In a government led by Peter Dutton, Country Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price would be appointed to the powerful Expenditure Review Committee to help end “government waste.” “I think she’s got a real practical understanding of what’s happening in the real world,” Dutton told SkyNews’s Andrew Glennell after she was appointed shadow government efficiency minister in February. “You need somebody who has that ability to communicate, to connect with people, to understand the rights and the wrongs that are happening in the marketplace, in the business sector.”
Dutton admires Price’s ability to “connect with people,” and she has certainly put effort into connecting in recent months, not only publishing a memoir, Matters of the Heart, but also allowing the ABC to render her life as an appealing Monday-night Australian Story. As she explained to the Australian’s Cameron Stewart, her memoir is intended to give “a more personal perspective, you know, Jacinta the human, the mother, the daughter, the sister, the child, as opposed to the politician.”
Price raised her profile by leading the No campaign of 2023. After Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton, she was the third most mentioned figure in mainstream and social media. She has more than 50,000 followers on X and is among the most viewed guests on SkyNews’s YouTube channel. “It’s not uncommon at all for people to randomly come up and hug me or shake my hand,” she writes.
To represent a politician as a “person” is, of course, a political move. Matters of the Heart seeks not only to bring personal warmth to her established fame but also to model a form of Indigeneity that has broken free of what she calls “long-outdated cultural practices.” As Christine Wallace showed in Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and Their Biographers, managing the biographical narrative in this way has long been a strategy of Australian politicians.
Price’s critique of her people’s “cultural practices” jars for many advocates of Indigenous self-determination. Writing in the Saturday Paper in 2018, Marcia Langton characterised the then-aspiring parliamentarian as a “political naïf” with a “bizarre” and “dangerous” political agenda and a following of (mostly) “barking mad racists,” some from the “alt-right.” She particularly objected to Price’s view (in Langton’s words) “that domestic violence is an innate part of Indigenous culture.”
Langton also mentioned (without evident censure) that Price’s policy prescriptions were “straight out of the pages of Noel Pearson’s published works” (a convergence of views I have discussed previously). Price was a member of the Alice Springs Town Council at the time, but she had been preselected by the Country Liberal Party to contest the seat of Lingiari in the 2019 election.
Price recalls Langton’s comments as “deeply personal… deliberately hurtful — poisonous even.” The two women had appeared together at the National Press Club in 2016, allied in a “passionate commitment to the same goal: to stop the epidemic of violence suffered by Indigenous women.” That “epidemic” remains a prominent theme in Price’s speeches: since becoming a senator in 2022 she has frequently highlighted the insecurity of women and children within what she has called a “sophisticated but brutal culture.”
That phrase comes from her first speech in the Senate (reproduced in Matters of the Heart) in which she evoked “unsupervised” Northern Territory children who “have witnessed, or been subject to, normalised alcohol abuse and domestic, family and sexual violence” and referred to “750 Indigenous Australians… murdered at the hands of other Indigenous Australians.” Later, when parliament declined to initiate a royal commission into the sexual abuse of Indigenous children in remote communities, she accused the Albanese government of telling victims — “who come to me on a regular basis” — that they are not important.
Recalling another appearance at the National Press Club, this time in August 2023, she writes: “I told them that for my family in remote communities, it was tradition not colonisation that caused suffering. I gave the example of young girls married off to older husbands.”
Is kinship the ethical foundation or the fatal flaw in Indigenous society? Price has made clear that she believes social disorder is endemic to Indigenous communities, but her view is at odds with how the concept of the Indigenous family assumed a key role in the development of Indigenous land rights in Australia the final third of the twentieth century.
Those decades saw a cascade of statutes, common law decisions and pragmatic adjustments of Australia’s laws of real property — from Don Dunstan’s Aboriginal Lands Trust Act of 1966 to John Howard’s successful campaign to reconcile the Coalition parties to an amended Native Title Act in 1998. With bipartisan support, these policy changes resulted in a growing Indigenous land and sea estate. No government could afford to extinguish even a tiny portion of its extent by lawful means, especially after the High Court’s March 2025 decision in Commonwealth of Australia v Yunupingu.
