There are renewed fears among the Indigenous public after Jacinta Price announced her desire to enter Federal Politics.
Jacinta Price confirmed yesterday that she has put her hand up for pre selection for the Country Liberal Party (CLP) to run for the seat of Lingiari which covers all of the Northern Territory except for Darwin. Price has been riding a wave of popularity over the last 12 months after she started speaking out on Indigenous issues that went against the status quo among Indigenous populations in Australia.
Her main arguments are that Australia Day is not something that needs to be changed and she believes that people who campaign for Australia Day to be changed don’t appear to be concerned about other issues that affect Indigenous communities such as Domestic Violence, Alcohol abuse and youth crime. There are many examples that prove this claim is simply not true.
During this time she has used her Facebook pages to publicly criticise high profile Indigenous leaders such as former Senator Nova Peris, Michael Mansell and respected Elder Rosalie Kunoth Monks. Her attacks and commentary resemble the kind of thing you would see in a school yard. These school yard antics are probably the reason why she has gained so much popularity among the current liberal government.
These attacks and her multiple attempts to speak on behalf of many Aboriginal people in the media have seen petitions started that state “Jacinta Price does not speak for me”. One of the petitions has been signed almost 7,000 times. There have also been calls for a “no campaign” in the Northern Territory to make sure that she is not elected to power.
The electorate of Lingiari has a majority Indigenous population and we believe this population will be aware the Aboriginal agenda she plans to use for her campaign is just a cloak that hides her white agenda which will see her elevated higher to a federal level. Recently Price went as far as defending the colonial explorer John McDouall Stuart after his highly controversial gun wielding statue was vandalised. According to Price the explorer who hails from Scotland (the same country as Price’s husband) never killed Aboriginal people even though records and the explorers own diaries suggest otherwise.
Aboriginal people of Lingiari know full well that the Price name resulted in no changes for them in Alice Springs and the wider Northern Territory. During recent years Price sat idle and sided with former Indigenous leaders Bess Price (her mother) and former NT chief minister Adam Giles who were in leadership during the height of abuses in youth detention centres. These former leaders suffered huge losses in the 2016 elections with both ministers falling from grace surrounded by claims of corruption.
The biggest fear of all is that Jacinta Price will one day become minister for Indigenous affairs. This would be a perfect solution for a government that refuses to listen to Indigenous voices as Jacinta Price is an Indigenous woman with no Indigenous voice who has nailed the art of speaking with a white voice.
