Anthony Albanese has been tearing his hair out because the more extreme activists who relish forcing the voice on Australia can’t stick to his sales pitch.

Part of the Prime Minister’s pitch is that the Uluru Statement represents a plea by every indigenous Australian for a voice in Parliament, and it “fits on an A4 page”.

The statement is much more than that, and it's no wonder the ‘yes’ mob are keen to play this down. It’s 26 pages full of demands for money, racially-exclusive access to Australian land and water, special race-based rights, and self-government – an independent indigenous nation entirely by Australian taxpayers. It’s recommended reading for anyone concerned about enshrining racial inequality in the Constitution.

Prominent voice extremist Megan Davis, one of the authors of the Uluru Statement, has since 2017 said repeatedly it’s a lengthy document of “18 to 20 pages”. This week she’s been forced to write a newspaper column pretending she never said anything of the kind, but it’s too late.

This issue has been a trainwreck for the ‘yes’ mob this week. Labour and the ‘yes’ extremists spent years talking to sympathetic audiences in the voice bubble. They allowed this sympathy to convince themselves the voice would sail through a referendum with solid support.

Now they’re beginning to realise that the Australian people at large – to whom the pitch must be made because changing the Constitution is our prerogative – are not so gullible.

When the Prime Minister finally musters the courage to set a date for the racist referendum, I suspect that’s when you’ll see the big money behind the ‘yes’ mob flow into a blitzing campaign about ‘listening’ and ‘better outcomes’ with no mention of what the voice really is: a vehicle for a treaty and special rights that will make non-indigenous Australians second-class citizens in their own country.