Jacinta Price vs Marcia Langton
With the no vote in the Aboriginal voice referendum in a commanding lead in all the recent polls yes activists are already in total meltdown mode. For a while, they claimed no vote was surging due to misinformation but this week they have gone back to racism accusations.
Yes activists exploded with rage at Shadow Indigenous Australians Minister and No campaign leader Jacinta Price’s National Press Club address this week because it was full of actual truth-telling. Price said that traditional Aboriginal culture is the reason why there is so much violence against women and dysfunction in remote Aboriginal communities. She said there is no ongoing negative impact from white colonization and has brought positive impacts to Aboriginal people. She also dismissed the concept of inter-generational trauma and that Aboriginals are victims with no agency. Price said Canberra needs ears to listen to those Aboriginals who they are ignoring not a Constitutionally enshrined voice controlled by the Aboriginal elites.
Contrast Price’s speech with recorded comments from Voice architect and Marcia Langton who said the No campaign arguments were either base racism or just sheer stupidity. In another speech, she said hard no voters were spewing racism. She has also said Australia is a horrible racist country and that the police and social workers are racist. In a 2018 Saturday Paper column Langton labelled Jacinta Price and her mother former Nothern Territory CLP Minister Bess Price as “the useful coloured help in rescuing the racist image of these conservative outfits”.
Yes activists say a Voice in the Constitution will unite the nation despite insults that Langton and her defenders have aimed at the no campaign. The Communist sympathies of Marcia Langon and prominent voice campaigners Thomas Mayo and Teela Reed demonstrate that their motives are much more radical. After the voice as per the Uluru Statement from the Heart, they want treaty and truth-telling (their version of the truth) with a Makarrata Commission. If they get their way more division not unity will be guarteened.