The Latest Breaking News from Voice

Victorian Liberal MPs will be free to cast a conscience vote in the Voice referendum, putting the state party at odds with its federal counterpart.

For much of the past two decades, polarisation and hyper-partisanship have weakened Western democracies, most notably in the United States and Britain. Australia has not escaped, although the consequences here have been nothing as compared with Brexit or the insurrection in Washington on January 6, 2021.

Central to the coronation will be the out of sight anointing of the King as God’s chosen, a medieval remnant of the Divine Right of Kings.

Tony Abbott entered the debate on this year’s Indigenous Voice referendum on Monday just as had been predicted.

Support for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament has dropped since the first polls that asked about it in late 2022. Analyst Kevin Bonham has plotted all the poll results, and the average Voice support is down from 65% in August 2022 to 57% now.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott offers a staunch criticism of a proposed constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament, just hours after getting into a spat with a parliamentary committee investigating the looming referendum.

Acknowledgement: we would like to extend our thanks to the Gkuthaarn and Kukatj People who invited us to work on this sensitive project through the lens of truth-telling – particularly Phillip George, Richie Bee and Francine George – whose insights have formed a key pillar of the work.

Australian Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s recent claim that New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal has veto powers over parliament was met with surprise in New Zealand, especially by the members of the tribunal itself. That’s because it is just plain wrong.

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Peter Dutton’s defensive posture of just appealing to "the base’" and trying to hold the Liberals together may prove the losing gambit.

Party stability on the progressive side of politics, and repeated party reconfiguration on the conservative side of politics, is a marked contrast in the history of Australia’s two-party political system.