Meet the Aboriginal politician leading the charge against Australia’s Voice referendum

Every so often, in the life of nations, there comes a moment when a new political force articulates a sense of frustration at the old orthodoxies, or a yearning for something new. Sometimes, such a force turns into a momentous presence that transforms the national landscape.

Australia has reached such a moment in the person of a 42-year-old Aboriginal mother of four. A conservative legislator for little more than a year, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the shadow chancellor for indigenous affairs, has challenged the old, failed narratives which argue that systemic racism is responsible for indigenous woes and that a policy of welfarism and separatism is the answer. As a result, she has changed the nature of our national debate surrounding our Aboriginal population.

On 14 October, Australians will vote in a referendum on whether to support a constitutional change that would compel the federal parliament to take advice from an unelected and unaccountable ‘Voice’ comprising a group of indigenous Australians. The advocates (‘Yes’), which include the centre-left Labor government and its media allies, bill the ‘Voice’ as a ‘modest’ proposal that would help heal the traumas of history and unite the nation. But opponents (‘No’) fear that the creation of a Voice will be a smokescreen for a treaty, reparations and more apologies for what are viewed, in hindsight, as British sins of the past, which will lead to more division across the country.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Voice has attracted overwhelming financial and rhetorical support from the corporates, celebrities, union bosses, private schools, universities, the richest philanthropists, the big sporting codes, and so on. The national airline Qantas, which has not been state-owned for three decades, has even plastered ‘YES’ on the tails of some of its planes.