Image: Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. AAP Image, Diego Fedele
by JOHN MOYLE
As the Yes and No campaigns for the Voice to Parliament goes down to the wire, the voices aligned with each side are by now clearly defined.
On the Yes side we have a majority of leading Indigenous leaders from academia, the legal and teaching professions and community leaders, many who have been prominent at local and national levels for thirty years or more.
Voters leaning to the No vote are claiming a wide range of reasons for their decisions, including that the Voice promotes one race above others, that the Voice is divisive and that it requires constitutional change.
While there is definitely big money supporting both sides of the argument, both sides have also been able to enlist an impressive army of impassioned volunteers.
As the official 45 day campaign progresses so has the rhetoric been ramped up, with the No side seemingly in a winning position despite presenting a bewildering array of arguments.
On the No side we have three main representatives, all of whom have only come to prominence in recent times, and all with agendas that include their own self promotions.
During the campaign, Nyunggai Warren Mundine’s daughter and eldest brother have both come out supporting the Yes vote, while Lidia Thorpe astounds us almost daily with attention grabbing antics inside and outside parliament and Jacinta Price reinterprets colonial history.
Warren Mundine has a checkered history for seeking career advancement with his current role as director of the Indigenous Forum at the centre-right Centre for independent Studies being the latest after his failed attempts to gain a soft retirement through gaining a political seat.
Mundine is something of a political switcher-oo, having joined the Australian Labor Party and contested the setoff Dubbo in the 2001 Federal election.
After that failed he tried for a state senate ticket, which he lost, before succeeding Barry Jones as ALP National President in 2006, only to step down in 2007.
Not deterred, Mundine then tried for an ALP senate seat to replace that of the disgraced Mark Arbib, but lost out Bob Carr was preselected.
Spitting the dummy, he quit the ALP and was in the political wilderness before being rescued by Tony Abbot, who appointed him to the coalition’s Indigenous Advisory Council, a job that in 2017 was dissolved by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.
A supporter of a nuclear industry, Mundine has since found a comfortable co-existence with a large section Australia’s big-end mining industry.
Jacinta Price’s early life was influenced by her mother Bess Price’s conservative politics that gained her considerable support amongst the European community in the Northern Territory.
A senator for the Northern Territory since 2022, Jacinta Price’s star rose when she caught the eye of Peter Dutton, who viewed her, along with Mundine, as political allies he could support while proving his connections to First Nations people.
Price had already shown her alignment with the coalition, when in 2007 she supported John Howard’s Northern Territory Intervention into Aboriginal homelands and opposed the ALP’s stance around deaths in custody, while rejecting any claims of systemic racism in Australian prisons.
More recently Price gobsmacked a nation when she claimed that colonisation had been a beneficial impact on First Nations people.
Lidia Thorpe is worthy of a more substantial examination, but what we need to know is that she was elected to the seat of Northcote in the Victorian legislative assembly as a Greens member in 2017 before losing it to Labor in 2018.
This was after she had been declared a bankrupt in 2013, owing $700,000 to Indigenous Business Australia and the Australian Tax Office.
In 2016, claiming domestic violence as a defence, Thorpe was discharged.
Not deterred, the Greens preselected her for the senate after Greens’ leader Richard Di Natale resigned and she was sworn in on 6th October, 2020.
That was when we got to know more about Lidia Thorpe than most of us cared to, as she told Liberal senator Hollie Hughes that she ”kept her legs shut”, tweeted her delight at Old Parliament House catching fire, claimed that the Australian flag had no right to be flown and wrongly accused the female Aboriginal attorney-general of the Northern territory of being a white male.
Then came the Melbourne strip club incident where she claimed that early one morning, or late one night, a bunch of white men attacked her, while the club owner claimed that it was her who verbally attacked the group.
if this was not enough, she was forced to resign from the Greens when it was revealed that she had been dating the ex- leader of Rebels outlaw motor cycle gang.
All three of these prominent No campaigners are little more than rent seekers looking for a soft landing if Dutton ever lands the top job.
In Thorpe’s case, unfortunately the senate has her for the duration of her six-year term, even though she no longer represents the party that the people of Victoria voted for.
Behind all of the No campaign has been the gangrenous hands of Tony Abbott and John Howard, both suffering from attention deficit disorder while continuing to shape policy through division.
Days out from the results we should ask ourselves if these are the people we want to shape the future of our First Nations people.
