Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has laid out her vision for an “advancement movement” in Indigenous affairs, in which welfare-dependent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people do the jobs in their communities currently done by fly-in, fly-out workers, and “meet the standards other Australians are expected to meet”.
The opposition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman also calls for an end to an implied acceptance of cultural payback, arranged marriage, apportioning tragedies and mishaps to sorcery and other practices that are “anathema to modern culture”. As her home base of Alice Springs enters its second curfew this year to curb youth violence, and the nation struggles to find a new policy path after the failure of the voice to parliament referendum, Senator Nampijinpa Price has declared there is a “second way” to close the gap.
“We know where the gap is – it is 20 per cent of the 3 per cent,” the Northern Territory senator writes in an essay on history commissioned for The Australian’s 60th Anniversary Collector’s Edition magazine, published on Saturday.
“It’s remote Indigenous Australians, many of whom do not have English as a first language. We already know that we can either fix or exacerbate that by school attendance.
“There should be no fly-in, fly-out workers in communities with Indigenous Australians on welfare.”
Senator Price – a Warlpiri-Celtic woman from Alice Springs – has set out her arguments for an “advancement movement” and her hope for “real reconciliation and integration”, as she works on the Indigenous affairs policy she and Peter Dutton will take to the next election.
She describes the advancement movement as “a second way”.
“We can continue along the separatist road that sees Indigenous Australians as irrevocably damaged by settlement and wants to keep Aboriginal culture stuck in time like a museum piece,” Senator Nampijinpa Price writes.
“Traditional culture is romanticised by those who do not live it, while reinvention of culture has become an industry in the name of reconciliation for the purpose of political influence.
“This (separatist) way forward leaves negative parts of Indigenous culture alone to grow and fester. Things like violent cultural payback, arranged marriage and apportioning tragedies and mishaps to sorcery, all of which are anathema to modern culture.
“This is a view that lowers standards for Indigenous Australians … This has been the strategy of decades of government agencies and academic activists, and yet they fail to draw the obvious connection between this approach and the failure to make much ground on Closing the Gap.”
Senator Nampijinpa Price has never supported a truth-telling commission as proposed by the Greens in parliament last week. Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney on Tuesday said the government would look at the nature of the proposal.
Sources have told The Australian that Labor will block any judicial model that would in any way replicate the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa. Instead, it has been consulting communities that prefer truth-telling projects potentially overseen by a central body. The Albanese government has left this work to states.
“My personal view is that it needs to be more of a community-led initiative that brings people together,” Ms Burney told ABC on Tuesday.
Senator Nampijinpa Price expresses her concern about truth-telling because, as she tells The Australian in a video interview to be published with her essay, it has been “driven by this notion that somehow modern non-Indigenous Australians have to compensate for what occurred to Aboriginal people in our country’s history”.
But she said Australia needed to understand the atrocities that occurred at and after colonisation, which included the murders of many of her Warlpiri family in the last sanctioned massacre at Coniston in 1928. “Seventy-five years after that we had a commemorative ceremony and invited those descendants of those who killed our family … (we told them) ‘we don’t blame you for what happened in our country’s history’.
“We recognised those were hard times but we are now together as Australians moving forward, and I think that is one of the greatest acts of reconciliation I’ve ever been part of.”
Senator Nampijinpa Price said guilt politics was like racism because “it denies the truth and it doesn’t help anybody progress”.
“We need a second way: the advancement movement. Under this movement, we are all Australians. We can learn and cherish our Indigenous culture while still meeting the same standards that every other Australian is expected to meet,” she writes in her essay.
“Our culture will be respected like never before when Indigenous Australians are making it thrive under their own steam and not as part of a welfare industry. That culture will become part of our national tapestry, rather than a separate story to be fought over.”
Senator Nampijinpa Price was the Coalition’s most potent weapon during the debate that culminated in a failed referendum for an Indigenous voice in October 2023. Her decision to join right-wing activist group Advance in February 23 was a landmark for the No campaign.
She said the nation needed a nuanced understanding of its own history, including what is great about the nation that emerged from it. She said few younger Australians were taught that King George instructed Governor Arthur Phillip to “live in amity and kindness” with Aboriginal people and to punish crimes against them. “Of course, the British settlers did not always live up to King George’s instructions, but that doesn’t change the fact the instructions were given,” she writes.
“Even … when barbaric crimes were committed against Aboriginal Australians, the civilising rule of law often played out. The infamous Myall Creek massacre in 1838 marks a dark and bloody moment in our history, when 28 Indigenous Australians were murdered by British settlers. But the activists have done a good job of playing down what happened after the massacre.
“Contemporary sources indicate that while there were pockets of excuse-making for the perpetrators, there was also clearly an abiding desire of the colony as a whole to do the right thing. The attorney-general, John Plunkett, prosecuted the perpetrators and then – when they were acquitted on a technicality – he prosecuted them again. Seven white men were thus found guilty and hanged.”
Read the essay in full on Saturday in the 60th Anniversary Collector’s Edition magazine.