Jacinta Nampijinpa Price a new and powerful figure on our landscape

Great article in today's Australian by Paul Kelly.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a true Australian, and puts to shame Langton, Burney etc.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/jacinta-prices-alternative-to-the-indigenous-voice-to-parliament-is-a-vision-for-the-future/news-story/4c36bbc221c22433a93aaf21b6e39974

SURPRISE VOICE SEEKS END TO SEPARATISM

Paul Kelly

Australian democracy is about to be shaken up. It has been a nasty week on the campaign trail and in parliament, where the voice is in trouble.

But something else is emerging – an assertion that rejecting the voice is the gateway to a better destiny for Indigenous peoples. If the voice is rejected on October 14 much can be attributed to indigenous senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who is turning into a new and powerful figure on our landscape – among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples – and whose vision is a systemic rejection of the orthodoxy surrounding the voice and Indigenous political power.

Price is not just saying No to the voice. She is saying yes to a different vision – that Indigenous peoples must be joined together in the wider nation, that they not be seen as separate, that the long-run goal must be the phasing out of separate Indigenous institutions and special policies. For Price, these are the problems. Price opposes the voice because she sees it as the latest step in a tragic, mistaken direction for Australia that must be reversed.

Price says the essence of her campaign is “a fight against those who want to divide our nation”. But her targets are both establishments, the non-Indigenous and the Indigenous power structures. This is a unique position; we haven’t seen it before. This is what makes the referendum so potentially significant in its consequences.

Her immediate goal is to defeat the referendum. But behind any such defeat Price has a vision for Indigenous peoples and the nation utterly anathema to conventional progressive wisdom. A referendum defeat will guarantee a new cycle of dispute about our future direction.

Price says “it is only an elite few” who want the voice. She says its Aboriginal proponents “have had years at the table”. She thinks the voice seeks to perpetuate an unrepresentative Indigenous industry. Price wants no treaty, and an end to the constant debate about racism, rejecting the remarks this week from high-profile Indigenous academic and leader Marcia Langton that the No campaign is based in racism or stupidity.

Price dismissed as a lie that Aboriginal people did not have a voice, saying they had 11 voices in parliament.

She branded as another lie the insistence by Anthony Albanese that the voice was an act of courtesy by Indigenous Australia. “The claim that this is an invitation from Indigenous people to the rest of Australia is the second lie that the voice is built upon,” Price told the National Press Club.

“To say this has come from ‘First Nations people’ plays into backwards, neo-colonial racial stereotyping, suggesting that all Aboriginal people think the same, feel the same and want for the same things.”

She radiates a different view from Aboriginal Australia. Coming from the Northern Territory with a grassroots family experience of violence against women and children, and a critic of the existing Indigenous institutions, Price fights the Indigenous status quo. She says Indigenous peoples will be better off without an Indigenous constitutional institution. She demands accountability for existing Aboriginal structures and a rejection of the claims of inner-city activists to speak for all Aboriginal peoples.

Price is a revisionist, a radical and a conservative, a mix that bends the minds of the political and media establishment. This was apparent in her NPC performance. She repudiates the entire narrative of invasion trauma and the claims that Indigenous peoples today still suffer from colonisation. Indeed, she said colonial settlement had a “positive impact” – nominating running water and readily available food.

These remarks will infuriate the power structure, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. They demand modification since they deny too much of the historical record. Peter Dutton cannot afford to repeat them.

Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney repudiated Price, saying her remarks betrayed the experience of many First Nations peoples. But this inevitable debate risks being a distraction for the Yes camp.

While Price’s blanket rejection of any downside of colonisation doesn’t work, what does work is the point she’s trying to get across: the historical narrative of Aboriginal people as victims since 1788 is counter-productive, constitutes a misleading “romanticism” of Aboriginal culture and works against Indigenous agency.

The media will focus on the colonisation hook to discredit Price, but this misses the greater significance of her position: Price’s alternative vision for Indigenous Australians will have wide appeal and if the referendum is defeated it will trigger a new, different and divisive debate about how Australians relate to one another.

