Jacinta Price says curriculum’s approach to Aboriginal topics creates division

A prominent Indigenous leader has exposed how the Australian curriculum’s approach to Aboriginal topics has led to a race division.

Prominent Indigenous leader and likely future Northern Territory senator Jacinta Price has raised the alarm about the way Aboriginal topics are dealt with in the Australian Curriculum, a day after revelations that school lesson plans were being influenced by hard-left activists.

Ms Price said the way the Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority (ACARA) was taking advice on including Aboriginal content was divisive.

“It’s dividing us along the lines of race, and individuals who are removed from traditional culture are involved in this radical romanticising of traditional culture which is ultimately infantilising for us and our kids,” Ms Price said.

Alice Springs deputy mayor Jacinta Price in Toowoomba's Queens Park. Picture: Kevin Farmer

On Thursday this newspaper reported that ACARA’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory group included members who believed maths instruction was racist and that the boomerang inspired the invention of the propeller and even unmanned drones patrolling for sharks.

“This is ideology, not fact,” Ms Price said.

“Seriously, boomerangs led to drones? No, these are far stretches of the imagination that should be nowhere near our kids.

“As a cross cultural educator for over 20 years what myself and my family sought to do was create an understanding of why my people lived the lives that they did and conducted themselves the way they did and what the Dreaming meant to us.”

Ms Price’s comments come as a Freedom of Information request submitted by the Institute for Public Affairs revealed that the advisory group was consulted on every topic area in the proposed new Australian Curriculum, including physical education.

“ACARA seems to have consulted everyone on this radical new national curriculum except for the most important stakeholder, parents,” said Dr Bella d’Abrera, Director of the IPA’s Foundations of Western Civilisation Program.

“The activists writing our radical new national curriculum believe while children are playing on the monkey bars, they should be pondering how they are oppressing and discriminating against Indigenous Australians.”

Originally published as Jacinta Price says curriculum’s approach to Aboriginal topics creates division