Jacinta Price’s Mercifully Neglected Education

On September 14, 2023, in a musty and over-crowded little room at the National Press Club (the main hall being mysteriously out of action) the most important presentation in the No campaign was taking place. As appears to be her custom for non-socialist guests, the Press Club president assigned a lesser director to be her Master of Ceremonies for the presentation by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Ironically the lesser host (David Crowe) who after a barrage of unfriendly questions mostly about colonisation and inter-generational trauma, asked the most important question of the entire Voice campaign.  The segment proceeded like this:

David Crowe:   We’re moving into an area that goes well beyond the Voice but is it, you know, I have talked to indigenous people and I’m sure others have too, who talk about generations of trauma in among indigenous Australians as a result of colonisation whether that means that colonisation continues, Now this is probably a separate question but would you accept there have been generations of trauma as a result of that history? 

Jacinta Price:  Well, I guess that would mean that those of us whose ancestors were dispossessed of their own country and brought here in chains of convicts are also suffering from intergenerational trauma, so I should be doubly suffering from intergenerational [trauma].

(A further and no less telling extract from Senator Price’s exchanges with the Canberra press is reproduced at the foot of this page.)

At last someone has said that if intergenerational trauma exists it is not a “matter of race” but of circumstance, meaning it all stems from that classic psychological debate about nature vs nurture or generic inheritance vs learning environment. Genetics may determine your height, skin colour, eye shape, hair colour and texture, specific health issues etc. Most of what we believe about Nature v Nurture is from life-long studies of Twins, and what many of those studies conclude is that what you do with these inherited traits is not hard-wired.

Noam Chomsky suggests that linguistic abilities are inherited. Skinner and Pavlov believed behaviour is learned and Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory suggests that to change behaviour you must change either the participants or the environment.

I think all of this academic to-ing and fro-ing is too confusing. I draw from a comparison between rats of Skinner and Olds. Skinner rewarded his rats with a food pellet if they managed to solve his maze and only met with limited success, so most of his rats died of educated old age. Whereas Olds rewarded his rats who successfully pulled the right lever with a pleasure stimulant to the brain (or an opiate) and most of his rats died young and smiling.

What we witnessed from many speakers and advocates during the Referendum and unfortunately since the referendum is prejudice and contrived anger. Prejudice, in my opinion, is a learned reaction, not an inherited trauma.  Oscar Hammerstein II put it better than I ever could in South Pacific. Here is what he said:

You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!”

It is obvious that Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was not taught to hate when she was young and, obviously, she has not been taught since.

Senator Price’s grandfather. who first saw a white man as a teenager in the late 1920’s, did not imprint hate on his grand-daughter despite his own experiences. Her mother, Bess Price, would have been a six- or a seven-year-old when the 1967 Referendum was held, she was born into the tribal lifestyle which was both brutal and repressive of female members. Bess escaped when about 19 and found education and love with her white Celtic-Australian husband David Price. Together they have achieved much and demonstrated that neither colour nor culture should prevent any Australian becoming self-reliant and finding a fulfilling life. They obviously passed this on to their daughter.

Unfortunately the lessons of the October 14 referendum have not been learned and activists protesting about “Stolen Generations”, colonisation and chanting “Always was and always will be” are at it again. Many of these activists did not even grow-up Aboriginal — and some/many others are not Aboriginal at all. In recent weeks some of these activists have conflated the Australian Land Rights issue with the much denied savagery of October 7, 2023 in southern Israel.

In the 1920’s the International Communist movement decided an easy way to achieve world domination was to encourage peoples who had been colonised to seek or demand self-determination. The Communists of Australia rallied to the cause with little success because of the work of Paul Hasluck and later Bill Wentworth. On the retirement of Bob Menzies in 1966 the hapless Harold Holt became prime minister and, the following year, called the referendum in which a near-majority of Australians rallied to support our Aboriginal citizens. And then Holt spoiled it all by appointing left-leaning Dr HC “Nugget” Coombs to head the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. Under Coombs. foreign classifications and ideology crept into our advancement efforts and schools adopted the terminology and teachings of the “black armband” form of history as if they were verified fact. Many retrograde decisions were made in the pursuit of “self-determination”, few sillier than Prime Minister Bob Hawke handing over Ayers Rock to the Mutitjulu community on November 11, 1983. (The history of this foolishness is well recorded in the book Storm over Uluru: The greatest hoax of all  by Peter B English (Veritas Publishing, 1986):

While we continue to substitute ideology for knowledge we will continue to ask “If not now, when?” before we can answer “If now, what?”. Maybe when senators Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Kerrynne Liddle become the relevant ministers the focus will turn to removing disadvantage rather than causing it.

Further Extract:

Josh Butler: [the Guardian]  Senator, thank you for your speech.  You claim some indigenous organisations want to demonise colonial settlement.  Can I ask you please do you believe the history of colonisation continues to have an impact on some indigenous Australians? 

Jacinta Price:  Uh, no I’ll be honest with a No, I don’t think so. Uh, positive impact absolutely, I mean now we have running water, we have readily available food, I mean everything that my grandfather didn’t have when he was growing; because he first saw white fellows in his early adolescence, we now have um otherwise he would have had to live off the land, uh, provide for his family uh and all of those measures which Aboriginal Australians; many of us have the same opportunities as all other Australians in this country and we certainly have one of the greatest systems around the country, around the world, in terms of the democratic structure in comparison to other countries.  It is why migrants come to 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 provide, 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 is tell them that they are a victim without agency and that is what I refuse to do.  So you don’t believe that, thank you.         [Applause].

Josh Butler:   Just a quick follow up as we, you don’t believe there is any negative ongoing impact of colonisation on indigenous Australians today, just to confirm. 

Jacinta Price:  No, there’s no ongoing impacts of colonisation.  What I will say which I have suggested obvious within my speech, is that particularly for my family in remote communities, again who live very close to traditional culture 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, uh, it’s expected that young girls are married off to older husbands in arranged, uh, women, we haven’t had a feminist movement for Aboriginal women because we have been expected to toe the line when its come to Aboriginal activism for the rights of our race, but rights as women have been second place, uh, and I have the lived experience, my mother has the lived experience and someone who was subject to traditional custom and expected to become a second wife in an arranged marriage.  There are still people living this way in this country 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.  Thank you.         [applause].