Peta Credlin: Say No to abuse and identifying people as victims

The hardest thing to do is to go against the noisy bullies among your peers but Jacinta Price has consistently shown the moral courage to do just that and this week became a national hero, writes Peta Credlin.

The Yes campaign was always going to turn nasty once it started to flounder in the polls. From the moment Anthony Albanese declared voting Yes was simply a matter of courtesy and respect, it was axiomatic that No voters were going to be labelled disrespectful, if not outright racist, in rejecting his Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

From the beginning, the Voice debate has been about how we see Australia. Are we one of the modern world’s great success stories, perhaps the least racist and most colourblind country on Earth, or is modern Australia built on a fundamental injustice, so that the descendants of the first settlers (and all subsequent immigrants) need to atone to the descendants of the original inhabitants?

Because, as the Uluru Statement makes clear, the Voice is just the first step in a campaign for VOICE, TREATY, TRUTH.

First, the Voice then the Treaties with compensation (or reparations) costing hundreds of billions of dollars, and finally the so-called Truth that Australia’s history should be retold as a story of shame.

Professor Marcia Langton insinuates that it is racist to disagree with the Voice proposal. Picture: NCA NewsWire

The Yes campaign is now trying to repivot the Voice as just an advisory body dedicated to closing the gap in life outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

If only Aboriginal people were listened to, the claim runs, things would be so much better, even though the people pushing the Voice — such as Aboriginal activists Noel Pearson, Professor Marcia Langton, Professor Megan Davis, Senator Pat Dodson and Pat Anderson — are all the ultimate Indigenous policy insiders.

For years, they’ve got their way by insinuating that it would be racist to disagree with them. Since the Whitlam era, out of guilt, officialdom has not been working towards the integration of Indigenous people into the wider community but fostering collective self-determination under a policy of separatism.

It’s no wonder Aboriginal people continue to live worse, on average, than other Australians because it’s decades-old official policy that they should be entitled to live differently to everyone else, in communion with “country”, rather than getting on with life in places where there are services to access and jobs to be had.

Or applying the law of the land without deference to cultural practices in order to protect women and children, in particular.

Rather than being a fresh start, by reinforcing separatism through giving a select group of “victims” their own special voice of grievance, the Prime Minister’s Voice would just double down on failure.

By contrast, a defeat for the Voice would not only be a rebuff to separatism, and a potential fresh start, it would also damage the status of the Aboriginal elites whose brainchild it is, and who have been deferred to, for so long.

Hence their anger.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price argues that Aboriginal programs need to be held to account. Picture: Martin Ollman

After earlier accusing No campaign leader Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price of “punching down on blackfellas” and being “trapped in a redneck celebrity vortex”, Pearson is now trying to keep his resentments under control. But that hasn’t stopped others.

On Friday, Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney complained about her treatment in parliament, saying “it’s just unbelievably racist and bullying”.

But if there were a gold medal for the activist ready to heap abuse on anyone who doesn’t share her views, that would go to Langton, the co-author of the Calma-Langton report that the government claims provides all the detail needed to understand the Voice.

After she was exposed earlier for all but calling No voters either racist or stupid, she tried to backtrack the following day, saying it was just their arguments that she’d said were racist; as if declaring that “you’re not racist, it’s just what you say that’s racist” is somehow OK.

Then it emerged she’d said of so-called hard No voters they were just “spewing racism”.

Further, it emerged that in 2018 she’d been dismissive of Price and her mother Bess, a former NT minister, as just “the useful coloured help in rescuing the racist image of these conservative outfits”.

Finally, tape revealed Langton calling Australia “a horrible racist country” and of her saying that she had to sit down during the national anthem because the words are so offensive.

Just like the brouhaha of the full Uluru Statement from the Heart versus the PM’s claim it’s just a one-page poster, Langton has been caught out by years of media commentary and speeches, and in this digital age, nothing disappears.

Yet while Langton has been feted for years by the very country she often says she despises, Australia has been much better served by someone much less honoured.

The hardest thing to do is to go against the noisy bullies among your peers but Price has consistently shown the moral courage to do just that.

Her Press Club speech on Thursday was a tour de force, especially her answers to questions.

To one loaded question, she simply denied that Aboriginal disadvantage was a result of the colonial past.

To another, about the neo-Marxist concept of so-called intergenerational trauma, she simply said she must be “doubly suffering” because some of her ancestors had come here as convicts.

When asked about people dubiously claiming to be Indigenous, she said that “if we actually chose to serve Australians on the basis of need, not race, those opportunists would disappear quick smart”.

She said there needed to be accountability in Aboriginal programs, but that would come only if we “started treating Aboriginal people like Australian citizens”.

She said “we keep telling Aboriginal people that they are victims … effectively removing their agency and then giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives” even though “the worst possible thing you can do to any human being is tell them that they are a victim without agency”.

For standing against the misguided separatism that’s made such a mess in remote Australia, this woman is a national hero.

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Say No to abuse and identifying people as victims