Raised Voices: The battle over Indigenous recognition turns ugly

By Lisa Visentin

The three Indigenous women at the vanguard of the referendum debate – Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney, CLP senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, and Greens First Nations spokeswoman Lidia Thorpe.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen, Rhett Wyman

Northern Territory Country Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price cemented her status this week as the leading flamethrower for the campaign against an Indigenous Voice to parliament.

A Walpiri-Celtic woman who joined the Nationals’ ranks at the May election, Price’s position as the party’s sole Indigenous MP and the esteem in which she is held by colleagues made her a critically influential figure in its decision to adopt a policy position formally opposing the Voice.

But as she stood with Nationals leader David Littleproud to defend the move at a press conference on Monday, she gratuitously blasted Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney for “dripping with Gucci” as she travelled by private jet to remote communities to “tell people in the dirt what’s good for them”.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price speaks at the announcement of the National Party’s opposition to the proposed Voice.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Framing the debate in zero-sum terms, Price said the Voice would empower “the elites” at the expense of marginalised Indigenous Australians in remote communities, particularly those in the NT on whose behalf she claimed to speak, insisting they were more concerned about challenges such as alcohol-fuelled violence in their communities.

“They’re not sitting around waiting for a [Voice] proposal to come up with details as to how it’s going to improve their lives,” she said.

Price is a conservative firebrand whose contrarian views on Indigenous issues made her a regular on the right-wing media circuit, where she frequently railed against the “woke” and “virtue-signalling left” and tore down so-called left-wing shibboleths that Aboriginal people were victims of a “continued imaginary white oppression”.

To her supporters, her first speech to the Senate was a barnstorming confirmation of her role as a teller of uncomfortable truths and the war she would wage against the Voice, which she declared a “virtuous act of symbolic gesture” that would divide black and white Australia.

The battle lines drawn by Price on the Voice are not new. The Voice may well be an ambitious, nation-changing idea but its fate will, in part, be determined in the trenches of Aboriginal politics, where there has always been friction over the best way to advance the lives of First Nations people and furious disagreement over who has sufficient credibility to make the case for change.

A remarkable feature of the Voice referendum is that it will be authorised by a parliament that includes a record 11 Indigenous MPs and senators from across the political spectrum. Never have Indigenous politicians had such a platform from which to prosecute the fight for constitutional recognition – a principle that has been agreed to in one form or another by every government since the Howard era.

Perhaps one of the great ironies, then, is that the three Indigenous women who will be at the vanguard of the referendum debate – Price, Burney and Greens First Nations spokeswoman Lidia Thorpe – have such discordant views.

The argument this week was over the Voice’s details or the lack thereof, but the battle exposed several of the political, philosophical and personal fault lines in this high-stakes debate.

Handpicked by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to make the case for constitutional change to the Australian people, Burney eschews culture wars and is widely respected across parliament as a consensus-seeker.

Her attempt this week to lift the debate out of the political weeds, while subtly repudiating the elitist label – a spokesman said she doesn’t own any Gucci – is indicative of her non-confrontational style.

Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney has the task of building a consensus for the Albanese government’s proposal.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

She was raised in the small town of Whitton in the NSW Riverina by her great aunt and uncle, she told the parliament.

“We didn’t have much. I didn’t know my dad until I was 27. Billy and Nina taught me the value of respect and [that] being kind to others doesn’t cost you anything,” she said.

It would be the Australian people, not politicians, who decided the fate of the Voice, she told the chamber, adding it represented the “best chance” at creating a better future for Indigenous Australians after decades of failed government policies.

“A better future that will improve the lives of Indigenous Australians on the ground in practical ways like health, education, and housing. This isn’t about more bureaucracy. This is about making sure voices in remote and regional communities are heard,” she said.

The Voice to parliament was the first of three sequential elements agreed upon by 250 Indigenous leaders in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, along with treaty-making and truth-telling. It was the culmination of years of work that included regional dialogues (town hall-style meetings) with Indigenous people across the country.

Burney’s comments were implicitly aimed at the Nationals and Littleproud, who had sought to justify their opposition to the Voice on the basis that it would do nothing to close the inequality gap and instead would “create another layer of bureaucracy here in Canberra”.

