Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s dismissal of any negative impacts of colonisation on First Peoples and mockery of the idea of intergenerational trauma takes the core idea of the No campaign and extends it to its full, logical conclusion: the erasure of First Peoples and their unique experience of dispossession, dislocation and genocide.
In a week when Professor Marcia Langton has been demonised for making the straightforward point that the basic arguments of the No campaign always resolve into racism, Price’s remarks demonstrate that the No campaign in the end rejects as either non-existent or irrelevant the impact of the invasion and colonisation of Australia on First Peoples. Her particular version is one of extreme assimilation: Indigenous peoples now have running water and food, colonisation had a positive impact, and the Indigenous Affairs portfolio that she herself holds should be dissolved.
That is, there are no First Peoples in any governmental sense, just “everybody … taking advantage of the same opportunities that our country has to offer”.
That’s one of the core themes of the No campaign — that the Voice is divisive and unfair (a large section of the No campaign goes further and views any recognition of First Peoples as divisive). Behind the glib language of equality and unity from the No campaign has always been a denialism — denial that the dispossession of First Peoples was a foundational act of the Australian polity, that Australia as a state, as a concept, as a legal entity, doesn’t exist without the catalyst of invasion, theft and murder. For the No campaign, Australia exists regardless of how it was created, or came into existence without that foundational act of dispossession.
Either it didn’t happen or it doesn’t matter. Or, Price seems to suggest, both.
Like other forms of denialism, it can be dressed up in rhetoric and distraction (who, after all, can think something that divides Australians is good?), and can be ignored by the media, but there’s no escaping those outcomes for the No campaign. Either dispossession didn’t happen, or it doesn’t matter.
With non-Indigenous colleagues cheering her on, Price lays the way open not merely to the defeat of the Voice referendum, but to a sea change in Indigenous relations. Presumably the Coalition position — Price is the portfolio shadow minister — is now that colonisation was entirely a good thing, that intergenerational trauma is a kind of scam, that there is no need for a separate Indigenous Affairs portfolio. The way is open to a full assimilationist policy and the closure of any Indigenous-specific program of any kind — after all, they’re surely “divisive”, aren’t they?
This is where the No campaign inevitably leads — any form of recognition of the experience of First Peoples must be suspect and divisive, not merely that proposed for the constitution. If the goal is to erase the experience of First Peoples in relation to the creation and maintenance of the Australian state, then any policy apparatus relating to First Peoples must be erased as well. We’re all happy Australians enjoying running water, freely available food and the other benefits of colonisation. Let us not be divided.
Do Price’s comments represent a new low for the Coalition? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
