Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Warren Mundine hit back at Yes activists for ‘blaming others for their failures’

Indigenous No voice leaders Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine have hit back at Yes activists for refusing to acknowledge divisions fanned by the referendum.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine.

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Indigenous No voice campaign leaders Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine have hit back at Yes activists for “blaming others for their own failures” and being unable to acknowledge divisions fanned by Anthony Albanese’s referendum.

Senator Nampijinpa Price, who led the No campaign powered by conservative activist group Advance, said Australians want the best for “the vulnerable and needy in our country (but) the voice failed to realise this”.

The opposition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman, who is devising Peter Dutton’s election policies to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, on Sunday accused Yes campaigners of “returning to form” and not taking responsibility for the referendum defeat on October 14 last year.

“The leaders of the Yes campaign (are) blaming others for their own failures and not recognising the division they have caused,” the Northern Territory senator said.

Senator Nampijinpa Price said supporters of a constitutionally enshrined voice “failed to show how entrenching division in our Constitution would improve the lives of anyone but the elites and activists”.

A special investigation in The Weekend Australian revealed internal Yes research showed support for a voice was soft even at its mid-60s peak in late 2022, awareness levels of Indigenous disadvantage reached 50 per cent by referendum day and that only 3 per cent of non-Indigenous Australians had direct engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Some Indigenous Yes leaders, who were critical of Labor and unions for not being stronger in their support of the campaign and who accused the No campaign of widespread misinformation, also lamented that some people “with racist motivations” voted no.

Mr Mundine said Yes campaigners were “still failing to see that Australia is not a racist country, and it is not opposed to supporting Indigenous Australians”.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine on the referendum day last year. Picture: NCA NewsWire / John Gass

Amid the No pushback, prominent Indigenous leader and Yes campaigner Sean Gordon said the No side shouldn’t be “patting themselves on the back for what was an easy sell”.

Mr Gordon, who led the Liberals for Yes group alongside former ACT chief minister Kate Carnell, said “even if they didn’t run a campaign at all, it still would have been difficult to get over the line because (non-Indigenous Australians) just don’t know who we are”.

“Less than 3 per cent of non-Indigenous voters had direct engagement with Indigenous people. It’s a case of out of sight, out of mind. ‘Vote no if you don’t know’ wasn’t a hard sell. People shouldn’t give too much credit to the No side.”

Mr Mundine said the referendum result – 60.06 per cent of Australians voted no, 39.94 per cent voted yes – was “emphatic”.

“Australians loudly rejected the division of the proposed voice coast to coast. But it didn’t start that way; support for Indigenous Australians was, and actually remains, at very high levels,” he said.

“What happened here was they proposed a fundamentally flawed idea and Australians aren’t fools. If the Yes campaign wants to complain about toxicity and misinformation it should look in the mirror.

“The voice was a proposal built on lies and many leaders of the Yes campaign showed nothing but contempt for those who disagreed with them, for the Australian people and at times even for each other.”

Advance executive director Matthew Sheahan, who ran the No campaign, said it was “just wild” for Yes campaigners to claim they didn’t raise enough money to execute dual education and political campaigns.

“They still don’t get it. To suggest they didn’t have enough money when outspending us six-to-one and managing to finish with a few million in the bank is just wild. The suggestion that we lied, that there was ‘misinformation’ from our campaign, is a lie,” Mr Sheahan said.

“It was the Yes campaign that called people ‘dinosaurs and dickheads’ … it was the Yes campaign that ran an operation driven by elites and activists. And to top it all off, they ran a very poor campaign.

“If the Yes team want any tips on uniting Australia maybe start with this: no more welcoming Australians to their own country, no more standing under three flags – there is one Australian flag, no more demonising Australia Day, no more indoctrinating our kids and loading them up with anxiety and guilt for what happened 200 years ago.”

Mr Gordon said claims the Yes campaign needed to convince more conservatives to win the referendum are misleading.

“People genuinely think it was conservatives that won the referendum. It wasn’t the conservatives, it was the mums and dads, football fans. They just don’t know us, unfortunately,” he said.

“We needed to reach the ­football club fans, the people at the bowling club, people like that old man who was genuine when he said to me ‘I am sorry’ (for using the word Abo) and he meant it. He said ‘I didn’t know’.”