Ray Martin showing “contempt” to no voters in heated rant reveals he sucks at winning friends and influencing people

It hardly takes a psychology degree to know you don’t win friends and influence people by calling them names.

As the best-selling self-help author Dale Carnegie once wrote: “If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive”.

So why do prominent pro-Voice advocates like Ray Martin choose intemperate language to describe the “dinosaurs and ****heads” who populate the morally bankrupt land on the other side of the argument?

Have they given up on persuasion because they secretly hope that next week’s referendum will be lost?

Regardless of the quality of the product they are selling, the retail skills of prominent Yes advocates, including the Prime Minister, have been profoundly unimpressive.

Their product knowledge has been abysmal, rendering many Yes advocates incapable of answering questions.

No salesman in the history of used cars has closed a deal by scorning their customers for failing to read the handbook.

So when the PM was asked quite reasonably if Voice representatives would be paid, he was hardly going to win the hearts of 2GB listeners by telling Ben Fordham to “go and have a look at the Calma-Langton report. It’s 260 words of detail.”

The pattern of clumsy responses continued when Neil Mitchell asked the PM if he agreed with the supplementary document attached to the Uluru Statement.

“I haven’t read it. There’s 120 pages — why would I?” Albanese answered.

The Yes campaign is a masterclass in not selling a product.

If Anthony Albanese and Martin were running a supermarket, they wouldn’t have to worry about restocking the shelves since nothing would have walked out of the door.

Persistence is essential to sales success but should always be distinct from obstinacy.

Successful salespeople learn from rejections and remain alert to their own mistakes.

They employ emotional intelligence to navigate difficult conversations and build stronger relationships.

They stay positive, remain motivated and focused on their targets.

The mystery is that Albanese and Martin are hardly novices in the selling game.

Martin made a successful career by preventing customers from walking away between ad breaks.

Albanese proved he could sell snow to Eskimos last year when he persuaded sane voters to buy his government.

We must conclude that the main goal for the Yes campaigners is not a victory for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but a victory for themselves.

The prize is a dividend of virtue that will increase their moral stature.

As Thomas Sowell perceptively observed, the vision of the anointed is not just a vision of how social justice crusaders want the world to be but a vision of themselves.

Albanese’s argues for the Voice are sentimental rather than concrete.

He promises Yes voters the joy of feeling warm and fuzzy inside.

“It will make us feel better about who we are as a nation,” he told Kieran Gilbert on Sky News on July.

“It will send a signal to ourselves and to the world that we’re a mature nation that is coming to terms with the fullness of our history, and that we’re proud of sharing this great continent of ours with the oldest continuous culture on earth.”

Albanese’s argument that the Voice will make practical improvements to the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians may be underwhelming.

He is on firmer ground, however, with naked appeal to virtue signallers.

The Voice leans less to ambition to change the world than to be seen as the kind of person who wants to change it.

The yes symbol is a badge of honour, the medal proving that you are more intelligent, compassionate and selfless than the rest.

The conviction of Yes advocates is characteristic of what Sowell describes as the unconstrained vision of the world.

They believe they have the solution to Aboriginal people’s complex challenges.

When detail or evidence is requested, they appear dumbfounded because the answer is axiomatic.

It stems from the hubris of imagining that one is blessed with more wisdom than the average Joe, a hubris that tends to flourish in those who spend their early adult years studying at university.

When Martin excited the Marrickville crowd by sneering at the brainless idiots in the no camp and their statement, he and his audience luxuriated in the joy of reaffirming their superior moral worth.

They are blessed with the intelligence that allows them to order other people’s affairs better than people can organise their own.

A victory in the referendum, anything close to the 90.4 per cent Yes vote at the 1967 referendum, is the last thing they want.

It would deprive them of the joy of condemning others as racist and ignorant, instantly devaluing the moral currency they have accumulated and eroding the margin of virtue between themselves and the kind of Australians who listen to Ben Fordham.

Which explains the PM’s sneer at Fordham’s questions rather than answer them.

It demonstrates Martin’s contempt for Australians so ignorant that they won’t sign a document without reading the fine print.

“At this stage of the game, the details simply don’t matter,” he told his audience. “They never did matter, honestly. They’re irrelevant.”

A defeat by the margin, the polls are suggesting, will do nothing to deter the social justice adventurists.

On the contrary, it will demonstrate that most Australians are further down the evolutionary chain than they imagined.

The defeat of the Voice will mark the end of one movie script in the eternal franchise, starring themselves as crusaders bravely confronting giant pre-historic beasts in a dark and threatening world.

In the words memorably delivered by Samuel L Jackson in Jurassic Park, “Hold on to your butts”.

Nick Cater is senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.