The Indigenous Australians minister, Linda Burney, says comments made by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price that there were no lasting negative impacts of British colonisation have caused great distress among the Aboriginal community.
The Labor minister also revealed she had faced a “gruelling” two weeks, telling NSW premier Chris Minns she had been on the receiving end of “unbelievably racist” bullying and “appalling” treatment.
Speaking in Kogarah while handing out flyers for the yes campaign on Friday morning, Burney said Price’s comments were “offensive” and “simply wrong”.
“There are many people I’ve spoken to last night, this morning, that are very distressed and quite frankly, pretty disgusted,” she said.
“But I am going to focus on the goal here and that is a successful referendum.
“It’s a real betrayal to the many families that have experienced things like stolen generations,” she said.
“The idea that colonisation in any country … doesn’t have long and far-reaching effects is simply wrong.”
The comments were made by the leader of the Indigenous voice to parliament no campaign and shadow Indigenous Australians minister during her address to the National Press Club in Canberra on Thursday.
During her speech, Price criticised Indigenous organisations, which she claimed sought to “demonise colonial settlement in its entirety and nurture a national self-loathing about the foundations of modern Australian achievement”.
When asked to clarify whether she thought any Indigenous people were suffering negative impacts of colonisation, Price responded “no”.
“I’ll be honest with you, I do not think so. A positive impact? Absolutely. I mean, now we have running water, readily available food,” she said.
Price also suggested if Indigenous Australians had suffered intergenerational trauma from the impacts of colonisation then it would be a similar experience for the descendants of convicts.
“I guess that would mean that those of us whose ancestors were dispossessed of their own country and brought here in chains as convicts are also suffering from intergenerational trauma. So, I should be doubly suffering from intergenerational trauma,” Price said to applause and laughter from her Coalition colleagues.
For 60 years between 1910 and 1970, it’s estimated between one in 10 and possibly as many as one in three Indigenous children were removed from their families and communities.
Under assimilation laws and policies, the children were placed in missions, institutions or with non-Indigenous Australian families with many facing harsh, degrading treatment.
The NT senator later appeared at a News Corp event where she was concerned the voice to parliament would pave the way for treaty and reparations, adding there had been no war with Indigenous Australians.
“You can’t have treaty with your own citizens. There was, as far as I know, not a declaration of war for there to be a treaty,” Price said.
Analysis by Guardian Australia shows between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died in massacres across Australia between 1794 and 1928. It’s estimated between 399 and 440 colonisers died in comparison.
In recent years, the period has been commonly referred to as the Frontier Wars.
The federal opposition leader, Peter Dutton, praised Price as a “brave Indigenous woman” while stopping short of endorsing her claim about colonisation.
“We either accept that people have a broad range of views, or we don’t. The left just say, well, we can only listen to people like Marcia Langton, but people on the right, like Jacinta Price, we can’t listen to,” he told the Today show on Friday morning.
“You’ve got somebody on display who is brave, prepared to stand up for what she believes in and believes passionately about making the better society for Indigenous Australians.”
Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce praised Price for making comments others would be branded as “racist” for stating.
“Jacinta has the capacity to say things that so many other people want to say but we feel unable to say it because we will be cast as racist,” he told Sky News’ Bolt Report on Thursday night.
“It was so good to be able to sit and listen to it in the front row. It will go down in Australia’s history as a totemic moment of politics.”
The federal attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, accused the no campaign of sowing “fear and division across our wonderful country”.
“Hide who you are, cause fear, cause alarm, never actually discuss the actual issue on the ballot paper,” he said of the no campaign when speaking with ABC RN on Friday morning. “We need to get back to what we’ve got to do in four weeks’ time.”
Historian Henry Reynolds said on Friday that Price’s comments were far from the truth.
“It clearly flies in the face of a whole generation of new history that has told us a totally different story,” he told ABC radio.