It was a conclusion some Nationals did not accept. Frontbencher Andrew Gee, who was not in the party room meeting when the position was decided, declared in a Facebook post that he was “a long-time supporter of an Indigenous Voice to parliament” and his position “hasn’t changed”.

Meanwhile, the West Australian branch rejected the federal party’s framing of the issue as a choice between the Voice or Closing the Gap, with state leader Mia Davies telling the ABC: “We think that we can do both.”

Sovereignty stand: Greens senator Lidia Thorpe.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

But there is also a question mark over how forcefully the Greens will advocate for the Voice once the referendum campaign gets underway next year. Though they were quick to condemn the Nationals as laggards on First Nations policy this week, their endorsement of the Voice was tepid. They repeated the party’s commitment to seeing all three elements of the Uluru Statement progressed, though they remain more interested in treaty and truth-telling.

Thorpe, who famously walked out of the Uluru Dialogues in protest, is a complicated pick to lead the party’s position on the Voice.

Like Price, Thorpe relishes a take-no-prisoners style of politics, although that’s where the similarities largely end. Thorpe takes her cues from radical Blak activism, viewing with scepticism voices and institutions of authority. She was forced to retake her oath of office earlier this year after she referred to Queen Elizabeth II as “the colonising” Queen, and was criticised in January after tweeting that the colonial system was “burning down” after a fire broke out at Old Parliament House.

After slamming the referendum as a waste of money, putting her at odds with the Greens’ policy position, she has since recalibrated her stance, saying she will not campaign against it.

In a press conference in Parliament House this week, she confirmed she had ongoing concerns that Indigenous people would be ceding their sovereignty by signing up to enshrine the Voice in the “colonial” Constitution.

“The government say that they’re sovereign, we say we’re sovereign,” Thorpe said. “It’s time to negotiate what sovereignty actually looks like in this country. We’ve asked the government to provide evidence to us and to the people of this country, that going into the colonial Constitution won’t cede our sovereignty, and I’m still awaiting that evidence.”

A unifying moment?

The Nationals’ decision to reject the Voice during the preliminary stage of the debate, before the official campaign has kicked off or a date has been set for the national vote, has all but extinguished hopes that the referendum would be a unifying moment for the nation.

Price’s attempt to discredit the Voice as an elitist idea, and paint Burney as a patronising figure seeking to bestow unwanted change on Indigenous people, marked a turning point in the debate when disagreement over sincerely held views devolved into personal attacks.

Pouring fuel on this fire, respected Indigenous lawyer Noel Pearson, a long-time champion of the Voice and member of the government’s handpicked expert advisory group on the referendum, unleashed an ad hominem takedown of Price.

In an interview on ABC Radio National, he said Price had been caught up in a “tragic redneck celebrity vortex” fuelled by right-wing think tanks, the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies, that had manipulated her into punching down on Indigenous Australians.

“They’re the string-pullers. They’re the ones who have lined up behind Jacinta. This has been a campaign in the making over the last three years and their strategy was to find a blackfella to punch down on other blackfellas,” he said.

Australians who were tuning into the Voice debate for the first time were shown signs of what the coming months may hold when the campaign proper kicks off.

Price, who worked as the Indigenous program director at the CIS before entering parliament, condemned the remarks as “ugly”, saying she was “no stranger to attacks from angry men who claim to speak on behalf of Aboriginal Australia”.

After her first speech in the Senate in July, Jacinta Price (second from left) is embraced by (from left) Labor senators Jana Stewart, Malarndirri McCarthy and Pat Dodson.Credit:James Brickwood

Labor senator and Yawuru elder Pat Dodson, the government’s special envoy for the implementation of the Uluru Statement, says the personal attacks risk derailing the debate.

“I always worry about language that goes to the personal attacks on individuals,” Dodson says.

“It’s a tough world in the political realities of life. I don’t try to behave in that way and I certainly don’t support people who do.”

The focus, he says, should be on “the principle of a Voice being enshrined in the Constitution”.

Known as the Father of Reconciliation, Dodson has been at the forefront of the Indigenous rights struggle for decades and served as a royal commissioner on the 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

As a politician, he keeps a relatively low profile and is sparing with his public appearances on a cause that is dear to his heart. But in an interview with this masthead this week, he revealed his fear that a failed referendum would “send a tsunami wave across the international spheres that we are still stuck in our colonial past”.

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