Jacinta Price: If the LNP wins the next election she will have real political power. Photo: AAP

ONE…
During the last week of the referendum, my wife and her sister stood beside busy streets waving YES placards. I was with them. One bloke with a long wispy beard leant out the window of a car waving his fist, wanting to fight. The thought passed through my head – is all politics identity politics now? The next election will be fought on immigration.

TWO…
Last Monday, I went to the library and flicked through The Australian newspaper for the week after the referendum. I don’t trust the Murdochs. It is beyond argument that they connived in Donald Trump’s “Big Lie”, thereby dramatically weakening the idea of democracy around the world. They did it for money. The Murdoch flagship publication bristled like a battleship with support for Israel and jubilation at the NO vote. Politics is about momentum and, suddenly, the Murdoch mob sense they have it.

On the Wednesday after the referendum The Australian ran a photo of Jacinta Price with her Irish father and Warlpiri mother under the headline, “Jacinta Rises To Be Voice of Her People”.

Voice of her people?

During the Voice referendum, a Warlpiri elder put out a statement saying Jacinta Price has no status with the Warlpiri. That’s what the delegates did to John Howard at the Reconciliation Convention in 1997 when they turned their backs on him. I was there. Johnny shouted at their backs. But he was being told he had no status in their eyes.

Voice of her people?

In April this year, to quote Loren Allam in The Guardian: “Ninety leaders of the powerful Central Land Council, representing dozens of remote communities in central Australia, have issued an extraordinary joint statement rejecting the views of Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, saying “she needs to stop pretending we are her people…”

The Australian newspaper needs to stop pretending they are her people.

Allam wrote the delegates at the meeting said that Price “neither speaks for them nor listens to them”.”

People are toying with the idea that Jacinta Price could become Prime Minister. Maybe. Australian political life operates at the level of a cartoon series like “The Simpsons”. Peter Dutton is the Queensland cop. Dutton is always the Queensland cop in the way that Ned Flanders is always Ned Flanders and Mr Burns is always Mr Burns. People don’t like the Queensland Cop. He’s also associated in the public mind with Scott Morrison, who now has as much standing as Ronald MacDonald would if he fronted a conference for the world’s greatest chefs and restaurateurs. There’s even talk of bringing back the Muddled Monk, Tony Abbott. Can’t see that lasting long before there’s another George Pell, another Sir Prince Phillip, another onion, and another dark political muse like Peta Credlin.

Jacinta Price offers something wholly new. She is a natural for the 24/7 news cycle, since she has a potentially endless capacity to create shock headlines. In the cartoon of Australian political life, Jacinta could play the Voice of Her People – an Indigenous Evita. It’s a big role, but Jacinta doesn’t look one bit daunted by it. In her youth, she wanted to be a country and western singer and she approaches the microphone like it’s her ally. At the same time, she shields 61 per cent of the population from any troubling thoughts they might have about Indigenous Australia. If the LNP wins the next election she will have real political power. She will also be the exact opposite of what the Voice referendum sought to achieve – a Voice coming up from the grassroots.

Jacinta Price is the only Aboriginal person I’ve encountered who says there are “no ongoing negative impacts” of colonisation. That is radical, powerfully so. People on the left assume someone is writing her lines for her. I’m not so sure. It would be a serious mistake to underestimate her.

I hereby call on the major media organizations to send an Indigenous journalist to central Australia to ask the two great journalistic questions – who and why? Who is Jacinta Price really? And why is she doing what she does? It’s approaching the stage where we really do need to know. The wind beneath Jacinta’s wings is Gina Rinehart. A rapacious mining magnate and the Voice of Her People could go a very long way in little time. In another Australian article last week, it was reported that 93-year-old conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey “has poured doubt over the future of remote Indigenous towns” and criticised the Native Title Act. The rush is on.

Avoid the rush.

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THREE…

If Picasso were alive today, he would be painting Gaza. His Spanish civil war painting “Guernica” is about the bombardment of a civilian population. About terror, panic, chaos. Nearly half the population of Gaza is under the age of 18. By what measure is the life of a Palestinian child not of equal value to the life of an Israeli child? (And, yes, I understand the role of Hamas. I am of Irish descent. Hamas is a terrorist organization like the IRA was, but don’t tell me that the IRA’s acts exist without a historical context, that they occur in a vacuum).

The events in Gaza led me back to reading “Markings”, the diary of former Nobel Peace Prize winner Dag Hammarskjold. Hammarskjold was the UN secretary general from 1953 to 1961, when the mass destruction of World War 2 was still fresh in people’s minds and the UN’s sense of mission as a peace-keeping force was strong. He died in a plane crash in 1961. Many believe he was murdered.

In his introduction to the book, former US president Jimmy Carter wrote, “Hammarskjold’s public life was a testament to his commitment to serve others, to work for peace and justice”. Hammarskjold was religious but not like the new Speaker of the US Congress, Mike Johnson, who believes all the creatures earth descend from the animals who boarded Noah’s Ark two by two. Johnson has no doubt. Jimmy Carter, a fair dinkum Christian, wrote that Hammarskjold records in intimate detail “his self-doubt, loneliness and even, occasionally, despair”.
With the despair of Gaza in mind, I read Hammarskjold’s entry for 22 April 1956: “The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all”. I believe that. The people who taught me this more than any other were Aboriginal people. To someone like Michael Long, it’s second nature.

FOUR…

When I started exploring Aboriginal Australia in the 1980s after returning from overseas, I thought I’d get speared. I was the enemy, wasn’t I? But, overwhelmingly, I wasn’t treated as an enemy. At the top end of my experiences were a series of great elders I met, people like Pat Anderson. If you want to see a display of indomitable human dignity, watch the clip of Pat Anderson speaking after the Week of Silence. When you think about what the dignity she displays as an Aboriginal person has withstood historically over the past 235 years, you start to see the strength of the world’s oldest living culture. Pat doesn’t think it’s over. She thinks the YES people are just getting going. If you need a lift, have a listen.

FIVE…

People reveal themselves by how they walk on Aboriginal land. Watch Kevin Sheedy, if you ever get the chance. I did at a Tiwi Island grand final. He was quiet as a tree. Humble to each and every person – man, woman, child. You heard his name being whispered as he walked. On the few occasions John Howard visited remote Aboriginal communities he looked like a confused geriatric who’d wandered into the wrong ward.

Midway through the Voice campaign, John Howard called on his (overwhelmingly white) supporters to maintain their rage. Rage, John? Fly to Iraq and introduce yourself as one of the masterminds of the invasion on a pretext that soon collapsed. It brought death and injury to thousands while also opening the door for the religious fanatics who rule Iraq today and, as human types, resemble the new Republican Speaker for the US Congress, Mike Johnson.

How much did John Winston Howard, along with George Bush and Tony Blair, rush into war because they entertained fantasies about being war-time leaders? My dear departed mother always called the Father of Modern Australian Conservatism Little Johnny Howard. Why little? Well, here is an example of what it means to be big – Patrick Dodson’s sister saw their mother chained to a tree back in the old mission days and he has spent the past 50 years without a single public hint of rage as he sought to make our nation whole. That’s big. That’s Uluru big. And that’s why those of us who saw that same spirit in the Uluru Statement from the Heart are here to stay.