Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s recent speech at the Australian Press Club could well be a key turning point in the wider Australian discourse. As an example of what a brilliant orator and influential politician Senator Price has become, there was this mic-drop moment during question time (see particularly from 58:55 to 59:40):

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David Crowe (MC): We’re moving into an area that goes well beyond The Voice, but it’s interesting… I have talked to Indigenous people, and I’m sure others have too, who talk about generations of trauma among Indigenous Australians as a result of colonisation. Whether that means that colonisation happens now is probably a separate question, but would you accept that there have been generations of trauma as a result of that history?

Senator Price: Well, I guess that would mean that those of us whose ancestors were disposed of their own country and brought here in chains as convicts were also suffering from intergenerational trauma. So, I should be doubly suffering from intergenerational trauma.

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At which point the room broke out into raucous laughter and the MC very quickly moved on to the next question.

If Senator Price was holding a microphone then she could have simply dropped it on the floor then and walked away. Because that is the perfect answer to the morally vacuous Woke ideology which is so much in vogue at the present time.

Andrew Bolt perceived that Senator Price’s speech was so significant that it signals a ‘turning point’ in the debate regarding The Voice. His video of the incident has since gone viral.

Significantly, just before this (starting at 55:56) Senator Price had this exchange with the journalist Josh Butler from The Guardian:

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Josh Butler: Senator Price, thank you for your speech. In your speech you claimed, ‘Some Indigenous organisations want to demonise colonial settlement.’ Can I ask you, do you believe the history of colonisation has an impact on some Indigenous Australians?

Senator Price: Ah, no. I’ll be honest with you, no. I don’t think so. Positive impact? Absolutely! I mean, now we’ve got running water, we’ve go readily available food. I mean, everything that my grandfather had when he was growing up – cause he first saw white fellas in his early adolescence – we now have. Otherwise he would have had to live off the land, provide for his family, and all of those measures which Aboriginal Australians, many of us have the same opportunity as all other Australians in this country.

We certainly have one of the greatest systems around the world in terms of the democratic structures in comparison to other countries. It is why migrants flock to Australia to call Australia home because of the opportunity that exists for all Australians.

But if we keep telling Aboriginal people that they are victims we are effectively removing their agency. And then we’re giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives. That is the worst possible thing you can do to any human being – to tell them that they are a victim without agency. And that’s what I refuse to do.

Josh Butler: Just a quick follow-up. So you don’t believe there’s any negative, ongoing impacts of colonisation on indigenous Australians today? Just to confirm.

Senator Price: No. There’s no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation. What I will say, which I have suggested obviously within my speech is that particularly for my family in remote communities again who live very close to traditional culture and who experience the highest rates of violence in the country, family violence, interpersonal violence … they experience that not because of the effects of colonisation, but because it’s expected that young girls are married off to older husbands in arranged marriages.

We haven’t had a feminist movement for Aboriginal women because we’ve been expected to toe the line in Aboriginal activism for the rights of our race. But our rights as women have been second place. And I have the lived experience. My mother has the lived experience as someone who was subject to traditional custom and expected to become the second wife in an arranged marriage.

There are still people living this way. And yet those who have held the narrative because they have had an education and access to media ignore the plight of those in communities. And this can’t continue to go on.

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It was a stunning exchange and likely to become viral in the years to come. For if we are to move forward as a nation then we must forsake the progressive paradigm of victimhood.

Senator Price is right, it denies human agency and prohibits people from not only taking responsibility for their lives but of contributing the wider world around them.

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