OPINION
For all the “progressive” posturing of the Australian left, it was the Liberal Party who elected Australia’s first woman MP in the lower house, Dame Enid Lyons, and Australia’s first Aboriginal parliamentarian, Sir Neville Bonner, and first Aboriginal cabinet minister, Ken Wyatt.
Some political observers are speculating that the Liberal Party may already be fostering Australia’s future first Aboriginal Prime Minister. Somewhat perversely, as an unintended consequence of the current PM’s blundered, divisive, “Indigenous Voice” referendum.
The “No” campaign has transformed Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from a rising star of the centre-right, to a skyrocketing superstar. As co-leader of the No campaign alongside former Labor national president Nyunggai Warren Mundine, Price has become instantly recognisable to a wide audience of Australians. Alongside a cabal of Liberals campaigning to pull the party back from the left and nobble the influence of the dripping wet “moderates”, Price is hooking them in, in town halls and branch meetings across Australia.
The referendum process has created a national forum for newly elected Northern Territory senator Jacinta Yangapi Nampijinpa Price to tell the heartbreaking story of her community.
Price has been travelling the country for the No campaign, telling her story to anyone who will listen. It includes, as she said in her first speech to parliament, that “direct family members have been violently murdered, or died of alcohol abuse, suicide, or alcohol-related accidents” and laments a justice system which is broken because it “serves perpetrators exceptionally better than victims”.
Unlike the usual troughers of Aboriginal politics, though, Price seems set on demolishing the poor-bugger-me, blame-it-on-whitey narrative.
An increasing number of people are listening to the eloquent senator, who couples her focus on the terrible disadvantage in Indigenous communities with a message of empowerment, that Indigenous people can choose their destiny in modern Australia. She made headlines at the National Press Club for her claim that colonisation has been good for Indigenous Australians – a shocking and presumptuous claim to those trapped in the cycle of intergenerational trauma, but a truism in the context in which she put it: running water, readily available food.
Sanitation and nutrition are two fundamental measures of wellbeing that, together with Western-style housing, still dominate conversations over quality of life in remote Indigenous townships. Hearing it said plainly and publicly by an Indigenous woman who is still very much part of her own community as well as part of Canberra is revolutionary. Price is cutting through because her vision of what Australia can and could be for Indigenous people is unashamedly upbeat.
The Age
It’s a vision that’s winning hearts and minds around Australia, and across the political divide.
Much to the fury of the leftist troughocracy. The usual suspects were enraged when Price openly repudiated the central narrative of Aboriginal victimhood: “colonisation”. No Aboriginal Australian alive today, Price asserts, is a “victim of colonisation”. As for the supposed “generational trauma”, she points out that the Celtic half of her ancestry were also dispossessed, at roughly the same time. “So I should be doubly suffering from it.”
“There is no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation … A positive impact? Absolutely. I mean, now we’ve got running water. We’ve got readily available food … if we keep telling Aboriginal people that they are victims, we are effectively removing their agency and then giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives,” she said.
“That is the worst possible thing you can do to any human being, to tell them that they are a victim without agency. And that is what I refuse to do.”
SBS
But it’s a narrative that’s been very lucrative to those who’ve grown fat on the $30 billion-plus annual taxpayer spend on “Indigenous Affairs”. It’s also a narrative that suits the tribal “big men” who, Price has previously accused, hide behind “traditional culture” as an excuse for appalling behaviour by too many Aboriginal Australians, men in particular.
But, in an unintended consequence of Albanese’s botched effort at divide-and-rule, Price is proving to be a great uniter.
“The striking increase in the No vote suggests that Price, as campaign figurehead, has played a big part in winning people over,” says Resolve pollster Jim Reed. “Even progressives, who may not welcome her message in the same way conservatives would, cannot deny the authentic views of a black woman with hard-won experience” […]
The Yes campaign accuses the No campaign of creating division. But perhaps the most uncomfortable thought for Yes campaigners is that far from dividing the country, Price is unifying it around an aspiration for Australia that Yes doesn’t share.
The Age
That aspiration is hope. Hope for an Australia where all are Constitutionally equal, with no special prerogatives carved out for one race and no others. An Australia where Aboriginal Australians are treated as fully human, rather than infantilised as cultural museum pieces, and exploited as cash cows for a kleptocracy grown bloated on taxpayer money.
In other words, the great Australian Fair Go.
No wonder the left is so desperate to shut her down.