That’s pretty much the extent of Cameron’s reflection on the wording of the Brexit referendum question.

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Australia’s last referendum in 1999 offered Cameron some useful parallels and insight. Just like Cameron, John Howard led a centre-right party that was committed to a referendum on a question that he personally opposed. The big difference was that Howard believed the referendum question must include a model for the proposed republic.

In the years before Australia’s 1996 federal election, both major parties planned a republic referendum and explained their different road maps to get there. In 1993, Paul Keating informed the Queen of his preferred approach: a referendum in 1998 or 1999 that would lead to Australia becoming a republic in 2001, the centenary of Federation. The Liberal Party preferred a people’s convention to debate the proposed changes and create a model. This would be followed by a referendum before the end of 2000.

The election of the Howard government in 1996 saw this plan put into action. The convention included elected and appointed delegates who met in Canberra in February 1998. Although some said it couldn’t be done, they eventually thrashed out the compromise model that was put to the people in 1999.

I was at Old Parliament House on one evening during the convention. It was temporarily transformed from being a quiet relic of the past. Instead it was filled with noisy, passionate, argumentative people who were clearly relishing being part of big conversations about the future of Australia. What I remember most from that night were the excited conversations and arguments that were happening all over the building, and spilling out of it too as people tried to get some relief from the Canberra heat.

It is telling that the republic referendum process forged political careers while Brexit has been a politicians’ graveyard. Most notably it ended the premierships of Theresa May and David Cameron. In direct contrast, the republic referendum gave a national platform to Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull and a preview of their intertwined future careers in the Federal Parliament. Other future MPs were also among the delegates of the Constitutional Convention.

To some, the Howard government’s approach was really about peeling off votes from those who supported a republic but didn’t like the model, in a cynical attempt to stop a republic.

But what we see in Britain today may show some of what was avoided. Taking the politics out of the Brexit question may have ticked the boxes under British law, but left a massive political task undone and just to make it even harder, gave it a deadline. It also created an irresistible opportunity for many Remainers to delay, confuse and challenge the validity of the 2016 vote.

Britain may have benefited from some additional layers of democratic input on the way to the Brexit referendum, with some attempt to design a Brexit model. Would it have been possible to distil a Brexit model, with all the inevitable complexity, into a simple but still meaningful referendum question? We will never know, but one of the great flaws of the Brexit process is the apparent failure to even try.