Jacinta Nampijinpa Price broke down in the Senate on Tuesday as she blamed a culture of silence, political correctness and systemic child protection failures for the death of her young niece who was allegedly murdered in Alice Springs last month.
In an emotional speech that repeatedly halted as she fought back tears, the Northern Territory senator declared: “The cost of silence is now measured in the life of my five-year-old niece.”
Price, a Warlpiri/Celtic woman, used the condolence speech to demand a national reckoning over violence, neglect and abuse in Indigenous communities, accusing governments and institutions of failing vulnerable children while prioritising “cultural sensitivities and political correctness ahead of the safety of children”.
“I don’t want to be here right now, to have to stand in this chamber, to deliver a condolence speech for a little girl in my family,” the Liberal senator said.
“She was loved. She should still be here.”
Known as Kumanjayi Little Baby for cultural reasons, she was last seen when she was put to bed just before midnight on Anzac Day at the Old Timers Camp. The senator said her niece’s death had exposed deep failures inside the child protection system, revealing that “multiple warnings were made in regard to her safety, and these warnings were not acted upon adequately”.
“The hardest truth is that for many in my home town, none of this came as a surprise. But the truth is that people do not want to speak this out loud,” Senator Price said.
At times visibly shaking, Price spoke about her late brother Leonard, who died young before he had the chance to become “one of her other fathers” under cultural traditions.
“I find myself wondering whether things might have been different if he had lived, whether he would have been able to protect her,” she said. “The only comfort I can take is that they are with our heavenly father now.”
But she said motions meant nothing if they were accompanied by inaction and excuses. Her speech turned from personal grief to a sweeping critique of government policy and Indigenous affairs administration, with Price arguing too many Australians were afraid to speak honestly about dysfunction in remote communities.
“For too long in this country, there has been silence around what is happening in too many town camps and remote communities,” she said. “A silence driven by fear, a fear of causing offence, a fear of being labelled racist, fear of speaking honestly about dysfunction, violence, alcohol abuse, neglect and conditions vulnerable children are growing up in.
“That silence is killing our babies.”
Price is a vocal conservative critic of mainstream Indigenous policy, having argued against the concept of systemic disadvantage and the effectiveness of decades-old approaches to successive government towards “Closing the Gap”.
Thousands of Australians gathered at vigils held across the country earlier this month to pay their respects to the Alice Springs girl, whose body was found on April 30 on the outskirts of town.
Before a condolence motion was moved in the Senate, where Indigenous Affairs Minister Malarndirri McCarthy, a Yanyuwa woman from the Gulf country in the Northern Territory also spoke and parliament was reminded of her family’s request that her short life “not be used by politicians for reasons that do not honour and respect her”.
McCarthy said that community effort to search for her and the mourning which followed “helps us all to remember that this little baby girl isn’t just baby girl, isn’t just a headline or a statistic”.
“She was a little girl as important as any other, and she was so loved,” she said.
But Price accused sections of the child protection system of adopting a “hands-off culture” that treated Indigenous children differently because of “racial heritage”.
“We cannot continue pretending that lowering expectations for Aboriginal children is compassion. It’s not compassion, it’s neglect. It’s the racism of low expectations,” she said.
She also criticised governments for spending “billions of dollars” while conditions in town camps continued to deteriorate, arguing housing programs alone would not solve entrenched violence and neglect.
“I don’t want another family to stand where mine stands today,” she said. “I don’t want this parliament to offer condolences while refusing to confront the conditions that made those condolences necessary in the first place.”
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Rob Harrisis the national correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Canberra. He is a former Europe correspondent.Connect viaemail.
