Mark Kenny | The great Australian shouting match surrounding the Voice to Parliament

In fact, for all his scathing insight, Horne probably didn't know the half of it.

In recent weeks, as political manoeuvring has plumbed new lows, there has been little sanction from media commentators and no measurable reproach from electors either.

Rather, if the poll trends are accurate, voters continue to be frightened away from their better first instincts to seek "a more perfect union", to borrow from the American constitution.

Thinking of which, if one of our leaders offended America, there'd be media condemnation, haughty editorials lamenting a crucial lack of judgement, an obvious unfitness for office.

But insult Australia's First Peoples, talk about them as if they are not in the room, impugn their experience and motives? Go right ahead.

Ours is not a country of ideas or ideals. Hard things are routinely denied or trivialised. Think decarbonisation, fast rail, aged care, Aboriginal deaths in custody, and our lax fuel emissions standards (we stand only with Russia on that one).

Horne's point was that as a new-world polity, Australia had fortuitously plumped for what we now parade as our defining strengths - the English common law tradition and Westminster parliamentary democracy. We'd merely taken the path of least resistance - easier than revolution, a war of independence, or even a sophisticated civic discussion.

And it is why 123 years after adopting a constitution about which voters knew nothing, people who have not read it today, revere it as sacrosanct - above improvement. There's that luck again.

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There are those of course who have never been lucky, not when they were deprived of their lands and denied legal status. And not now, when their proposal for meaningful inclusion in the constitution has become the site of high-octane political warfare. More on that in a moment.

For First Australians, there was a path of maximum resistance. Theirs was fierce and prolonged, but ultimately, futile. Then, even that asymmetric struggle was expunged from the record.

As the National Museum of Australia notes of the massacre at Myall Creek. "[It] was just one of a sequence of violent events that accompanied settler expansion in the Gwydir region of north-eastern NSW in the 19th century ... it is telling that a contemporary authority and eyewitness, Muswellbrook police magistrate Edward Denny Day, termed this conflict 'a war of extermination'."

For generation after generation, Australians' knowledge of their own bloody origin story omitted the Frontier Wars and the ugly truths of ethnic cleansing, unlawful detention, forced removal, forced labour, enforced marginalisation and poverty.

Terra Nullius was its legal foundation - an odious fiction that persisted right up to 1992.

Anthropologist William Stanner in his landmark 1968 Boyer Lectures coined the term for this amnesia as "the great Australian silence".

It was another in our cornucopia of "lucks" that we were not even required remember it, let alone atone for it.

Indeed, Indigenous Australians have long been on notice in this Voice campaign - do not go there, do not say anything that might offend, play nice, be positive, stay optimistic, appeal to the better angels. Try not to make anyone feel bad.

At the heart of such advice is a telling frailty. Australians don't take kindly to being reminded of the past, of the "black armband view".

Keep it prosaic and practical. Don't get emotional.

In his 2022 Boyer Lectures, Noel Pearson famously described the country's original inhabitants as "a much unloved people", warning that it would take little impetus for White Australians to turn away.

More recently, Pearson has noticeably swung positive himself, telling Sarah Ferguson on 7.30, "the important thing now is that in the conversation with the Australian people, we can only appeal to goodness".

Politics however, observes no such respect reflecting another observation of Pearson's in that 2022 lecture, Australia's "white versus white over black problem".

"Aboriginal people are the subjects of this fight, but they are not its prime protagonists ... race and the Aboriginal problem of Australia is about white Australians in a cultural and political struggle with other white Australians. It is yet another agenda of the culture wars."

It certainly feels like that as Peter Dutton, channelling his inner-Abbott, depicts the Voice referendum as mere cover for sneaking in a treaty with First Nations.

His escalation follows an interview in which Anthony Albanese unsuccessfully attempted to limit discussion exclusively to the referendum question rather than acknowledge the subsequent elements of Uluru agenda - truth telling and agreement-making.

Said Dutton, "on 34 occasions he told Australians he was committed to implementing the Uluru Statement in full ... he was asked seven times whether he supported treaty and seven times refused to give a direct answer".

Leaving his vaulting self-interest aside, Dutton had a point.

No doubt the Prime Minister's response conformed to the best strategic media advice. But had that advice weighed the even higher credibility cost of sounding tricky and evasive?

Albanese would be safer standing proudly by what he believes and has already asserted. That alone would put him well ahead of his increasingly desperate opponent.