Jacinta Price reveals battles with drugs, alcohol in her 20s

Coalition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has revealed she battled drug and alcohol abuse in her 20s, just a day after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton made his own major personal disclosure.

Price recounted surviving domestic violence from a man she dated between her first and second husbands, which led her to abuse drugs and alcohol in the aftermath.

Northern Territory Country Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has revealed she is a survivor of domestic violence.Credit: James Brickwood

“It would be easy for me to gloss over this period, perhaps to briefly touch on it and move on, but there is no point in me telling my story if I’m not completely honest,” Price said in an interview with the Weekend Australian Magazine. “And that means sharing the darkest period of my life. It’s a time I’m not proud of, but one that very much shaped who I am today.”

Price’s disclosure follows Dutton’s decision on Thursday night to tell Sky how his engagement to the mother of his first child broke down while she was pregnant, giving voters a clearer look at the personal lives of the Coalition figures before the election due by May.

Price’s interview was conducted in advance of the release of her memoir, Matters of the Heart which comes out next week. Price writes that as a divorced single mother of three children, who spent alternating fortnights with her and their father, she used her alone time to party, including with the use of drugs and alcohol that could keep her awake all weekend.

“At the time, I foolishly thought that the drugs like ecstasy were helping me shake off the darkness that constantly shadowed me … I was caught in a dangerous cycle,” she writes. “I wanted to change. I hated who I’d ­become – I didn’t feel like myself and I wasn’t happy.”

She said that a rehabilitation program helped her recover by identifying underlying issues such as grief at the end of her marriage and a loss of identity after suffering domestic violence. The Northern Territory senator is now one of the Coalition’s most prominent and popular politicians, according to this masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor.

Peter Dutton with his family (left to right) son Tom, daughter Rebecca, wife Kirilly and son Harry in Brisbane.Credit: Dan Peled

Dutton, who typically gives little away about his personal life, said on Thursday he was briefly married in his early 20s.

“Well it was a tough issue at the time because I’d been married when I was about 23 for about six months and picked up my then wife from a night shift [as a police officer] and she said, ‘I don’t love you any more’,” Dutton told Sky News’ Peta Credlin, a former senior Liberal staffer who is still close to the opposition leader.

“It was … pretty shocking at the time but we just got married too young, I was working too hard and didn’t have enough time for the relationship and it was just one of those things.”

That relationship would have been in the early 1990s. Later, Dutton said he was engaged to another woman who was pregnant with his first daughter Rebecca, who was born in 2002.

“I was engaged to … my daughter’s mum and Rebecca was conceived in that relationship and that relationship broke up. Kirilly and I met after that” through friends, he said.

The insight from Dutton’s personal life comes as he opens up more in the lead-up to the election due by May, appearing on long-form podcast interviews and soft-focus social media posts. Dutton said that his children were very close and Kirilly had been a loving stepmother to Rebecca as well as the Duttons’ two sons, Harry and Tom.

“In terms of how Kirilly responded to that, again, all in a stride and … [the kids] have never seen each other as stepbrother and sister, that has never been language in our household,” Dutton said. “The kids have always been treated equally by me, by Kirilly and I think that’s been an important thing as well.”

The opposition leader told Credlin he and his family had received death threats throughout his political career, requiring him to have personal security for years, which meant he and Kirilly often decided to stay home.

Peter Dutton as a candidate for federal parliament in 2001, around the time of his broken engagement.Credit:

“There was one occasion, the kids had had a death threat. At school, the police were there with them and it was either Harry or Tom said: ‘Dad, it’s so embarrassing, the police are at school’ and I said, ‘mate, no one will know who they are’ and one of them said, ‘dad they’re the only people walking around with bumbags’,” Dutton said.

“Fortunately that didn’t last for long, again Kirilly’s had death threats, all sorts of things which go with this job.”

Dutton’s children have all graduated from school. Rebecca works in childcare, Harry in construction and Tom is on a gap year working on a farm.

In the policy section of the long interview, Dutton said it was “perfectly reasonable” that girls want to compete fairly and supported a review of Australia’s treatment of trans adolescents.

“The individual needs to be treated with respect, I think the parents need to be treated with respect. We know that there are two sexes and we know that for many families, for different reasons, this is a very confronting debate,” he said.

“I just don’t believe in discriminating against anyone, not on the basis of anything and for young girls not to be able to achieve their Olympic dream, their pathway to a world cup or to be displaced from a team because somebody has a physiological advantage over them.”

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