Warren Mundine backs Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s ‘spot-on’ Indigenous vision

Prominent No campaigner Warren Mundine has backed NT senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s vision for reconciliation and described her desire for integration as ‘spot-on’.

NT senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Prominent No campaigner Warren Mundine has backed Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s vision for reconciliation and described her desire for integration as “spot-on”, declaring there must be an end to “ideological nonsense” in Indigenous affairs and a focus on practical steps forward.

Mr Mundine supported Senator Price’s call for an end to “separatism” as one of the leading architects of the Indigenous voice proposal, Megan Davis, described the 6.2 million Australians who voted Yes to the voice last October as friends in an ongoing movement for change.

“We don’t intend to give up after what happened last year,” Professor Davis said, according to reports of her NAIDOC Week address at the University of Queensland. Professor Davis called on Indigenous people to “march on” post referendum, according to reporting by public interest journalism outlet Croakey.

Professor Davis – an architect of the Uluru Statement from the Heart – said while Australians voted No to “a particular amendment” in the Constitution, they did not vote No to a legislated voice or to truth telling. The Cobble Cobble woman, who co-chairs the Uluru Dialogue, said Yes voters remained staunch in their support and that was something to build on.

However Mr Mundine said the conclusions he had drawn from the failed voice referendum was that there was “a massive movement of people trying to divide this country … and we’ve got to stop that”.

“We’ve to talk about how we work together and stop this division,” he said.

Senator Price – the opposition’s Indigenous affairs spokeswoman – sets out her vision for “a second way” to close the gap in an essay on history commissioned for The Australian’s 60th anniversary Collector’s Edition magazine to be published on Saturday.

Describing an “advancement movement” in Indigenous affairs, Senator Price writes in her essay that there should be no fly-in-fly-out workers in communities where Indigenous Australians are on welfare. She says Australia knows where the gap is – it is the most disadvantaged 20 per cent of the 3 per cent of Australians who are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

“It is remote Indigenous Australians, many of whom do not have English as a first language,” Senator Price writes.

“We already know that we can either fix or exacerbate that by school attendance.”

Sean Gordon, a conservative who supported the voice as chair of Uphold and Recognise, is among Indigenous leaders who support efforts to ensure that work in remote communities is done by local Aboriginal people, not city contractors. However, he was concerned by Senator Price’s implication that there was a dominant separatist movement in Indigenous affairs when, in fact, separatism was a colonial idea.

“You’ve got to first look back to history and understand that segregation was first introduced by white Australia to Aboriginal people … And you can’t just skim over that. To say ‘you’ve got to accept history and move from that’, people can’t move on from that because the impact was far too great on their families and their communities,” Mr Gordon said.

“And unfortunately, as a country, we don’t want to talk about that history. I still think it misses the mark in regards to government accepting their role in the problems that exist.”

Former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner Mick Gooda said Senator Price’s vision was too “simplistic” and ignored the differing needs of Indigenous Australians, while Uluru Dialogue member Eddie Synot said there was “a complete lack of understanding of the situation” from Senator Price.

“(Senator Price) only has ideological answers suited for the culture wars and political power games,” Mr Synot said.

“I think most importantly, where is the community’s voice? She still ignores that and cherry picks.”

Senator Price’s essay calls for a rejection of “negative parts of Indigenous culture” that had been allowed to “grow and fester”.

“Things like violent cultural payback, arranged marriage and apportioning tragedies and mishaps to sorcery, all of which are anathema to modern culture,” she said.

“This is a view that lowers standards for Indigenous Australians … This has been the strategy of decades of government agencies and academic activists, and yet they fail to draw the obvious connection between this approach and the failure to make much ground on closing the gap.”