Liberals ‘have lost contact with mainstream’ over Indigenous voice to parliament, says Ken Wyatt

Ken Wyatt has compared the Liberal Party’s opposition to the Indigenous voice to the stance taken against same-sex marriage by Peter Dutton and others.

Ken Wyatt, second left, with Anthony Albanese announcing the referendum wording. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The Coalition risks descending into political irrelevance unless it can find a way to reconnect with middle Australia, former federal Liberal MP Ken Wyatt has warned.

In his latest scathing broadside against the party he served for more than a decade, Wyatt – who was the first Indigenous Australian elected to the House of Representatives, the first to serve as a government minister, and the first appointed to cabinet – said it was hard to see a ­future for the Liberals and the ­Nationals if they did not change their stand on a range of issues.

“The party is going to have to consider its position in respect to the political landscape of the nation or face a period in which it’ll be ­irrelevant and its numbers will be small,” he told The Australian.

“The Coalition … is not reaching the future generations of this country. The things that concern them and are not being addressed, and one of the things that does concern them is fairness.”

After losing his seat of Hasluck at last year’s federal election, Mr Wyatt earlier this year quit his membership of the Liberal Party after Peter Dutton declared that the party would campaign against the Indigenous voice to parliament that Mr Wyatt has long argued for.

He stood with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Canberra when the proposed wording of the referendum was announced, and last week he was confirmed as the new co-chair of the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Council overseeing Western Australia’s new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act and ­offering advice to WA Aboriginal Affairs Minister Tony Buti.

Mr Wyatt said the federal opposition’s position on the voice was emblematic of the party’s disconnect with many mainstream voters, and compared the party’s stand on the voice to the opposition from some MPs – such as Mr Dutton – on the same-sex marriage plebiscite.

“Australians aren’t stupid. They know what they want addressed,” he said. “When we had the plebiscite, there were many of my colleagues who did not think the Australian people would support same-sex marriage. And then when the result came back, we saw the reaction of some individuals who didn’t even enter the chamber for the vote.”

Mr Wyatt’s commentary follows a report last week from the Centre for Independent Studies that found younger generations were not following older generations in shifting towards conservatives as they aged.

While Labor’s primary vote has also been eroded, that party could rely on preferences from the Greens. At the same time, the teal independents who won several lower house seats at the last election could potentially erode the Liberals’ upper house numbers.

“Somewhere we are missing the mark on reaching into the future generations of Australians and I think it’ll only be a matter of time before the teals start running candidates for the Senate,” Mr Wyatt said.

“And if that happens, I think the Coalition will have even greater challenges.”

Mr Wyatt said he had been particularly hurt by the opposition to the voice from former WA-based colleagues Michaelia Cash and Linda Reynolds.

“I used to sit with them on the VIP flight coming back from Canberra to Perth,” he said. “Neither ever asked about the voice. They could have had a four-hour discussion with me just on one flight about the voice, and they never did.”

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He slammed what he described as Senator Cash’s “outlandish” commentary about the voice and the former attorney-general’s ­argument that she did not want to see a race-based provision introduced to the Constitution.

The document, he says, already includes multiple race-based provisions. “It’s alarming to have a former first law officer of the nation not understanding the Constitution,” Mr Wyatt said.

He was also critical of two of the most prominent no campaigners, Warren Mundine and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Neither of them, he said, had been able to deliver meaningful solutions for Indigenous people despite having been in positions of influence in the past.

Mr Mundine, he noted, had the ears of prime ministers Tony ­Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull while serving as the chairman of the Indigenous Advisory Council while Senator Price was the deputy mayor of Alice Springs before ­entering parliament.

“If [Mr Mundine] had the solutions, then we should have seen change. Jacinta had a significant role in local government in a town that has got so many sorry elements to it, and yet I didn’t see proactive action from her in local government that turned around and addressed the needs of the town camps or the Indigenous ­people living in that area,” he said.