Jacinta Price should have been appointed Indigenous Australians spokesman because she has more guts than just about all of them

There is one person in parliament who could save us all from a new Australian apartheid but she was overlooked by Peter Dutton.

Peter Dutton has just made his first big mistake as Opposition Leader.

He didn’t – or couldn’t – promote the one person in parliament most able to save the country from apartheid.

And so save the federal Liberals, too.

His new shadow ministry, announced on Sunday, did not include Jacinta Price, the only Coalition MP with Aboriginal ancestry.

But I don’t mean Price should have been picked just to make the Coalition look “diverse”. Price hates that demeaning identity politics, too.

No, she should have been picked because she is the most potent weapon the Coalition has against the Albanese government’s racist campaign to create a kind of advisory parliament just of Aborigines called the “voice”, enshrined in the constitution, making it almost impossible to

ever dump.

I get that promoting Price – who is actually a Nationals senator – would have offended timeservers especially in the Nationals, now led by cardigan-man David Littleproud.

Jacinta Price is a gutsy, whip-smart politician, who Liberal leader Peter Dutton could employ as a fierce weapon against the Albanese government.

Two weeks ago, Price, a former deputy mayor of Alice Springs, wasn’t even in parliament.

Appointing a new arrival straight on to the front bench is extremely rare and reserved almost always for the greats – Robert Menzies, Bob Hawke and Peter Costello.

So how could this 41-year-old with little experience running anything be leapfrogged over all her other jealous colleagues?

Because she has more guts than just about all of them. Because she is whip-smart. Because she can argue brilliantly. Because she is a leader.

But most of all, because the times demand it.

Not one other Coalition MP could argue against Labor’s racist plan to divide us without seeming racist themselves. Not when Labor has appointed no fewer than three Aboriginal MPs to push for the Voice: Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney, Assistant Minister Malarndirri McCarthy and “special envoy” Pat Dodson.

How would that play – the Coalition’s new Indigenous Australians spokesman, white guy Julian Leeser, tells three Aboriginal MPs they’re wrong to say Aborigines need a “voice”?

Not that Leeser, chronically predisposed to surrender, would want to do that anyway.

Ominously, that may be exactly why Price was not promoted. Many Coalition MPs are so timid or confused that they’d back this voice, and Littleproud, Price’s immediate boss as Nationals leader, is the kind of modern “conservative” whose first instinct in a culture war is to run.

Oh, he’s running already, promising to “work constructively with the (Albanese) government” on the voice, for which Labor had “a mandate”. To “work constructively” on what every true conservative and Liberal should instead reject as immoral, just like apartheid South Africa’s own race-based “parliaments” – one for whites, one for blacks and one of “coloureds”.

So I reckon there was no way Littleproud would tell Dutton to appoint Price as one of the Nationals’ six ministers, and it’s sad that Dutton would not or could not overrule him.

But imagine the fear. Appointing Price would declare right off the bat – this “voice” is divisive, racist, patronising and a terrible distraction from fixing the real problems in Aboriginal communities.

That’s because Price, who identifies as both Aboriginal through her Warlpiri mother and Celtic through her father, has in the past said no to “creating a separate entity” such as an Aboriginal-only parliament: “I think we should be treated just like other Australians.”

It was also unclear to her how this voice would help anyone.

Last year, Price said: “I personally don’t support the idea of the voice.”

Last month, she said “We shouldn’t be dividing ourselves along the lines of race”, and last week, she noted there were now 10 people in federal parliament identifying as Aboriginal – “10 voices”, she said pointedly.

That one fact exposes the patronising racism of this voice.

Aborigines make up 3.7 per cent of our population, but 4.4 per cent of our federal politicians. They already have a loud voice in politics, but now Labor says they should have an Aboriginal-only parliament as well, a race-based political right denied every other race. How racist.

True, Price has played the team game since being elected. She is echoing Dutton’s time-buying line – to first consider the detailed proposal Labor eventually comes up with.

But there is no way she could with integrity endorse a racist proposal she’s denounced so brilliantly.

Appointing her as its Indigenous Australians spokesman would have committed the Coalition to fighting what it must.

With Price in charge, that’s a battle the Coalition could win. She’d save the Coalition from appearing spineless. And save us all from a new Australian apartheid.