Australia's political vacuum needs someone to step into the breach

The NBN or National Broadband Network, was one of the better ones. The doomed CPRS or Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, less so.

The former at least, sported a retail-friendly name and promised a nationwide rollout of optical fibre-to-the-home bringing high-speed digital connectivity to (nearly) all.

Politically, it sold itself but that wouldn't stop "Dr No" from railing against its cost while depicting its 25 megabits per second technology as gold plating.

Technology journalist Adam Turner wrote at the time Tony Abbott had cemented his place in the "Short-sighted Hall of Fame".

Even before that, Abbott had famously scoffed the NBN was "essentially a video entertainment system".

If the capacity to imagine a better future is a prerequisite for national leadership, Abbott had given us fair warning before we made him PM. Still, Prince "Sir" Philip got his gong, so don't tell me important stuff did not get done.

As an ETS or emissions trading scheme, Kevin Rudd's signature CPRS was in trouble from the start. Its name didn't come close to explaining how it would work. Coalition sceptics had a field day and while their then leader Malcolm Turnbull wanted to back it (with amendments), it died on the parliamentary floor.

As economic reform, the CPRS's concept-to-design phase was way longer than the political cycle could make sense of. By the time Rudd retreated in 2010, an election was looming and his colleagues had lost faith. Turnbull had already gone.

But you can oversimplify, too. When Julia Gillard replaced Rudd and survived the 2010 election, she quickly introduced a more direct greenhouse gas mechanism - a simple price-per-tonne of CO2, which, in a surfeit of honesty, she conceded was tantamount to a carbon tax.

Trouble was, she had expressly ruled out a carbon tax during the election.

Her frank admission gave Abbott carte blanche to relentlessly attack it as a growth-killer and a broken promise, as his former chief of staff Peta Credlin later revealed: "That was brutal retail politics, and it took Abbott six months to cut through and when he did cut through, Gillard was gone."

From opposition, Abbott had defined Gillard's carbon price in the negative, even as it began to drive down carbon pollution, as emissions figures would later show.

Now, back in office and wiser for its experience, Labor has unwittingly created another vacuum.

Who fills it will determine the cohesion of Australia for decades into the future.

The proposed Voice to Parliament is an idea whose time has come. Anthony Albanese has staked his prime ministerial authority on delivering it. Correctly, he sees this as a moral imperative.

The Opposition has been more circumspect reflecting the fact that within the community, there is uncertainty. Uncertainty that amounts to opportunity.

Understandably, given past referendum failures, Albanese does not want the debate to bog down on the machinery of the Voice, but rather to address its existence or not - a simple choice between right and wrong.

To that end, the government is looking at a referendum question along the lines of "do you support an alteration to the constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice"? "Our starting point," Albanese told the Garma festival on July 30, "is a recommendation to add three sentences to the constitution, in recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the First Peoples of Australia."

These three points would (i) state in the constitution there would be a body known as the "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice"; (ii) empower the body to make representations to Parliament; and (iii) make it entirely and exclusively up to the Parliament to create that body through legislation.

This approach, it is hoped, minimises the risk of the referendum debate being swamped by downstream arguments over its franchise (i.e. who would be eligible to vote for its representatives) its size and composition, and its practices. This makes a certain sense because it limits the voters' role in the referendum to a simple binary.

Albanese stresses Parliament would remain supreme because while the power to create the Voice would be constitutionally enshrined, it would be a power given to the Parliament.

This comprehensively deals with the first misrepresentation which rushed into the vacuum when the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart initially recommended the Voice - that it would somehow constitute a "third chamber of parliament'.

That mendacious claim was never correct but it was a sign of scare-campaigns to come. Current calls for more detail and for voters to be given the "fine print" before signing a "blank cheque" will not be so easily dismantled.

Peter Dutton believes Labor has added to the vacuum even in the weeks since Garma.

"The original position of the Prime Minister was to put a question on the Saturday and then provide the detail on the Monday," he told a press conference this week.

"They've backflipped from that position ... they all seem to be on different timelines."

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Simplicity can be made to look tricky but complexity is a risk factor all of its own.

As Abbott said in 1999: "If you don't understand it, don't vote for it, and if you did understand it, you wouldn't vote for it." And even more pithily: "If you don't know, vote no."

Nature might abhor a vacuum but politics thrives on them.