Contrary to the blatherskite of the racially “Indigenous Voice” proposal, Aboriginal people already have a voice to parliament. It’s called a “vote”. There are a plethora of other Aboriginal “voices”, too: quangos and taxpayer-funded corporations supposed to advance Aboriginal interests.
Supposed to. Too often, it seems, such bodies are usurped by the self-interested and the venal. Australia spends twice as much on Aboriginal Australians as other citizens. Except that too many Aboriginal people see little gain for it.
It often seems that that’s because the truly impoverished Aboriginal people in remote communities are out-clouted. By urbanised, well-off “Indigenous” people. Many of whom, it seems, are of the “my great-grandmother was one-quarter Aboriginal” variety. These troughers hoover up grants and sinecures, while women and children in remote communities suffer appalling violence and abuse.
Those “forgotten people” may be about to get an unapologetic advocate in Canberra. Someone used to standing up to the bullies and troughers of the Aboriginal Industry.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, deputy mayor of Alice Springs, has been nominated to the top spot on the Country Liberal Party’s Senate ticket. Barring a significant electoral upset, she will almost certainly become a parliamentarian late next year.
Price’s path to Canberra should mark the moment when old agendas are not only challenged and repudiated but replaced with new ideas that could help improve the lives of our most disadvantaged communities.
Price came to prominence five years ago when she delivered an address to the Centre for Independent Studies, a Sydney-based public-policy think tank that I head.
Titled Homeland Truths: The Unspoken Epidemic of Violence in Indigenous Communities, Price’s lecture was a powerful call to stop the violence against women and children that predominantly Aboriginal men inflicted.
As head of the CIS’s Indigenous affairs program, Price has scored intellectual points with a new political paradigm based on empowerment, the virtues of the work ethic and a recognition of the limits of state power to correct societal ills.
For that, Price has endured relentless, often openly racist, attacks from the left and certain quarters of the Aboriginal Establishment. Earlier this year, the ABC was forced to issue a formal apology to Price. Former ALP National President Warren Mundine has also been subject to similar attacks.
What really angers the left about Price and Mundine is their message that Aboriginal people have to stop the abuse and drop the welfare mentality – and that the political-cultural elite has to give up its addiction to empty symbolism.
Price, the 40-year-old Walpiri-Celtic deputy mayor of Alice Springs, offers constructive alternatives to the Black Lives Matter narrative, which argues that systemic racism is responsible for Indigenous woes. She wants to base policy on evidence to deliver practical solutions and meaningful outcomes.
Here are a few policy areas she highlights in her recent paper on Indigenous disadvantage:
Education reform: remote Indigenous children are still not taught basic skills in reading and writing in English, so they should receive bilingual teaching to introduce phonics, proper grammar and alphabet learning in earlier grades.
Welfare reform: when there are poor education outcomes, there are poor job outcomes, and people end up dependent on welfare, which hinders individual initiative, risk-taking, personal responsibility and opportunity. So policymakers should encourage training in entrepreneurship, which creates businesses and jobs, reducing poverty and welfare dependency.
Even more threatening to the Aboriginal Establishment and especially the “Big Men” who rule it with iron fists, is Price’s pushback on using “customary law” and blaming “colonialism” as an excuse for violence and abuse.
Under Aboriginal customary law, many Indigenous townships are blighted with a high incidence of murders, suicides, assaults and child abuse. Blaming colonisation and racism for these atrocities exonerates violent offenders and masks murder as manslaughter. This must change.
It’s true Price’s rise to power will be a genuine watershed only if these policy shifts are put into place. That will require the determination of leaders in both major political parties and pressure from an alert public to force the political class to shake things up.
The Australian
Which is why Price is being so relentlessly attacked by the left and the Aboriginal industry. She, along with others of a new wave of Aboriginal leadership, threatens some very powerful and lucrative vested interests.
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