese’s campaign is failing with the electors is supported by all polls and anecdotal evidence. FFor example, the Sydney Morning Herald says ratings show that Sky News viewers are turning Chris Kenny off. He’s their only strong Voice supporter.

The vote will not be just to reject what most rightly see as a blank cheque referendum. That has been well and truly lost, aided by the various state and federal laws and policies, especially in WA and also in NSW creating eye-catching lotteries delivering substantial unearned rewards solely on the basis of race. That this extends to those making notoriously spurious claims to Aboriginality, or claims based on a mere soupçon of Aboriginality, leads the average Australian to conclude that the  politicians and judges lack the courage to expose this.

In that rejection of the Voice, Australians will also be declaring – as they already are in polling – that the country is definitely going in the wrong direction. They will be confirming their lack of consumer confidence which, according to an ANZ-Morgan survey, has for a record well over half a year been ‘deep in recessionary risk territory’. Measured by the nation’s gross domestic product per head, Australia went backwards over the second straight quarter and is now in recession. Hence the government push for a Big Australia to cover this in the statistics, despite  the housing crisis, something ignored by a mainstream media who remain hysterical about ‘global boiling’. In the meantime, it is beginning to dawn on Australians that the media portrayal of Albanese as a gentle leader in the middle was never accurate.

Unlike Malcolm Turnbull‘s embarrassingly foolish assessment of John Howard on the evening of the 1999 republic referendum, that if Howard were to be remembered for anything, it would be as the man who broke the heart of the nation, Anthony Albanese is likely to be remembered for the increasing decline of Australia which is beginning to dawn on Australians.

That this is no exaggeration can be seen by a careful examination of historical and comparative international statistics in such areas as education, housing, manufacturing, the electricity grid, law and order, and per capita GDP statistics as well as the overloaded constitutional, legal and educational change agenda of the Albanese and similar governments.

Mr Albanese obviously regrets a lot about this referendum. He should have put it to an elected convention, as John Howard did in 1999, and he should not have been so devious in improperly advantaging the Yes case. It would have been fairer to have funded both sides rather than given tax deductibility first only to the Yes case and only later to both sides. The result was Big Banks and Big Business massively increased the taxpayer-funded advantage to the Yes case.

It is obvious that Mr Albanese never intended to give a serious opportunity to the Australian people to reject his proposal. Rather, he had assumed that, with the media on side and the education system converted to indoctrination, Australians would endorse his refusal to give details of the Voice, his response to why he had not read the longer Uluru statement (‘Why would I?’), calls to vote Yes based on the vibe and as a question of good manners, and his all-purpose response, ‘if not now, when?’

For his naive assumption that all would be well with the referendum, Mr Albanese should particularly blame the mainstream media for that record honeymoon. He may have even begun to believe the fictional picture of calm middle-ground competence they concocted.

Australians won’t forget this.