Plan is to move on quickly from the referendum defeat

Albanese will say he fulfilled its promise to hold the referendum and had been true to his values.

The added downside to all this was that it made the Prime Minister look not just defeated, but disengaged.

A government does not just need to respond to a crisis, it needs to be seen to be doing so. Optics are important, and the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas, the brutal response they have elicited, and potential broader consequences, are of utmost seriousness.

Inwardly, the government’s substantive response to events in Israel has been reasonable.

At the weekend, Defence Minister Richard Marles was talking to the top brass, Albanese was being appraised of events and, by Monday, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and her department were working up a contingency plan using civilian and, if necessary, military aircraft to evacuate from Israel any of the 10,000-plus Australians wishing to leave.

The template for this was the Howard government’s mass evacuation of dual citizens from Lebanon in 2006 when Israel invaded. Diplomatic sources counsel that should Hezbollah attack across the border from Lebanon this time in support of Hamas, Israel will hit Lebanon hard, meaning the Albanese government, if it hasn’t already, might have to broaden its evacuation plans.

Yet, the government was not keen to publicise any of this, let alone undertake the most basic of actions, such as convening a meeting of the national security committee (NSC) of cabinet.

That did not happen until Wednesday afternoon, four days after the Hamas attacks, and even then, the Prime Minister refused to confirm or deny afterwards if and when the NSC had met.

The four-day delay is perhaps why he grew snarky at journalists for having the temerity to ask.

“Quite frankly, I don’t intend to hold press conferences and announce intelligence briefings, and I find it astonishing that some in the media expect that I would,” he barked.

This is nonsense. Many times in the past, during times of crisis, governments have briefed that the NSC was meeting to assure the public it was responding. This became a staple of the Morrison government’s response to the pandemic, especially in the frightening, early stages.

There is a difference between letting people know a meeting has happened, and blabbing what the intelligence and military officials told the Prime Minister and his ministers.

Albanese often tells his troops that Labor’s re-election prospects hinge on it being seen as a safe pair of hands on the economy and national security.

In that vein, an obvious, initial response to the events in Israel would have been for Albanese to take a break from Voice duties in South Australia on Monday to convene a meeting of the NSC in Canberra, followed by a news conference with assurances evacuation plans and domestic security concerns were in hand.

All while unequivocally condemning the atrocities and warning opposing camps in Australia to keep it civil.

Instead, the PM spent until Wednesday afternoon focused on the Voice while he and his ministers, too mindful of the domestic political implications of angering pro-Arab communities in key electorates, grappled with finding the right form of words regarding the Hamas attacks.

“He should have visited a synagogue, not Uluru,” said one Labor MP concerned with Albanese’s singular focus in the first half of the week.

This, in turn, allowed Peter Dutton to level all sorts of inflammatory allegations and make claims about the government being slow to act.

After a particularly fiery, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation issued a statement warning “words matter” if social cohesion was to be maintained.

Dutton said he had been told by ASIO boss Mike Burgess the ASIO statement was not directed at him.

The national security establishment will tell you that the Albanese government is solid on national security, but doesn’t talk about it. Pumping up its national security bona fides is not in Labor’s DNA. It needs to be.

As for the Voice, the atrocities in Israel ensured that right until the very end, the campaign struggled against external circumstances, with the main backdrop being the cost-of-living crisis.

A once-in-a-generation inflation spike and housing crisis was the worst possible time to try to appeal to people’s better angels. They are cranky, uninterested and hard to reach.

Nobody in government or the Yes campaign expects victory on Saturday and the plan is to move on quickly. Dutton’s decision to actively oppose the Voice will be cited as the pivotal cause of the defeat, and Albanese will say he fulfilled a promise to hold the referendum and had been true to his values.

Ultimately, however, the people have spoken.

There will be derision for those who have spent the last six months saying a Voice would be racially divisive but then dare demand the government legislate one instead.

Or the likes of Warren Mundine, who said this week with a straight face that once the Voice went down, attention needed to turn to how to better spend money on Indigenous programs.

Despite the defeat, inside Labor there will be widespread relief the campaign has finished, and the PM and the government can get its mojo back.

Left with nothing, other than an overwhelming feeling of utter rejection by their own nation, will be the likes of Marcia Langton, Pat Dodson, and Tom Calma, who back in March stood alongside Albanese in Parliament’s Blue Room to launch the campaign.

The pain of their lifelong struggles that creased their faces was offset by tears of hope.

Langton urged then it was time to end the annual “misery fest” that was the Closing the Gap statement made to parliament, in which nothing ever improves in terms of life expectancy and incarceration rates of Indigenous Australians.

As of Sunday, that’s back where we’ll be. Just more divided.