The shadow Indigenous Australians minister, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, in her address to the National Press Club included several instances where the no campaign leader appeared to misrepresent key aspects of the referendum or create confusion over key sections of her portfolio.
Nampijinpa Price several times also declined to endorse the opposition leader, Peter Dutton’s, alternative policy to the proposed Indigenous voice, further throwing into question exactly what the Coalition would do on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues if elected to government.
The Indigenous Australians minister, Linda Burney, accused her counterpart of a “betrayal”, following the Nationals senator’s hotly contested claim that British colonisation had no ongoing impact on Indigenous Australians.
Here we look at five key claims made in Nampijinpa Price’s speech.
The voice’s power
Price took issue with the fact that the proposed constitutional amendment says the voice “may make representations” to parliament and executive government about matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. She claimed it meant the voice would “be more like a lobby group” that would act “only in the interests of its clients, not the interests of the government, the parliament or even the nation”.
However the legal advice of federal solicitor general Stephen Donaghue, released months ago in April, said the voice’s representations would have to be on matters with a “sufficient connection” to Indigenous people, and not an “insubstantial, tenuous or distant” connection.
The advice said the voice would not impose any obligations upon the executive to follow the voice’s representations, or consult with the voice before making decisions, and that the voice would also have no power of veto over parliament decisions.
Donaghue’s legal advice goes on to state the voice’s power to make representations to executive government “does not impose any reciprocal requirement upon the Executive Government to consider or otherwise address those representations” – and that the proposed constitutional amendment gives parliament the power to set the legal weight of the voice’s representations.
“The influence of the Voice’s representations to the Parliament will be a matter to be determined by political considerations, rather than legal considerations,” he wrote.
Donaghue wrote the voice would “enhance” Australia’s system of government. He wrote it would help in “overcoming barriers that have historically impeded effective participation by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”, and “rectify a distortion in the existing system”.
Senior government sources also strongly refuted Nampijinpa Price’s claim about the distinction between advice and representations.
The voice’s composition
The proposed constitutional amendment includes three sub-sections. Price claimed the government “don’t know” what the voice would do or how its membership would be constituted, and alleged that plans about gender and youth representation on the body were “not promises the Government can make.”
But while Price’s speech included reading part one and two verbatim, she only read part of section three. The third section is relevant in this discussion, as it states: “the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.”
The government has pointed to this section, to stress on multiple occasions that the parliament itself – which currently includes Nampijinpa Price and Dutton – would be the body that sets rules around the voice’s membership and how it would operate.
It would mean that, in the event of the referendum passing, the current parliament would vote and set the rules for the first iteration of the voice; and that future government, including subsequent Coalition governments, would be able to update the rules and settings as the parliament of the day sees fit.
So in a sense Nampijinpa Price is right – it is “up to our imagination what this voice would look like”, because she would be among the politicians debating that detail after a successful referendum.
Colonisation
The senator’s speech criticised Indigenous bodies which she claimed sought to “demonise colonial settlement in its entirety and nurture a national self-loathing about the foundations of modern Australian achievement”.
Guardian Australia asked Nampijinpa Price to clarify whether she thought any Indigenous people were suffering negative impacts of colonisation, Price responded: “No.”
“A positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we have running water, readily available food,” she said.
“No, there is no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation.”
In a 2022 report, the federal government’s Australian Institute of Health and Welfare wrote that “colonisation has had a devastating impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and culture”, and that such factors have a “fundamental impact on the disadvantage and poor physical and mental health of Indigenous peoples worldwide, through social systems that maintain disparities”.
The AIHW report noted colonisation included violence, disease, occupation of Indigenous land and restriction of Aboriginal people to reserves.
“Together with the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities, Indigenous Australians have suffered ongoing inter-generational trauma.”
Indigenous Australians minister Burney said: “We only have to look at the Stolen Generations and the impacts that has had, in terms of ongoing trauma and pain.”
Attempts at the mass killing of Aboriginal people were still being made as recently as 1981 in the Northern Territory – the year of Nampijinpa Price’s birth – according to Dr Robyn Smith, who has worked on the University of Newcastle’s colonial frontier massacres map project.
An Aboriginal man and Aboriginal woman died, and 14 others were admitted to hospital, after unwittingly sharing a bottle of sherry that had been poisoned with strychnine and deliberately left on the grounds of Alice Springs’ John Flynn memorial church. Detectives investigated and offered a $20,000 reward, but no one was ever charged. The NT coroner, Denis Barritt, later found the two people had been “murdered by person or persons unknown”.
Local and regional voices
Nampijinpa Price also stopped short of backing two key policies Dutton raised as alternatives to the constitutionally-enshrined voice. In April, when announcing the Liberal party’s controversial opposition to the voice, Dutton re-committed his support for a set of “local and regional voices” (there was confusion and conflicting reports at the time about whether the Liberals backed a national voice as well).
The Labor government’s plan for a national voice would feed into local and regional voices too. But asked about the plan for local and regional voices, Nampijinpa Price rebuffed that very language itself, saying she preferred to “amplify people in regional and remote communities” and “I probably wouldn’t even use the word voice”.
“I would suggest that we need ears in Canberra, not a voice and need to be listening to the regions,” she said.
Referendum 2.0
The senator also declined multiple opportunities to strongly support Dutton’s plan for a second referendum, on symbolic constitutional recognition, if the voice vote failed – further confusing the Coalition’s answer on crucial questions of Indigenous affairs policy.
Nampijinpa Price has previously declined to publicly back the call, saying her focus was on the current referendum. On Thursday, she again stopped short of fully endorsing Dutton’s call, saying she would not commit to holding another referendum in the first term of a future Coalition government.
“As the Coalition, we have had a long-held commitment to recognition, but we would want to absolutely follow the appropriate processes to ensure that those conversations had taken place right across the country involving everybody, that is what needs to be done and hasn’t happened,” she said.
