‘I would say to everybody in Australia, for the health and welfare of people like myself, out in the bush and the communities, vote No to this Voice. Because it’s their Voice, not ours.’ 

This plea is from Nurungga Elder, Kerry White, who has been an unapologetically outspoken opponent to the Voice to Parliament referendum.

Back in December, I wrote the article What I Learnt from an Aboriginal Elder, which recounted the interview Adam Zahra and I did on our podcast, The ExCandidates, with Kerry White.

Speaking on behalf of her community in rural and remote Australia, Kerry stated back then, ‘It’s a No from me. I say no to the Voice.’

Last Sunday, we had Kerry back on the show to see if her views had changed over the referendum campaign.

‘I’m a No all the way,’ she replied emphatically. ‘There is no way I want that mob telling me what to do. They don’t speak for me; they don’t speak for my mob. They don’t speak for every other mob in Australia. And they never spoke to any of us.’

Kerry White lives in Port Pirie in South Australia and is part of the Nurungga people who live on the Yorke Peninsula. She strongly identifies with the rural and remote Aboriginal communities of the area, many of which are isolated from regular Australian society.

In our interview, which lasted over an hour and a half, Kerry argued two main points.

Firstly, the Voice to Parliament will be dominated by city ‘elites’ and will not adequately represent Aboriginal communities in rural and remote areas.

And secondly, white people should not feel guilty for the period of Aboriginal history since British colonisation.

‘Aboriginal life before white man came was not peaceful,’ Kerry began. ‘Children were left to cry, they weren’t hugged or cuddled or anything. Because they had to be fighting men.’

‘If you were too weak to fight, you’d end up dead. ‘cos the mob wouldn’t take care of you. They didn’t take care of the sick or whatever. If you couldn’t keep up, you got left behind.’

To supplement Kerry’s argument, I quoted an excerpt by Bess Nungarrayi Price, mother of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, which was taken from Warren Mundine’s book Black + White.

‘I was born in a remote, desert community at a time when almost half of our babies died in infancy, the highest infant mortality rate in most of the world. Four of my siblings passed away before I knew them. I came close to death myself as a child and as a young adult and survive now only because of the magic of white man’s medicine. For that I am grateful.’

Kerry responded by adding, ‘I’ll tell you something. Now, the Aboriginal people were rounded up and put onto missions and communities, right. Now there was a lot of Aboriginal women, they went there voluntarily. Because women were not treated the same in the mob. They were just used and abused.’

While the prevailing narrative is that colonisation brought great hardship upon the Aboriginal people, with words like ‘invasion’ and ‘genocide’, Kerry painted a vastly different image.

‘And this is what they don’t like to hear. Aboriginal people say, ‘White fellas saved us.’ You heard that right. White fellas saved us.’

In speaking to Kerry, it is clear she feels extremely uncomfortable with the division that this referendum is causing. Speaking fondly of her Aboriginal grandfather, she proudly shared an anecdote of unity.

‘My grandfather. He fought in the second world war, alongside his brothers and his cousins. And they fought for our freedom. Not just Aboriginal freedom; freedom for all the white people. And they did it willingly. And they had great respect for their white brothers that they fought alongside.’

For Kerry, ‘white guilt’ is a blatant tactic used by activists and others to advance a political agenda.

‘What these activists do. And what they’ve always done, for decades is, they push intergenerational guilt onto White Australians.

‘They’re doing it in the schools. They get little kindergarten kids to say ‘sorry’. And then stupid Rudd went and did Sorry Day. Everyone had to apologise for something they didn’t do.

‘White people should not be saying sorry to Aboriginal people.’

As the interview progressed, I held up a campaign flyer supporting the Yes campaign, issued by the Member for Warringah, Zali Steggall. I read out one of the bullet points on the flyer, which states, ‘Over 80 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people support this proposal.’

‘Yeah, if they live in the city.’ Kerry exclaimed almost before I could get the words out.

‘80 per cent of city fellas want it, but 80 per cent of us in the bush, the ones that they’re supposed to be doing all this for, we don’t want it. So, they can have their 80 per cent of the city mob, and we’ll stick to the 80 per cent of us in the bush.

‘Because us in the bush, we’ve always been different; ‘cos there’s two lots of Aboriginal people in this country. There’s the bush mob and the city mob and don’t you dare put us together.’

The differences between Aboriginal people from the city and rural/remote areas is a distinction that Kerry has been determined to make clear whenever she has spoken on the referendum.

Frustrated by the narrative that the majority of Aboriginal people are in favour of the Voice, Kerry argues that her community has been ignored in favour of the loud ‘voices’ of city activists.