What is the value, to Australia, of the Indigenous land and sea estate? This question simmers beneath all our debates about Indigenous affairs. One of the ways we address it — indirectly — is by debating the condition of Indigenous society, and particularly its family life.
During the decades in which land and sea rights became a bipartisan commitment, Indigenous Australian society was seen, in a positive light, as not only land-based but also kin-based. The idea that a kin-based Indigenous social order exists and can be accorded collective rights was a powerful one. Gaining political acceptance for an Indigenous land and sea estate entailed recognising that Aboriginal customary law survived as a living system, worthy to be called law, enacted in how Indigenous Australians reckoned their obligations to one another as kin.
The NT Aboriginal Land Right Act, for example, assumes that claimants (and thus traditional owners) are a “local descent group.” The national system of native title mobilises what anthropologist Peter Sutton has called “families of polity.” Indigenous social order was believed to be reproducing itself, in an orderly fashion, as a system of rights and obligations that could be accommodated by our European-derived system of property.
But an alternative optic was also emerging. One effect of the Aboriginal deaths in custody royal commission (1989–91) was that Australian governments incorporated the “Indigenous identifier” within their administrative routines, making it technically possible to compare Indigenous with non-Indigenous (or “All Australia”) populations according to quantified characteristics, including pathologies. Comparatively high rates of domestic violence and incarceration, for instance, or large numbers of children in out-of-home care make it plausible to portray Indigenous Australia as a society in disorder.
One explanation for what came to be known as “the gap” emphasises the intergenerational effects of traumatic colonisation. It prescribes policies that recognise Indigenous collective decision-making and encourage the recovery of institutional and personal capacity. The other explanation points to Indigenous cultural traditions —precolonial and more recently acquired — that have become dysfunctional within liberal, capitalist modernity. It holds individuals and communities responsible for initiating their own recovery by committing to programs of self-improvement which the state has the duty to recommend and to prescribe.
These competing explanations circulated during the debate about the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention and its sequel, compulsory income management via the Basics Card and the Cashless Debit Card. Questions about the functionality of Indigenous society also surface — sometimes explicitly — whenever the Indigenous land and sea estate is considered as a national asset. What kind of “resource” is it? Are Indigenous Australians trapped in it or empowered by it? And whose answers to those questions should prevail?
These questions are inflected by a “culture war” in which alternative images of Indigenous customs and laws contend. Are their customs ethically and socially sound in themselves, entitled to exist despite stubbornly colonial structures and habits of mind? Or are they flawed and maladaptive, requiring innovation and perhaps external intervention to correct or erase them? Answers to these questions inform views not only about welfare policies but also about resource “development.”
Matters of the Heart is an intervention into this debate. What makes it both a “personal” and a “political” book is that, in wider discussions, the question of the worth and future of Indigeneity is often posed as a question about the constitution of Indigenous domestic order — in other words, the quality of relationships between men and women and between adults and children. Price presents her family life as exemplary of what Indigenous people could be if they make the right decisions. This is not the first time she has made herself a personification of something larger. In a widely viewed 2023 video she presented (what she called) the “racism” and “separatism” of the Voice as fracturing not only the nation but also her family.
A key obstacle to Indigenous hopes of a better life, she has said elsewhere, is “the dysfunctionality and lack of accountability of land councils.” In the Senate in February this year, for example, she justified her attacks on the NT land councils by saying, “Well, maybe if they didn’t have chairmen who had a history of domestic violence and maybe if they had removed these people or knew of their backgrounds before putting them in these places of leadership, I would stop calling them out.” She then named as “perpetrators” of domestic violence four men who lead NT Aboriginal organisations.
Matters of the Heart is too warm and engaging in tone (and perhaps too well-vetted by lawyers) to include such specific accusations. Its political punch is more implicit in its triumphal narrative of her own domestic order — stabilised, loving and wholesome. To succeed as a daughter, mother and wife Price has overcome three challenges: Warlpiri tradition, violent men (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) and her own drug use. Her modelling of a viable Warlpiri personhood validates a certain way of connecting Indigenous past and future, custom and modernity.
