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Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Prime Minister Albanese in parliament on Wednesday.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton criticised the prime minister for resolving to ditch the pamphlet before deciding to reverse course.

“It was frankly quite arrogant of the prime minister to believe that he didn’t need to provide details to the Australian people. Now,in the cases we’ve seen in the past,the government has published a booklet which has the Yes or No cases put so that people can look at the information,” Dutton said on Wednesday.

He said the pamphlet would be an important source of information for older Australians or migrants with limited English if they could read it in their first language.

The pamphlet and equal funding to the Yes and No cases are theCoalition’s key demands as the government looks to pass the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Amendment Bill 2022,which sets out the way the referendum will be run,before introducing separate legislation to authorise the referendum.

The report into the bill by the parliament’s joint standing committee on electoral matters is expected within days.

Among the proposed changes in the bill is the suspension of section 11 of the Referendum Machinery Act,which obligates the Australian Electoral Commission to distribute an official pamphlet outlining the proposed change to the Constitution,comprising up to 2000 words each on the Yes and No cases,with the wording to be decided by members of parliament backing the respective sides.

It is unclear whether this process will be kept or what form the pamphlet will take. Negotiations between Special Minister of State Don Farrell and opposition frontbencher Jane Hume are ongoing,with the Coalition pushing for the pamphlet to include an explicit Yes and No case.

Until now,the Albanese government had maintained the pamphlet was an outdated way to inform voters in a digital age,with Assistant Minister Patrick Gorman telling the parliament last year that politicians could instead communicate directly with their constituents via TV,email and social media.

The official pamphlet laying out the Yes and No cases from the 1999 republic campaign.Credit:AFR

Constitutional law experts George Williams and Anne Twomey,members of the government’s legal advisory group on the referendum,have noted that official pamphlets in previous referendums had often been riddled with misinformation,hyperbole and falsehoods designed to convince voters to back a particular side rather than assisting them to make an informed decision.

But they and other pro-Voice groups gave evidence to the inquiry on the need for the government to explain how it would distribute objective and authoritative information if it ditched the pamphlet.

The Central Land Council in its submission to the inquiry called for the pamphlet to be retained,saying Indigenous people in central Australia often had limited phone or internet access. It suggested the pamphlet be limited to four pages written by an independent panel explaining the proposed constitutional change,with translations into Aboriginal languages made available.

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