Lessons from the failed ‘Yes’ referendum campaign

Has our society become so politicised that this is the now the accepted expectation? Endorse, pay-up and support or else be ostracised and be shunned, like the ABC and our universities do to those who do not follow the fashionable left script?

The media should not emerge unscathed in any review. While a declining influence in our society, sections of the media showed hardly any semblance of balanced reporting on the referendum as it progressed in its downward spiral of public antipathy. Too easily the media 'catastrophied' the possible adverse impacts of referendum failure, too willing was it to stick the racist tag on advocates of a "No" vote.

The failed referendum also raises doubts about the value of political advertising. Perhaps political parties at the next election might learn from this and spend less on advertising and a little more on proper research to serve up to us voters some decent policies for a change rather than superficial slogans, and expedient policies rehashed from the last election.

Lastly, the disparity that will become obvious on Saturday in the voting between the inner city cliques – one cannot seriously call them elites – and the rest of Australia surely means governments and political parties have to stop taking their policy cues from so narrow a base as they have so often in past.

And that overly public funded and indulged one employer town of Canberra has done it again – completely out of sync with the rest of Australia as it was on the republic referendum in 1999. And there is some talk about giving the Australian Capital Territory two more senators – you must be kidding!

One thing for sure – the referendum and its rejection will have lasting but unexpected impacts.

The Albanese government has not just been weakened, but exposed for what it really is: an old, out of date Labor Party captured by the irrelevant ideology of the 1970s baby boomer left, controlled by declining and militant trade unions, peddling a 1940s ideological agenda of increased government intervention, filling government offices with its cronies who – as the referendum showed – couldn't display even a semblance of decorum, good practice, let alone goodwill.