With Robodebt and anonymous No Voice campaign, politics has descended into a dark place, feeding off downward envy

A leaflet appeared in letterboxes in suburban Melbourne in recent days. In her report about Robodebt, Commissioner Catherine Holmes said: "Anti-welfare rhetoric is easy populism, useful for campaign purposes." The same downward envy Before the politics of attacking welfare bludgers that lay behind the way the Coalition government prosecuted its Robodebt scheme, there was the earlier attack on single mothers during the Howard era. It's already a political brawl What seems so lost in the debate about the Voice is that it is – beyond any symbolic issue about recognition or influence – an attempt to rectify systems of government which utterly fail many Indigenous communities in a practical day-to-day sense: the incapacity of local, state and federal governments to deliver services in an appropriate and intelligent way. Perhaps unlike, for example, the coordinated attack on Voice campaigner Thomas Mayo across several news organisations in recent weeks, culminating in the Nine apologises for 'racist' anti-Voice ad, says it shouldn't have been published Photo shows A cartoon advertisment in the australian financial review newspaper depicting Kate Chaney, her father and Thomas Mayo There has been bipartisan condemnation of a "racist" full-page newspaper ad campaigning against the Voice to Parliament, in which a female MP is depicted sitting on her father's knee while he hands money to a Torres Strait Islander man below him.