“If we keep telling Aboriginal people that they are victims, we are effectively removing their agency,” Price said. She denounced separatism and attributing the causes of Aboriginal disadvantage to “racism and colonisation”, saying that putting “grievance before fact” ruined commonsense policies. Asked about more people nominating themselves as Indigenous, Price knew why: that happened when you prioritised race, not need. This was Australia’s national blunder, putting race before need.

Her performance at the NPC was astonishing for a politician elected only last year. Price cuts through. Her content is forthright, strident, yet compelling. Price is persuasive. She says things other politicians can’t say or would never dream of saying. She is going to become popular because she deals in common sense. She wants a united country, Aboriginal people in a broad Australia, not endless demands for separate rules, norms and institutions.

She speaks from the ground up, but she’s smart. Australians look at her face and know who this woman is. Price arrives culturally free. She speaks from the heart. She doesn’t speak the reconciliation vernacular or the culture of Aboriginal dispossession. Other politicians seem reluctant to challenge her. But that will change. The progressive elites will try to destroy her. She’s dangerous. Does she realise how dangerous her message is? She will unleash forces that will reverberate through the left and right of politics for years.

Price said the long-run goal should be the eventual phasing out of the separate Indigenous Australians ministers because they wouldn’t be required. A constitutionally enshrined voice implied “the gap will exist in perpetuity and that is not what we want”.

In short, she rejects the moral foundations on which much Indigenous policy in this country has been based for the past two generations. She rejects the narrative now dominant in our schools, universities, progressive media and corporations. Price, unsurprisingly, will interpret any defeat of the voice as having far wider implications for Australia.

This is not what the Prime Minister envisaged when he launched this referendum, backed by an alliance of elite, corporate, celebrity, institutional, professional and sporting bodies on a scale unprecedented since World War II. Australia’s elites are in the process of being administered a huge shock.

The referendum contest remains open. The Yes case is redoubling its efforts. Its determination and capacity remain strong. It has an army of volunteers and is well financed. But the startling feature of the contest, so far, is the quality and credibility of the Indigenous leadership of the No camp headed by Price and Warren Mundine and supported by indigenous Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle.

For Price, there’s a danger: beware the mad populist right claiming any referendum win and claiming Price. She will need astute political advice. Her worst mistake would be to allow herself to be manipulated and exploited by the extreme right and inept conservatives in this country. They are political poison. These people will be a menace after any referendum loss and would represent the sure path to diminishing her remarkable brand.

Australia’s mainstream and corporate elites have been taken by surprise in this campaign. They never saw this coming; they never did proper due diligence on the referendum. How serious are these people? Many felt changing our Constitution was a calculated deal to appeal to their Indigenous staff. A referendum defeat will repudiate their judgment and their conception of their own country. It will show they misread Australian values, knew nothing of Indigenous politics, ventured into territory they didn’t understand and demonstrated that they cannot be trusted on the strategic decisions about the nation’s future identity.

Price tied together the nexus of elites. She attacked Canberra politicians who were Yes supporters but who “listened to the Qantas-sponsored leaders of the activist industry”, not to ordinary Aboriginal women who had come to the national capital seeking help.

“The voice will become yet another battleground for many Aboriginal voices to disagree,” Price said. “This division must be rejected and certainly must not be enshrined within our Constitution.”

It is doubtful if there has ever been an insiders-outsiders contest on this scale in our history. The strategy of the Yes camp was to build an alliance of institutional and community support. Albanese still invokes this alliance.

While the full scale of respective financial support will not be known until after the referendum the Yes camp was backed by an April announcement of $17m from a range of rich philanthropists and family foundations. The Ramsay Foundation has provided $5m, Qantas is flying the Yes campaigners around the country, BHP, Rio Tinto and Wesfarmers donated $2m each.

This week Albanese told the parliament: “Every major business in Australia is supporting the Yes campaign. Woolworths, Coles, Telstra, BHP, Rio Tinto, the Business Council of Australia, the Catholic Church, the Imams Council, the Australian Football League, the National Rugby League, Rugby Australia and Netball Australia are all supporting the Yes campaign.”

The actual list, of course, is far longer, running into hundreds of community and professional organisations. The weight of institutional middle-class Australia has aligned with the Yes case. The No side has support including financial supporters but nothing on this scale.