Price’s success in achieving sustainable family happiness was prefigured and made possible by her parents’ household, a big topic in her memoir. She pays loving tribute to her parents, Bess Nungarrayi Price, born in 1960 at Yuendumu and raised there before attending Darwin’s Kormilda College at the age of thirteen, and David Price, born and raised in Lake Macquarie Shire. The pair became a couple in 1979 after Bess, with her first child Linawu, left her violent Warlpiri husband. (He was not her promised husband but another Kormilda student, also from Yuendumu.)
Both Bess and Dave have worked as teachers, and Bess has also had a political career as member of the NT Legislative Assembly (2012–16), including ministries in Adam Giles’ Country Liberal government. They raised Jacinta (born 1981) in Alice Springs.
Bess is one of the “matriarchs” anthropologist Paul Burke talked to when he was writing An Australian Indigenous Diaspora: Warlpiri Matriarchs and the Refashioning of Tradition, an ethnography profiling women of steadfast autonomy who have chosen to live outside the Warlpiri homeland (nowadays consisting of Nyirrpi, Yuendumu, Willowra, Lajamanu, Ali Curung) and in some cases have married white men.
“In evading key traditional obligations to accept particular Warlpiri marriage partners,” Burke writes, “they were all set on a course of reconfiguration of what is salient about being a Warlpiri person; at the same time they were managing the sometimes conflicting demands of continuing involvement with kin and projects close to their own hearts.”
Burke’s field work took him to Warlpiri women in Cairns, Darwin, Muswellbrook, Melbourne, Murray Bridge and Adelaide. Jacinta grew up in another Warlpiri outpost, suburban Alice Springs. For three years early in their relationship, her parents worked at Milikapiti (Tiwi country), and that’s where Jacinta was born. She says that this period (and the distance from Warlpiri country) released Bess and Dave from “the pressures and obligations of family life and the complex kinship connections at Yuendumu.”
In Jacinta’s infancy the Prices moved to Alice Springs, where their circle of friends included six other interracial couples. “Four of the white partners were teachers and all of the Aboriginal partners were from different Aboriginal settlements,” writes Burke. “They spent time together, helped each other out with short-term accommodation and childminding, and presumably supported each other through their mutual recognition of their relatively unusual partnerships.”
As a town resident, Bess Price had access to networks including
[her] immediate Warlpiri family, with their requests for assistance, their crises and tragedies as well as their own friends in similar interracial relationships and similar educational backgrounds. It included work friends, Indigenous leaders in the Indigenous sector, [Jacinta]’s school friends and through her the music scene in Alice Springs… [and Bess’s] own Aboriginal girlfriends with whom she could relax and celebrate. [It also] extended to local Alice Springs and Northern Territory political elites.
Matters of the Heart shows that Jacinta has inherited these networks, extending them since 2018 into a national political grouping, particularly in the Liberal and National parties, right-wing think tanks including the Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public Affairs, and allied campaign organisations including Advance, SkyNews and the Murdoch press.
Alice Springs’s 300-kilometre distance from Yuendumu has given Bess and Jacinta freedom to manage their Warlpiri roots. Education, orderly domesticity and (whitefella) politics have been the defining projects of what Burke calls these two “bicultural adepts.” Living in town, Jacinta’s respectful replication of Bess’s approach to her Warlpiriness points to the consolidation of Burke’s diaspora. Funerals, visits from relatives and visits to relatives in Alice Springs Hospital punctuate Jacinta’s memoir — episodes in a dynastic project of Warlpiri-modern.
Among the themes of Matters of the Heart is the patriarchal character of Warlpiri culture. Price says she first heard this criticism (if not the word) spoken with authority when she was seven or eight. The speaker was her maternal grandfather, Dinny, an outward-looking man of initiative and one of the first Warlpiri to own a car. Having observed how men were treating women in Yuendumu, Dinny said that he hoped Jacinta would “marry a whitefella.” This “acknowledgment of the failings of our culture” he then repeated “in front of Dad” — “a huge compliment to my father.”
