Sack the President at your peril

Yet this motivation vanishes completely under the referendum model. Instead of being able to turn to his stud-book of reliable party hacks, a Prime Minister will be faced immediately by the most senior State Governor as acting President.

Whatever a State Governor may be relied upon to be, a Prime Minister who automatically assumed that they would be a pliant political cipher would be a very foolish Prime Minister indeed. In a constitutional sense, it would be out of the presidential frying pan, and into the gubernatorial fire.

It gets even worse. When the Prime Minister turned to finding a permanent replacement for the sacked President, he would have to run the gauntlet of the whole bi-partisan appointment process.

Instead of promoting his chauffeur to Yarralumla, he would have to peruse the names provided by the Nominations Committee, and then come to an agreement with the Leader of the Opposition, which in turn would have to be ratified by a two thirds majority of a joint sitting.

What realistic constitutional commentator could imagine Prime Ministers sacking Presidents with the insouciance that they would bring to the dismissal of their cook when they would have no capacity to insist on a replacement?

There is no doubt that world records for obfuscation and distortion will be regularly broken in this referendum.

But it is most unlikely that the No case will rise above the heights of mutilated logic they have scaled on the question of presidential dismissal.