When Sussan Ley selected her frontbench in May, she replaced Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as shadow Indigenous Australians minister with Kerrynne Liddle. The choice was a symbolic step in Ley’s centrist renewal of the parliamentary Liberal Party. Liddle evinces sobriety and worldly practicality: it is hard to imagine her fooling about in MAGA merchandise like her predecessor or joining in with the culture war skirmishes of her fellow SA senator Alex Antic.
At fifty-seven, Liddle is more than a decade older than Price. She has more formal education, having received a BA from the University of South Australia and an MBA from the University of Adelaide. The recipient of a Vincent Fairfax Foundation Ethics Fellowship and a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, she has worked in the media, business and government. She is a former “chief people and performance officer” at Voyage’s Ayers Rock Resort, which has around a thousand employees, and a former Aboriginal participation manager for Santos, with “company-wide functional oversight on matters related to Aboriginal affairs in employment and training, community investment and cultural heritage.”
Liddle maintains the orthodoxies dear to the Liberals. Opposing Labor’s equal pay for equal work amendments to the Fair Work Act in 2022, she complained that the Albanese government wished to “demonise” the labour-hire industry, “an incredibly important and dynamic contributor to the Australian workforce.” On the first anniversary of the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, she urged universities not to allow pro-Palestinian protest camps.
Both major parties now routinely give the Indigenous affairs portfolio to an Indigenous minister. Liddle identifies with the Arrernte of Central Australia, “the cultural group of both of my parents,” she declared in her first speech in the Senate. But she hopes that it is not her Aboriginality alone that commands our respect. “I was not an Indigenous news reporter, nor an Indigenous businesswoman, or an Indigenous company board director. I had the same qualifications and experiences as everybody else. First and foremost, I am just me.”
The 2023 No campaign gained much from Aboriginal advocates like Liddle. To create a Voice by referendum, she said, would mean that “96 per cent of the Australian population… will determine what is best for 4 per cent of the population, and, in this process to date, most of the 4 per cent have not even been asked.” She claimed the Indigenous assembly that produced the Uluru Statement had offended the “senior custodians of Uluru–Kata Tjuta,” who were distressed that their sacred place had become an emblem for a Statement from the Heart they didn’t support.
Among the variety of arguments Liberals used during the referendum, Liddle seemed to align with those moderates who, while rejecting the Voice as a form of constitutional recognition, urged Anthony Albanese to follow the Morrison government’s decision to legislate local and regional Voices. However, she also argued that the Voice would grant “greater access [to] our parliaments and our institutions for one group of Australians over others exclusively.” Even a legislated Voice would fail that “equality” test.
Liddle’s statements and votes don’t make clear whether she considers Indigenous Australians to have distinct rights. She was not present on 6 December 2023 when Labor and Coalition senators combined to vote down a bill that would have applied the principles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, to all government policy. But she was in the chamber in February 2025 when champions of UNDRIP proposed a more modest bill that would have added UNDRIP to the human rights instruments used by the Joint Committee on Human Rights when evaluating legislation. She joined Labor and Coalition senators in refusing that bill a second reading.
What is consistent is Liddle’s pleading on behalf of the vulnerable. Elected by South Australian voters for six years in May 2022, Liddle was appointed by Peter Dutton as shadow minister for child protection and the prevention of family violence the following year. By then she had declared that the Albanese government’s decision to make the cashless debit card voluntary “will make the most vulnerable in our communities more vulnerable.”
In late 2022 and early 2023, as a member of a parliamentary committee on safety, support services and jobs in the Northern Territory, Liddle heard much about how two Labor governments (NT and federal) had handled the termination of alcohol controls under the Stronger Futures legislation. Liddle was keen to hear witnesses from Alice Springs, the town she grew up in, where Aboriginal organisations had warned that the NT government’s transition policies would increase social disorder. Witnesses at the inquiry cited crime and health statistics substantiating these organisations’ predictions.
Before Dutton had declared the Liberals a No party, Liddle used that failed liberalisation to illustrate her doubts about Labor’s Voice commitment: “This is not about voice; this is about listening to those voices that told you this was going to happen.”
Who can be trusted to speak for the vulnerable? Liddle has become shadow Indigenous Australians minister at a time when greater accountability is being demanded of Indigenous organisations. Coming through two distinct lines of analysis, that demand has a diversity of champions in unpredictable political alliances.
One argument relates to how Indigenous organisations give effect to land and native title rights. Are they playing the part they are obliged and expected to play in legislation covering land tenure and heritage protection? The other argument, seizing on the persistence of the “gaps” in schooling, life expectancy and so on, relates to social policy. Are Indigenous organisations effectively delivering the services that can lift Indigenous Australians out of poverty, illness and incarceration?
The first line of argument was given impetus by the parliamentary committee on Northern Australia, chaired by Liberal MHR Warren Entsch, in its October 2021 report on Riotinto’s destruction of Juukan Gorge. The report, Never Again, exposed not only a cavalier company but also a defective regime of Aboriginal representation.
What was missing from Rio’s decision-making process was the voice of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The Committee does not want to make this same mistake. Included throughout the report are case studies of similar events and the impact that these cultural losses have had on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, as told to the Committee by those communities.
Entsch’s committee found that prescribed bodies corporate, or PBCs — the first point of contact for organisations wanting to undertake activities on native title land — are too poorly resourced to do the work Australia’s heritage protection laws require of them. It recommended that anyone negotiating with PBCs should be obliged to put money into a fund, independent of government, that would pay the costs PBCs incur when they negotiate. Entsch’s committee also heard “concerning reports that some PBCs are not transparent in their decision-making with respect to their local community.” PBCs and other native title representative bodies must be required to “demonstrate adequate consultation with, and consideration of, local community views.”