It took Jacinta three partnerings to find a white man she could stick with. The first, Simon, “the hottest boyfriend in Alice Springs,” was her classmate at Centralian Senior College; she completed her schooling pregnant, keen to start a family in a town where “teen pregnancies weren’t unusual.” Readers will enjoy her warm and frank account of her initiation into motherhood — “a truly grounding experience” for “breastfeeding is bloody hard work.” Soon she had three little boys, but Simon — still a youth — couldn’t settle to a domestic routine. The marriage collapsed and an amicable sharing of access to the children ensued.
Her second partner, Jai, was charming but devious and — it soon transpired — violent: “a liar, an abuser and a crook.” After “booting Jai out of my life,” Price suffered “feelings of guilt, embarrassment and shame.” During this, “the darkest period of my life,” drugs were her solace. She was restored by the Holyoake drug and alcohol rehabilitation program.
Meeting, courting and marrying Colin Lillie — a migrant from Scotland, a single father and a musician — takes up fifty happy pages of Matters of the Heart. One bond with Colin was that “we had both grown up surrounded by drunkenness and violence, in communities clouded by hopelessness and despair”; and he too had recovered from drug and alcohol abuse. Here, the memoir presses home its theme of recovery from personal and domestic chaos through individual effort and mature marital choice.
Indeed, it is hardship — overcome — that qualifies Jacinta, in her own eyes, to pursue her political causes. After telling the reader how Holyoake enabled her to work successfully on herself, she writes: “Now I was in a position to use my experience to make change for others.” “It’s OK to be able to stand in front of the Australian people and to talk about your beliefs and how you think we can fix problems and that sort of thing,” she told the Australian’s Cameron Stewart. “But it’s another thing to be able to say, ‘Look, I’ve been there. I’ve walked that road too.’”
Apart from opposing the Voice amendment in 2023, what changes has Price advocated? Parts of the answer can be found in her membership of the Senate’s environment and communications references committee.
In August last year that committee reported on the Albanese government’s intention, as part of its Future Gas Strategy, to buy a $1.9 billion stake in the Middle Arm Industrial Precinct, a fifty-year development on 1500 hectares a few kilometres south of Darwin and Palmerston. Promoted by a series of Territory governments since 2020, the project would use gas piped from the Beetaloo Basin to fuel enterprises based on low-emissions hydrocarbons, green hydrogen, advanced manufacturing, carbon capture and storage, and minerals processing (though petrochemical processing wasn’t ruled out). Wealth generated by the precinct could free the Northern Territory from dependence on Commonwealth funding.
But the inquiry heard several concerns about the project: that gas processing is the primary purpose of the precinct; that the pace of global decarbonising makes it impossible to be confident of the precinct’s commercial viability; that there has been too little public information and consultation; that carbon capture and storage technology remains too unproven to be counted as a plus for the precinct; that there is no assurance that the emissions from its construction and operation can be offset; that the Commonwealth should invest in renewable energy rather than continuing fossil-fuel use; that the precinct would encourage investment in gas extraction contrary to Australia’s climate-mitigation obligations; and that the precinct would pollute the atmosphere of the Darwin region.
Though they don’t have native title — the 1500 hectares are owned by the NT government’s Land Development Corporation — the land has been identified by the Larrakia people as their country. Objecting to the precinct, the Larrakia were joined by the Nurrdalinji Native Title Aboriginal Corporation, a group of sixty-plus native title holders from eleven native title determination areas in the Beetaloo Basin region.
The Larrakia’s accusation that the Territory government had misled them and the public was echoed by the Northern Land Council. William Risk, a Larrakia spokesperson, pointed out that both the government and the opposition had announced funding for the Precinct in April 2022 without having spoken to the Larrakia.
The Senate committee, chaired by Sarah Hanson-Young, was so divided in its views on all these issues that it could formulate no consensus recommendations. Eight Coalition members, including Price, complained that the inquiry had not recognised “the contribution of the Middle Arm Industrial Precinct project to the future of the Northern Territory and Australian economies” and had “downplayed Indigenous groups in the Northern Territory who are in favour and see [its] potential.” They claimed to have observed and received reports of “physical and verbal bullying” of witnesses who were “intimidated and assaulted at hearings.” Price and her colleagues expressed confidence that the project would benefit the Larrakia.
