Rita Panahi: Jacinta Nampijinpa Price won’t be bullied into silence or intimidated into inaction

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has maintained a quiet but fierce dignity as she withstands the most dreadful vitriol and threats to fight for what’s right.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is the bravest woman I know.

She is a warrior who has withstood the most dreadful vitriol and threats to fight for what’s right.

Sadly, for her what’s right is not always popular with the media, celebrity and activist class, who too often set the narrative in this country.

For years she has endured the ugliest of abuse — often racial and/or sexual in nature — for speaking up about the deplorable rates of domestic violence and child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has endured years of ugly abuse. Picture: Martin Ollman

She has been targeted by the powerful to the pitiful, from prominent Indigenous men to random online trolls.

If she had railed against Australia Day and the flag, Price would be celebrated as a heroine, but she has the temerity to speak about what she has seen and experienced; consequential issues that can’t be readily blamed on “colonisation” or “white privilege”.

This week, Marcus Stewart, a Yes campaigner who has served as co-chair of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, was given a platform on the national broadcaster to throw demented abuse at Senator Price.

“We have a far Right politician in Senator Nampijinpa Price out there spreading lies, spreading misinformation, I don’t think I’ve come across anyone that hates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander — or seems to hate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — so much,” he said.

Here was an Indigenous man who looks whiter than the washed out ABC host interviewing him, accusing a black woman, a survivor of domestic violence who has devoted her life to helping the most disadvantaged in her community, of hating her own people.

The ABC host, Greg Jennett, did not question that outrageous statement, indeed he sought to justify it by suggestions why Stewart would make such a claim.

Apparently, Price questioning the usefulness of divisive and often incoherent Welcome to Country statements warrants such an unhinged reaction.

The ABC gave Yes campaigner Marcus Stewart a platform to hurl abuse.

Many Australians, from all sorts of backgrounds, detest being incessantly welcomed to their own country.

It’s precisely the type of performative racial privilege that achieves nothing other than dividing us along racial lines; owners and interlopers.

For many years now, long before the Voice debate, Price has been punished for revealing the cultural issues that contribute to Indigenous women being 35 times more likely to be hospitalised due to domestic violence than other Australian women.

Price has been in the activists’ crosshairs for years, with the intensity of the attacks picking up in 2016 after she shared insights into the culture of silence that demands victims protect their abusers or face retribution, not just from the aggressor, but their extended family.

Price explained the dangerous cycle of violence: “The kinship network demands loyalty to your family members, even if they are a perpetrator.

“One is expected to pretend that these perpetrators are decent human beings and ignore the fact that they have committed acts of physical and sexual violence towards those you love. Because to speak the truth is to create conflict. So from early in life, everyone learns to lie to keep the peace — which manifests into child and youth suicide and the continuation of a destructive cycle.”

Back in 2018, I wrote about some of the abuse Price was copping and the lack of support from “the sisterhood”, which normally sparks into action at the first hint of gendered abuse.

Back then, it was the likes of Bill Nicholson, from the Wurundjeri tribe council, who was targeting Price. He posted: “How bout (sic) you f---ing die a painful death u sell out cocanut (sic) … Ur (sic) type of real cancer in our communities and need to be eradicated like the disease u are.”

Then there were the many threats of physical and sexual violence that people felt emboldened enough to post on social media.

In the face of such ugliness, Price has maintained a quiet but fierce dignity.

She won’t be bullied into silence or intimidated into inaction.

She is her mother’s daughter, the fearless Bess Price, who was promised to an older man as a second wife when she was just 13.

She escaped that fate to become an advocate for the disadvantaged and served in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly.

Senator Price has excelled as Shadow Indigenous Australians minister after replacing the feckless Julian Leeser.

Australia is lucky to have a woman of her calibre in the Australian parliament.