Moments after a press conference in which she failed to endorse Sussan Ley’s leadership this week, sealing her own political fate, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price accompanied Michaelia Cash to a party fundraising event in Perth.
Titled Reclaiming Liberal Values, the function was headlined by Price, Cash and the party’s WA policy committee chair, Sherry Sufi. It was lunchtime on Wednesday, and the Northern Territory senator was a couple of hours from being sacked.
In addition to her provocation against the opposition leader, Price was still refusing to apologise for politically poisonous and false claims that Labor was gaming the visa system to bring in electorally valuable Indian migrants. She blamed others for the comments and insisted she would not be silenced on “mass migration”.
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But the events of the week have demonstrated that Price might not be the political “rock star” her conservative allies insist. In the years since her victory over the Voice referendum, her wins have been few and her slip-ups many. Underlying the drama of her demotion is a determined effort by conservatives to undercut Ley as leader and reclaim the direction of the party before the next election.
Price’s speedy rise in national politics is instructive.
A former deputy mayor of Alice Springs, she entered parliament in 2022 and quickly became the face of opposition to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum. After pushing the Nationals to oppose the plan supported by Labor and mainstream Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, Price was championed by the then Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, and used the campaign to build her national profile.
Referendum proposals are historically difficult in Australia, and the Voice was lost in a poorly run campaign mugged by a lack of bipartisan support. Its thumping defeat emboldened Price, who quickly flagged plans to fight on other issues, including transgender women in sport, and even publicly stoked hype about her becoming prime minister one day.
She quickly became a walking headline for the Canberra press gallery and was catapulted up the Sky News roster. Campaigning for audits of Indigenous spending, and fighting with land councils and advocates, she has been in high demand for political events and fundraisers around the country. One colleague this week called her “the senator for Advance”, a reference to the hardline conservative campaign group.
Elevated to shadow cabinet in her first term, Price campaigned alongside Dutton before the election, before badly undercutting his attempts to distance the Liberal brand from Donald Trump. In a campaign plagued by policy chaos, mixed messages and bad judgment, her claim that the Coalition would “make Australia great again” might have coincided directly with Dutton’s electoral time of death.
Quietly, some Liberals wondered if Price had been promoted too quickly, questioning her achievements in parliament and preparedness to speak to anything other than a rusted-on audience. These concerns found renewed currency when she defected from the Nationals to the Liberals, and then backed out of a plan to run for the deputy leadership on a joint ticket with Angus Taylor.
Like Dutton, Price refuses to engage with media outlets she perceives as hostile and blames journalists for taking her statements out of context in coverage she dislikes.
Coalition MPs were baffled and offended by her claims on Indian migration last week. They badly damaged the work of Ley and the shadow minister for immigration and multicultural affairs, Paul Scarr, to re-engage with voters from migrant backgrounds.
The last census showed Australia has become a majority migrant nation, with more than 50% of the population born overseas or having an immigrant parent. Indian, Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese communities should be natural constituencies for the Coalition.
Worse, Price hurt the Liberal party’s own legacy on fostering multiculturalism, including efforts by Harold Holt’s government to start dismantling the White Australia policy and level the playing field for non-Europeans seeking to come to Australia.
Predictably, support for Price came from her usual backers, including conservatives like Matt Canavan, Sarah Henderson, Cash and Taylor.
Perhaps Price’s biggest problem, however, is her brand of politics. She sees the world through a social media lens that is out of step with many everyday voters, bringing angry partisanship to too many issues. That style works for a figure like Donald Trump but feels disconnected from the mainstream in Australia, a country where many people consider politics an annoying inconvenience. Voters rejected Dutton in part for the same reason.
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Price forgets the politics of grievance has most often existed on the fringes of Australian politics, a space dominated by players like Pauline Hanson, and unattractive in the extreme to people who want to give others a fair go and not spend their whole lives aggravated by the culture wars.
Price has been cheered on by Tony Abbott, his former staffer and Sky host Peta Credlin, and rightwingers, including Tony Pasin, Alex Antic and Henderson. While Ley wants the party to “respect, reflect and represent modern Australia”, this wing of the Coalition believes muscular conservatism is a better road back to electoral relevance.
Abbott’s brand of politics was defined by tearing down what his predecessors had achieved, much more than building anything himself. Voters caught on quickly.
Abbott this week blamed the media for trying to shut down legitimate debate about immigration, ignoring mountains of coverage since pandemic border closures. He defended March for Australia demonstrators and wrote that some recent immigrants were “over-represented in crime and welfare statistics, or in Palestine protests”. Credlin claimed Price had been respectful to new arrivals and an immigration program “that discriminates only to ensure that migrants are genuinely committed to their new home and are contributing to a stronger Australia”.
Ley offered the only appropriate sanction to a junior colleague undermining her leadership. Her efforts to rebuild the Liberal party’s broad church could be the make-or-break test of her tenure as opposition leader, and her factional enemies are unlikely to be helpful.
Price’s move to the backbench means she is now free of the rules that require members of the shadow ministry to toe the party line. They have been inconsistently applied in recent months.
The whole saga brings to mind the wisdom of Sam Rayburn, the legendary speaker of the US House of Representatives.
“Any jackass can kick a barn down,” he said, “but it takes a carpenter to build one.”
Tom McIlroy is Guardian Australia’s chief political correspondent