The little voices in Peter Dutton's head.

Making no distinction between good and evil, nature is blind to principles. Survival is all. Peter Dutton now operates in a state of nature, where life, as Hobbes reminds us, is short, nasty and brutish.

For Dutton, survival is both calculating motive and unthinking compulsion. It is why in opposing the Voice he finds himself straddling unbridgeable gaps in logic and attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable.

By urging a hard NO, he either dooms a project which promises nation-building through reconciliation or he dooms himself.

Reduced to essences, this motherfucker will burn everything down just to hold onto a job he doesn’t need and has already failed.

In parliamentary systems, to be charged with the duty of leading the opposition to a government does not demand reflexive opposition to everything. However, it does carry an expectation of offering alternatives in good faith.

There is no good faith in what this man is offering.

If there was, he would not need to make the offer, having had ten years in power to make good on those failings he now seeks to lay at the feet of his opponents.

To complain that The Voice will make no difference ‘on the ground’ begs the question of what the fuck the last three conservative governments did while they had the power to intervene on the very same ground Dutton now walks clutching his pearls and wringing his hands at the plight of the continent’s first people.

A true conservative, a genuine Liberal, someone like Julian Leeser, will inevitably argue the details of any proposal to create a new national institution, but conservatives, by definition are constitutionalists, and thus for them questions of what an institution might achieve are not moot, but rather practical.

Creating the institution itself is worthwhile.

To say that The Voice will achieve nothing on the ground is an empty rhetorical flex akin to asking what Anzac Day is for.

Because practically, April 25 is all just bullshit symbolism, innit?

Except, of course, it’s not because, again, classical conservatism recognises the power of symbolism—as do any philosophies with a basic appreciation for human nature— and regards the power of institutions as increasing the closer they are to those they serve.

Dutton is attempting to wrench this into a contorted argument about creating smaller voices in local communities, but it is an argument that collapses under the strain of its internal contradictions.

Are those indigenous Australians who will fill the offices of whatever institution arises after a vote in favour of the Voice somehow less indigenous or less Australian than the purely parochial ‘little voices’ Dutton would prefer because they are endorsed to speak only to purely local and parochial matters?

More than somewhat awkwardly, Julian Leeser called bullshit on this as he hurried out of the door to shadow cabinet.

Until this week, Dutton entrusted Leeser with responsibility for carrying the Opposition’s message forward on the Voice and as the alternative first law officer. The former shadow Attorney General resigned because he just doesn’t believe Dutton's claim that the Voice would make no difference or that, even worse, it would be a net negative. Leeser framed his resignation as a matter of classic liberal principle, "I believe that by empowering people and building institutions that shift responsibility and decision making closer to people, we'll more likely shift the dial on Indigenous health, education, housing, safety and economic advancement."

Or perhaps it is simply that Dutton would prefer not to listen to any indigenous voices at all since that is the effect of his ‘alternative’ offering, effectively capping any consultation at the municipal level.

In this sense, the old-fashioned bigotry of the National Party, which straight up denies the need for anything to change or even to evolve, is the more honest position.

No contradictions for those fucking bigots.

Nor for Pauline Hanson, God help us, who tortured Simon Birmingham just a little bit this week, calling on him to resign and join Leeser on the back bench. You’re in a whole heap of trouble when Hanson is giving you lessons on political principles.

Birmingham did not resign, not as I type this anyway. But he looks so painfully twisted out of shape on this that his time must surely draw near.

Dutton’s too.

He may well wreck this referendum for the sake of a win, any win, no matter the cost. All so that he can lead his angry, ill-favoured rump of a party to an even worse defeat than Morrison did.

His performance in Alice Springs, in which crept back to a favourite discursive slur, raising the spectre of child sexual abuse to blow up any chance of considered discussion, doesn’t so much beg the question of how he will comport himself in leading the No campaign, as answer it.

He did the same thing when vilifying refugees.

Remember this?

He had a similar encounter in Alice, trying to hang an epidemic of child sexual abuse around the neck of the prime minister. When asked to provide proof by a local journalist, he had no data to back up his story.

If you’re wondering how low Dutton is willing to go for a win, any win against Alabanese, wonder no more.

But I remain hopeful.

I know that millions of people will vote No later this year. Some for reasons they consider just, many from ignorance or apathy, and many more from bad faith.

But I lean into the hope that change isn’t just coming, it’s already here. The demographic earthquake that will see the boomers removed as the most significant tribe in the electorate has already started. The old arguments and fear mongering that failed in the marriage equality vote, should fail here too.

I lean into the hope that there are more people of good faith than bad and that the No case is just the dying rasp of the punishers and straighteners. That we will get this done, not as an end but as a beginning.

And that the morning after the vote, Peter Dutton will resign his post in shame.