"I believe the tide is running our way. I believe the momentum is with us as never before."
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Anthony Albanese's speech to the Garma Indigenous festival outlined Australia's "momentous" but "simple" path to a Voice to Parliament.
His first utterance as prime minister-elect was a commitment to the Uluru Statement From the Heart in full.
Australians had just delivered more First Nations representatives to parliament than ever before. The new government, intent on delivering a referendum in its first term, would also be accountable to a newly-progressive crossbench.
Polling showed the majority of voters in favour.
But changing the Constitution is a gargantuan task. Within days of Albanese's landmark Garma speech, the No vote's most inflammatory future spokespeople were mobilising.
Pauline Hanson likened the Voice to "apartheid", stickers hammering home the comparison immediately appearing on One Nation's website, available for a price.
Some with memories of the doomed 1999 republican referendum warn the embers of an ugly scare campaign are already burning, and not to underestimate it.
'With us, not to us'
University of Canberra chancellor Tom Calma, co-author of a 2021 report to the Morrison government on the Voice, accepts an ugly campaign has "every potential" to damage the Reconciliation process.
But he stresses his report, which he says Albanese is using as the "nucleus for progression" on the Voice, demystifies fears being aired.
Details of each consultation during a process lasting years are also publicly available.
"[Even] the executive summary will give a really good handle of what's being proposed, and why it's being proposed," he says.
"It answers many of the questions out there, if not all, that are of concern to people."
The Voice would simply act as an advisory body, providing insights from a cross-section of First Nations Australians without overriding federal or state powers, he says.
"None of this is secret, this is all very public ... None of the [critics] go about doing any research, they just come and shoot off at the mouth for whatever their agenda is," he says.
"What they've got to realise is that they're undermining a really thorough process."
Calma accepts it may be difficult for a national Voice to offer a holistic representation of First Nations Australians without equivalents at a state and territory level, something his report also calls for.
He says "lazy" claims the Voice would do nothing tangible to improve outcomes for Indigenous Australians entrench the status quo.
"We've had governments in place for years ... that still haven't been able to adequately address the very issues that some of the conservatives are pointing at," he says.
"What we're now going to see is something that's going to put a formal structure [in place], and it's based on the principle: do it with us, not to us."
'Kitchen sink approach'
Ron Levy, constitutional law expert at the Australian National University, says current support for a Voice is between 65 and 70 per cent, and has been "firming up".
But most voters say they know little or nothing about the proposal. Could support be a mile wide but an inch deep?
Levy, a supporter of the Voice, has been tracking arguments for the No vote on social media, and says "pseudo-logical" claims already abound. "Kernels of truth" often grow into disingenuous arguments, he says.
That the Voice is intended as an advisory body has not stopped claims it would become parliament's third chamber, stoked by then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, from circulating online. Others note the Australian Federal Police are not constitutionally entrenched.
"There may be good reasons for opposing it, but what we want to avoid are bad reasons for opposing it," Levy says.
"What you see a lot of is people who are really committed to the No side coming up with whatever they can, the sort of kitchen sink approach.
"They seem like they're true or sophisticated, but they don't make a lot of sense."
A lack of strong misinformation laws could help "skew" perceptions on the Voice, he says.
Albanese suggested a "simple" referendum question at Garma, but details on how the body would function remain scant. The Prime Minister says that will be thrashed out after the vote.
Levy accepts the approach could open the door for opponents to frame it in disingenuous ways, but says "to some extent that's inevitable".
"People would actually probably not vote for something if they didn't know what it was, so I think there's going to be a fair amount of information [before the vote]," Levy says.
"You don't want to have 50 clauses. People could be happy with 49 of them, but not the [other] one."
Joker in the pack
The Coalition is the joker in the pack. Leader Peter Dutton is yet to reveal his stance, waiting for more detail before committing. Some Coalition MPs are dismissing the proposal as tokenism. Others are in favour.
An anti-Voice Coalition would "seriously damage" the Yes campaign, though not necessarily sink it, Levy says.
And with Dutton seemingly looking to rectify his history on First Nations issues, a happy medium could be a conscience vote.
"I think that that would actually be a positive thing, because what we don't want is people just deciding on the basis of partisan party allegiance," Levy says.
"What we do want is people thinking about things from a substantive basis."
Hanson's emergence as an official No leader is also not guaranteed.
Two campaigns - one Yes, one No - could receive public funding, but there is nothing to stop her leading a crowd-funded alternative.
Levy says there is a strong chance the No campaign will run a two-pronged attack seen before Brexit, when the official Leave campaign worked in tandem by an inflammatory unofficial group led by Nigel Farage.
But he says Hanson's rhetoric is likely to play to a small base while backfiring in the mainstream, her bluster unable to shift the dial.
"The conversation actually might not budge it very much. That's precisely what we saw in ... the same-sex marriage vote," he says.
"[Australians] already had a long-standing view about the place of gay people in society. We may well see that, too, in terms of Indigenous people."
'Latte-sippers'
The Voice concept emerged from the 2017 Uluru Statement From the Heart, which received input from local traditional owners, Indigenous community organisations, and Indigenous leaders.
But Country Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Warlpiri/Celtic woman, has framed the idea as an "Indigenous elite", disconnected from local communities, simply maintaining access to the "gravy train".
Her comments were publicly backed by a cross-section of conservative MPs.
Greg Barnes, who chaired the doomed pro-republic campaign, says the arguments are a "repeat" of what he faced in 1999.
"It's as though Abbott and co. pulled out the playbook and said: What can we use from that? One of them is to try to divide the electorate," he says.
"They'll say it's an elitist issue. The teals are into it, the Greens are into it, Labor's into pandering to its latte-sipping set ... I'm not sure that the community buys it now."
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His confidence partly centres on Albanese's support, given winning a referendum against an incumbent Prime Minister is "almost impossible".
"[John Howard] was virulently opposed to a republic and campaigned very effectively against it. You had the double-whammy in our case," he says.
"I'm not going to say that it was the number one factor, but it was certainly a large factor."
Division within the republican movement, centred on disagreements over the correct model, played into Howard's hands, Barnes says.
He knows how it feels for a referendum to slip through his fingers.
Support for the republic peaked under Paul Keating at around 60 per cent, but buckled in the face of a "very concerted, brutal, and unscrupulous" backlash, he says.
"Don't underestimate the capacity of the scare campaign to make it close, but no cigar ... While some of these arguments might seem far-fetched, if you say them often enough, they're effective," he says.