‘They’re not listening to our voices now. We’re shouting from the rooftops. So, what in the world do they think this Voice is going to do?’

Kerry then went on to explain the situation in more detail.

‘We have all these different mobs, all around Australia. What they do in the Northern Territory is a bit different to what they do over in Queensland, in New South Wales, in Victoria and even more so than over in Western Australia.

‘What’s happening in this community, is not the same thing as what’s happening in that community. That community might not have the violence that’s going on in the other one, but they need help in a different area.’

In Kerry’s opinion, the Voice will be dominated by the ‘city mob’, which she argues have had a monopoly over Aboriginal issues within Australia for quite some time.

‘And these mobs, they’ve been sitting up there for goodness knows how long, collecting billions and billions of dollars, and have done nothing, nothing at all.

‘I used to work for Aboriginal corporations. And to try and get funding to do anything, you might as well go and spit in the wind. Because that’s exactly what would happen. You’d come back and it would hit you in the face and you’d have nothing to show for it.’

Instead of a Voice to Parliament, Kerry is calling for a Royal Commission into Indigenous funding.

‘We want a Royal Commission into where all that money is going. Unless we get a Royal Commission and we say no to this Voice and no to these activists and kick their butts as far as we can down the highway. They’re going to keep using all these issues to suck people in, get people to feel sorry for them. And that’ll keep filling up their little coffers; keeps their gravy train going.

‘We need to stop their gravy train, get rid of all of them organisations that are doing absolutely nothing, except draining the taxpayer’s purse.

‘And we need people like our so-called ‘politicians’, that’s not worth a pinch of salt, to come out and actually sit down with us, in the dirt, as we call it. And have a conversation with us Elders, individually in each community that’s having problems. Because that’s the only way it’s going to get solved. It’s got to come from a grassroots level.

‘We get racism because we’re supposed to be getting all this money that we don’t get. Our communities never change.’

The lack of money that is filtering down to her community is not the only frustration Kerry has with the Aboriginal ‘elites’, who she claims are dominating the narrative on the Australian political scene.

The cashless debit card, a scheme that was scrapped in the early stages of the Albanese government, is another example of city ‘elites’ meddling in issues that Kerry feels only rural and remote Aboriginal people can understand.

She is not alone. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price made the argument during a recent appearance on Alex Antic’s ‘Based’ podcast.

‘That was protecting vulnerable women, the elderly, and making sure that kids had food in their bellies. And this government, for ideological reasons, because they were listening to academics and elites in the city, decided to scrap it. And all hell has broken loose in many of those communities, where it was protecting vulnerable people.’

During our interview with Kerry, I played this clip of Senator Price. Kerry completely agreed.

‘In rural and remote Australia, we fought to get the cashless debit card. To do something about alcohol-fuelled violence. And we got the debit card and the amount of violence went down, both in our communities and in the towns that were close by. And then, Albanese gets elected, and the first thing he does is takes away the cashless debit card.

‘When we first got that brought in; there was a big holla and a scream all over Australia; ‘Oh look what they’re doing to the Aboriginal people, oh it’s so bad.’ Not one of them city mobbers got a clue on what it’s like to live in a community in rural and remote Australia. Not one of them.

‘And we’re fed up with them activist and city mob telling us what to do.’

Kerry is no stranger to the issues her community faces. She has a history of working within Aboriginal government and welfare organisations in South Australia.

She has seen the worst of the worst when it comes to alcohol-fuelled violence and the abuse of children. She has visited the homes of families where children were living in horrendous conditions, with clear signs of neglect and sexual abuse.

In recounting one of her experiences, she said, ‘You’ve got parents giving a little six-week-old baby alcohol so it will shut up and go to sleep, so they can go out and party.’

Kerry has witnessed and faced the issues that the Voice to Parliament is claiming to address.

Yet, she is staunchly against it.

In Kerry’s view, the Aboriginal city elites will dominate the Voice to Parliament and silence Aboriginal people in rural and remote communities.

Speaking on behalf of her people, Kerry is doing everything she can to try and get her message out. To support the No campaign, she has joined the board of Recognise a Better Way and has participated in speaking engagements at various events in South Australia.

Kerry has been open to speak with media, journalists, or anyone who is willing to listen to get her argument across.

In finishing her interview with Adam and I, Kerry emphatically stated.

‘Always have the courage to speak up.

‘Just remember, we are one people, one flag, one Australia. And vote no to the Voice.’ 

---

Steven Tripp, Co-host of the ExCandidates podcast & former candidate for Warringah

Twitter: @RealStevenTripp

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