James Campbell: Jacinta Price’s truth-telling is not for the squeamish

Modern Australia is far more nervous talking about the nature of pre-colonial Indigenous life than we are about what occurred afterwards, writes James Campbell.

To understand the bucketing Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s speech to the National Press Club has copped from elite opinion-makers, you need to understand her argument about the root causes of what ails much of Indigenous Australia.

Price and her left-wing detractors are in furious agreement that things are crook in many Indigenous communities.

But whereas they would say the root cause of the violence and child-sex abuse was the destruction of traditional Aboriginal society after the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, Price argues these problems predated its arrival.

So while her critics argue Indigenous problems today are a legacy of colonialism, Price would say they are a legacy of the societies that colonialism supplanted.

Though we are often told that there needs to be truth-telling about the colonial period, in fact modern Australia is far more squeamish about the nature of pre-contact Indigenous life than we are about what occurred afterwards.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price with The Australian editorial director Claire Harvey. Picture: Martin Ollman

The best example I can point to is the introduction to a recent edition of The Life and Adventures of William Buckley by progressive national treasure Tim Flannery.

In a long foreword, Flannery wavers between explanations for why Buckley’s account is reliable for those aspects of Indigenous society he finds creditable to them, and reasons why he is not to be believed about those things that don’t read so well.

Price began her address with an anecdote from the last time she had spoken to the Press Club in 2016, when she’d been invited to talk about family violence and sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities.

Before that address, Price said Marcia Langton, who was also speaking that day, had cautioned she should not draw a link between the high rates of Indigenous community violence and the acceptance of violence within traditional culture.

“Her suggestion is that there is no correlation,” Price said on Thursday.

“My experience screamed otherwise, so I could not bring myself to expunge a painful truth for the sake of the audience who might not want to hear it.

“I could not sugar-coat the reality of so many communities because it would be otherwise unpalatable.”

Whether she is right about the root causes, Price knows what she is talking about. The former domestic violence victim’s aunt and her nephew were both murdered.

To Price, “for all the moral posturing and virtue signalling about truth-telling, there is no genuine appetite in Canberra to tell the truth or to hear the truth” about the nature of Indigenous society.

The Voice, she said, “is flawed in its foundations” and “built on lies and an aggressive attempt to fracture our nation’s founding document and divide the country built upon it”.

In a nod to Langton, she said that the No campaign has been branded as “base racism sheer stupidity”, but said this was absurd when, in fact, “what would be racist is segmenting our nation into Us and Them”.

This is at odds with progressive opinion, which is why her speech was seized upon with such anger by some media, especially her assertion “there’s no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation.”

At the risk of adding my name to the list of white people who have offered to explain things to her, there were ways in which this sentiment could have been better expressed.

If Price had said “on balance, the colonisation had brought more good than bad”, she would have been on safer ground.

But it would also have been a politician’s answer.

Though she is destined for the cabinet if Peter Dutton wins the next election, Price expresses too much moral clarity to be a politician.

How long that lasts remains to be seen.

Got a news tip? Email [e-mail]

Originally published as James Campbell: Jacinta Price’s truth-telling is not for the squeamish