Jubilant Penny Wong's cryptic swipe at her critics after her Voice gaffe almost derailed Albo's landslide election win
Penny Wong has made a defiant Acknowledgement of Country on election night, after her Voice gaffe caused campaign woes for Labor earlier in the week.
Wong sparked a furore on Wednesday by predicting that the Voice - a separate indigenous body with powers to influence government legislation - will still be introduced despite it being voted down 60 per cent to 40 per cent in a 2023 referendum.
'We'll look back on it in 10 years' time and it'll be a bit like marriage equality,' Senator Wong told the Betoota Talks podcast.
'I always used to say, marriage equality, which took us such a bloody fight to get that done, and I thought, all this fuss... It'll become something, it'll be like, people go "did we even have an argument about that?"'
Her backing for the indigenous body came just three days after Anthony Albanese ruled out any attempt to bring back the Voice, telling the leaders' debate: 'It's gone... I respect the outcome (of the referendum), we live in a democracy.'
Albanese was forced to respond to Wong's comments and reassure voters that he was not planning another referendum, while the foreign minister made an apparent backflip, telling SBS, 'the Voice is gone... the prime minister has made that clear, and the Australian people have made their position clear, and we respect the result of the referendum.'
After Labor swept to victory in Saturday night's election, Wong took the stage at a Labor party in Sydney to introduce Albanese.
She made a point of performing a brief Acknowledgement of Country in her speech.
'The power in our 26 million people from more than 300 ancestries... from the oldest continuing civilisation on the planet and I acknowledge the traditional owners, friends we love this country,' she said.
Albanese then performed another Acknowledgement of Country in his own speech.
'I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet,' the Prime Minister said to cheers from supporters.
'And I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet.'
The Voice campaign was a major blow for the Labor government and Albanese, who hitched his legacy to the proposal.
He went to the 2022 federal election with the referendum promise, spoke about it in his first speech as the PM and campaigned tirelessly for most of 2023.
Wong's podcast interview earlier this week was seen as a political gift to Peter Dutton, who quickly accused the foreign minister of 'letting the cat out of the bag'.
'Under a Labor-Greens government we see this secret plan to legislate the Voice and Penny Wong has let that cat out of the bag,' Dutton said.
'People will be opposed to that because they thought they sent a very clear message to the Prime Minister that they didn't want the Voice.'
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