Yet the week revealed, again, the central problem of the Yes campaign – public concern that the voice will divide the nation. From the start the obstacle for the Yes camp was the model of the voice, a point repeatedly made by many authorities who were treated with contempt by the Albanese government. The voice, by definition, is a group rights political body based on ancestry and granted unique advisory access to parliament and government – a model that is contentious and raises a series of doubts that have not been answered.

Yes advocates saw their efforts sabotaged this week by Langton – who has a long record of courageous achievement for her people – but who told a Bunbury forum last Sunday that the No case was anchored in “base racism” or “just sheer stupidity”.

This followed Noel Pearson the previous week seeking to win over the soft Noes, talking compassion, saying the voice was about love and attempting to put a positive frame around the proposal. Langton retaliated saying she had been misrepresented but doubled down on her original claims referring to “the very base and frankly stupid and racist claims being made by the No campaign”.

This only provoked the release of several further clips, one quoting her from July this year saying that 20 per cent of voters – the hard Noes – “are the ones who are spewing the racism”. In 2020 she said Aboriginal families had been broken apart by social workers “who are, by and large, white and racist”. A further clip from several years ago had Langton saying Australia was a “horrible racist country”.

As Dennis Shanahan said in this paper Langton, a distinguished academic and force for Aboriginal advancement, is not a politician accustomed to campaigns. Her message conflicted with the Yes strategy and real damage had been done.

With much of the media struck senseless, The Australian Financial Review’s political editor, Phillip Coorey, made the pertinent point: what made Langton’s comments “so reckless” was that this was the precise evidence about racism the No camp wanted to be able to exploit.

Moreover, in August 2018, in The Saturday Paper, Langton had patronised Price and her mother, Bess Price, in an offensive manner, branding them the “useful coloured help” for right-wing think tanks, the Bennelong Society or the Centre for Independent Studies, thereby raising suspicions “about their motives” when speaking about violence in Aboriginal communities.

Langton has made mistakes. But the No campaign is just as guilty, if not more guilty, of racist and offensive comments and misinformation. This week, therefore, should serve as a break point: the country cannot spend the next month sinking into accusations and counter-accusations about racism.

In a depressing and complex week, an example of our better selves suddenly sprang from multicultural Australia. Independent MP Dai Le, who arrived in this country as a Vietnamese refugee, interviewed on Sky News by Laura Jayes and talking with emotion, described Australia as a country “growing and maturing”, pointing out “there are flaws in any society”, conceding there were some racist people but asserting that “Australia is not a racist country”. This was the generosity and balance the week badly needed. At the same time Warren Mundine branded talk of racism as “madness” and said “whatever the result we have to come together”. He said he had just met and “cuddled” football legend Michael Long, who had walked from Melbourne to Canberra for the Yes cause.

The week in parliament was ugly and emotional, dominated by a slanging match of accusation between Albanese and Dutton. It was conspicuous for post-referendum blame-game positioning. Indeed, the blame game is a potent force hurting the referendum.

Feeling the momentum behind the No cause Dutton attacked Albanese: “He doubles down and he stands before the Australian people as the first Prime Minister in our country’s history who will seek to divide our country right down the middle.” And Albanese said of Dutton: “When it comes to dishonesty and division, when it comes to fear and campaigns and falsehoods, this bloke wrote the book.”

The problem is that attacking Dutton won’t win the referendum. This is not an election campaign. Treating it as an election campaign is folly. The people are not being asked to choose between Albanese and Dutton; they are being asked to vote in a referendum, and the only way Albanese can win is to build a broad based voting alliance. He needs to persuade.

At week’s end this is where the Prime Minister finished. Welcoming Long’s arrival in Canberra, Albanese was positive and eloquent. “Changing a constitution is tough,” Albanese said. “It’s hard. We knew that at the beginning of this journey. It didn’t stop us from stepping out. And not for a day, not for a day have I regretted that decision. And not a single Indigenous leader who I’ve met has asked for anything other than to keep stepping forward. Michael Long has made a lot of steps all the way the way from Melbourne. He’s a great Australian who cares for his people.”

The Yes camp says it still has a narrow path to victory. All his life Albanese has been a political warrior. His path to victory lies in promoting the notion of twin ideas of reconciliation and Aboriginal responsibility. A month is still a long time.