This critique resonated with MPs of diverse ideological inspiration. In September 2024 Liddle combined with Lidia Thorpe and Jacquie Lambie to move that parliament set up a select committee on First Nations representative bodies “to inquire into and report on the role, governance and accountability of native title representative bodies and prescribed bodies corporate” and report by 26 August 2025. Their proposed terms of reference invoked the UNDRIP concept of “free, prior and informed consent.” Independent senator David Pocock moved an amendment that the inquiry be conducted by the legal and constitutional affairs references committee. The Albanese government believed the reference was unnecessary, whichever committee took it on, as the Australian Law Reform Commission was already inquiring into the “future acts” provisions of the Native Title Act.
The Senate voted 32–32 to reject Pocock’s amendment, but Liddle voted for it. The Senate then voted on the original Liddle motion, which was defeated 33–31, with David Pocock voting against it. Liddle was scathing: “Ironically, the Greens and the Labor Party spent 2023 talking so much about Voice, yet today they voted down providing Indigenous Australians an opportunity to speak.” She scornfully quoted a Labor Party MP saying that “First Nations communities are already experiencing consultation fatigue. This wasteful duplication would be confusing and distressing for First Nations communities.”
Whether the Law Reform Commission inquiry will extend to the funding of Indigenous representation remains to be seen. But that was what concerned Liddle, Thorpe and Lambie: whether PBCs, native title representative bodies, land councils, traditional custodians, and native title claim respondents/objectors can afford representation.
Another question is also being posed about the funding of Indigenous organisations. Are they being politically protected, in effect, by governments’ failure to measure their effectiveness? Liddle put it this way in a question to a senior National Indigenous Australians Agency official in February this year: how do you prevent established Indigenous organisations from “essentially scooping up all the money that’s available — these scarce resources — and holding that at the expense of other programs that might be able to deliver?”
When the Albanese government responded to social disorder in Alice Springs with increased funding for programs administered by Indigenous organisations, Liddle was not impressed. “With the lack of a transition plan with the ending of the cashless debit card, the lifting of alcohol restrictions and hundreds of millions of dollars going into Central Australia, the wellbeing of local children is not being measured to understand the change,” she said in June 2023. “There’s not nearly enough peer review or independent evaluation of new and existing programs to ensure maximum impact from this investment, and it’s well past the time for much-needed further investigation.”
In March 2024 she explained the need for an audit of these organisations:
There are many good Aboriginal organisations delivering services. There are also many organisations who are not Aboriginal organisations delivering good services. I know you would have us believe that Aboriginal community-controlled organisations are the only way to deliver to Aboriginal people, but that is not the case… Those organisations doing the right thing, those organisations delivering to the people, those organisations that don’t invest in the assets such as big Toyotas, big hotels and big conference stays — they’re the ones who have nothing to fear, and they exist. An audit would identify those ones that need to do things differently.
On committees and in speeches to Senate, Liddle has often appealed for a more data-driven approach. But she has also found it tempting to use statistics rhetorically. In February this year, during a parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s youth justice and incarceration system, she referred several times to how “a recent report” had found “only 3 per cent of children are attending school regularly” in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara, or APY, region of northwest South Australia. Struck by Liddle’s repetition of the claim, the National Indigenous Australians Agency’s Ali Jenkins checked the report.
Jenkins explained the difference between the “attendance rate” and “attendance levels,” the former being the number of actual full-time-equivalent student days attended as a percentage of the total number of possible days attended over the reporting period, the latter being the proportion of students attending 90 per cent or more of the time. The attendance rate in the APY region “varies between about 40 per cent and 58 per cent.” Liddle’s 3 per cent was the “attendance level” — “the proportion of students who are attending 90 per cent or more of the time.”
Liddle is not the only public figure to misquote or misunderstand administrative data, but to be so careless, especially about children in a region within her own state, is a significant lapse. A greater problem — one she shares with Labor and the rest of the Coalition — is a reluctance to grasp the opportunity of UNDRIP. As an instrument of international law, UNDRIP is a potential weapon in the politics of federalism. Were Australia to ratify such a statement of rights, the national government would acquire more power (under the Constitution’s “external affairs” provisions) and more moral authority to hold states to account.
This possibility was explored during the parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s youth justice and incarceration system, a “system” run by state and territory governments that have become highly sensitive to popular demands a more punitive response to juvenile crime. After observing that several jurisdictions have appointed some kind of “children’s commissioner,” Liddle posed a sceptical question to an official with the National Commission for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People: “What will be the critical ingredients for a national role actually being able to make a difference?”
Some submissions to the committee answered this question by pointing to UNDRIP’s potential. (Notable among them was the Coalition of Peaks, which represents eighty-plus Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled peak and member organisations across Australia.) Ratification of UNDRIP by Commonwealth legislation would add to the federal government’s constitutional authority to overrule state policies such as Queensland’s recent juvenile detention policies, which was enacted in open defiance of UN censure.
Liddle is ambivalent, at best, about rights. Her support for income management via the cashless debit card — based on her sincere, frequently voiced alarm about the women and children who are victims of family violence — has reinforced her scepticism about public policy “driven by ideology.” Her antidotes to “ideology” are better data and rigorous audits.
But in a federal system such wariness of international law amounts to a refusal to hold the states to account. This is a familiar Liberal constraint, and has been shared by Labor since the Voice referendum defeat. •