Senator Price attended three of the inquiry’s four public hearings. On 10 April last year she confronted the Nurrdalinji witnesses with (what she implied to be) their illogical thinking about energy sources. Why accept SunCable’s solar farm on their country but reject drilling for gas? Surely it was a simple matter of sensibly using space? “The SunCable project obviously will take up about ten times the area that Middle Arm will take up.” Was Price pretending not to understand what is stake in choosing between fossil fuels and renewables? Was she hoping that by making “space” the issue she would reveal to the Nurrdalinji witnesses a perspective that they had not considered?
When a Nurrdalinji witness complained that the Northern Land Council had not properly represented their views on gasfields in the Beetaloo Basin, Price swooped: “Do you think it’s appropriate, then, that we look more closely at the NLC and the other land councils as to how they’re representing traditional owners — or, in your case, not representing traditional owners? Should the government have a proper look into land councils for that?”
Price has long urged that the land councils be “audited.” “We also know that land councils, especially in the Northern Territory, can be a barrier to economic independence,” she said on 10 February this year, and went on to promise that if she became Indigenous affairs minister she would “support traditional owners who want to form breakaway, language-based land councils. We must encourage those who want to develop their land for things like tourism, cattle stations or mining instead of keeping them dependent on government welfare.”
Since the Senate committee’s report on the Middle Arm Industrial Precinct was published, Price has joined the Senate’s select committee on measuring outcomes for First Nations communities. An initiative of the Australian Greens, this committee is focused on the statistical measurement of problems to which Price often refers, including rates of suicide and adult incarceration, the number of children in out-of-home care and the number of children commencing school who are developmentally on track. Her interest in the committee’s inquiry is beyond question.
The committee held two public hearings before parliament was prorogued for the election. On each occasion, Price’s questions to witnesses reflected two of her continuing suspicions. One is that the “gaps” are not closing because land and sea rights are not being used to generate wealth. “Have you seen any progress in terms of improved economic conditions or the lives of those who have had access to their land once more?” she asked one witness.
Her other suspicion is that governments indulge Indigenous organisations rather than holding them accountable. Thus: “Do you think there is an attitude that everything is handballed to the Aboriginal community-controlled sector as opposed to the responsibility belonging to everyone across the board?” She wants data that would enable “a comparison between community-controlled delivery outcomes and mainstream.” When a witness asked what would be the value of such a comparison, her answer included “freedom of choice.”
Addressing the committee, Price also repeated her scepticism about the “child placement principle,” which seeks (in the words of its advocates) “to keep children connected to their families, communities, cultures and country and to ensure the participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in decisions about their children’s care and protection.” Services that observe this principle, Price believes, keep children in a milieu in which they are more likely to be sexually abused when such abuse is “one of the main causes for children being placed into out-of-home care.” She asked a witness: “What policies, if any, are being implemented to address both the unreported sexual abuse and the role, in some instances, of traditional culture towards the prevalence of sexual abuse?”
Beyond the heft that she brought to the 2023 No campaign, it isn’t hard to understand why Peter Dutton sees Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as a political asset. In that struggle and since, she has made herself a “relatable” figure: a youngish Indigenous woman who can tell an appealing story about overcoming the disadvantages of her sex and her culture. The domestic problems among some First Nations families to which she refers are real. Her solutions — eliminate “waste,” audit the Indigenous sector, “cut the red tape, the green tape and the black tape” — play a familiar neoliberal tune.
These slogans have the cachet of coming from someone who has risen from below. Applying them to Indigenous affairs would set her on a collision course with the land councils, native title bodies and First Nations service organisations that make up the Indigenous sector. Yet, after “auditing” them, what then? To date she has proposed neither method of “audit” nor any alternative structures or mechanisms. That cavalier approach to public policy is an intellectual consequence of seeing affairs of state through the lens of family. Her notion of Indigenous flourishing is based on a positive appraisal of her own and her family’s flourishing.
Only a cold-hearted reader of Price’s memoir would begrudge the happiness she has found as mother and wife. But can a policy modelled on her own family’s attenuation of difference — celebrated in Matters of the Heart — be given a name other than assimilation? Might not other Indigenous families make different choices differently? •
Matters of the Heart: A Memoir
By Jacinta Nampijinpa Price | HarperCollins | $36.99 | 384 pages
