Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size
Planted high on a rocky outcrop overlooking Alice Springs is a flag Jacinta Nampijinpa Price wishes wasn’t there.
For more than a decade, Indigenous residents campaigned for the Aboriginal flag to join the Australian one on Anzac Hill, a site held sacred by the Arrernte people that also serves as the town’s war memorial.
But Price, a town councillor in 2018, remained opposed. She questioned whether the flag’s supporters truly represented Arrernte wishes. The plan, she warned, was “too divisive”.
Price, 44, wants to unite the country under the Australian flag. Last week, draped in the Southern Cross and Union Jack, she gave a rousing speech in the Senate calling for burning of the flag to be banned. When she was joined by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, the face of conservative race politics in Australia for decades, Price leapt to her defence. “You vilify her,” Price said of the government’s treatment of Hanson. “You’ve made her out to be a racist in this country.”
That same afternoon, Price suggested the government was prioritising Indian migration to shore up votes. She quickly retracted the comment but refused to apologise. A week later, her defiance still dominating headlines, she declined to support her leader, Sussan Ley. By late Wednesday evening, she had been sacked as a shadow minister.
But even before she was moved off the Liberal frontbench, Price was pursuing an agenda closer to that of the conservative lobby group, Advance, which she worked for before entering the Senate.
Images of Price draped in the Australian flag last week were shared across Advance’s social media. The same campaign vehicle calls for an end to “migration madness” and attacks sitting Liberals. It has amassed 500,000 supporters. Serving on Advance’s advisory council is Tony Abbott, Australia’s 28th prime minister, and Price’s mentor.
Both Abbott and Price’s father, a white former cultural consultant, have argued against the history of the stolen generations taught in schools and universities. Price claims without evidence that the descendants of Indigenous people who were forcibly taken from their mothers are now wealthier than their peers. At the same time, she says too few children are being removed by child protection authorities due to a “stolen generations stigma”.
The Warlpiri-Celtic senator – who once shared a meme comparing Black Lives Matter protesters to Nazis – is more divisive than ever. Now on the backbench, she is no longer talking about the defence industry. She is free to wage her larger campaign: to remake the Liberal Party.
Does she want to be prime minister one day? As she told Sky News in May, “There’s a lot of Australians who would love to see that.”
Price declined interview requests and did not respond to questions for this article.
Rise of the ‘rock star’
Jacinta Suzette Yangapi Nampijinpa Price is not an Australian conservative from central casting.
She fell pregnant with her first child in high school. Later, on weekends without her children, she took ecstasy and went on three-day benders. She was never involved in student politics because she never went to university. She worked in art galleries and rapped under the stage name Sassy-J in a band called Catch the Fly.
One of the happiest times in her life was spent playing the best friend of a giant honey ant called Yamba on television.
“She was such a creative and talented person,” says Julie McAllan, who produced the award-nominated children’s show about Indigenous health and education. “She was an artist, she wrote songs, she sang, she performed on stage. She was everything a television producer ever dreamt of, and she was local. After she was hired, I said we’d end up going national with this show.”
McAllan says Price was dedicated to improving the lives of vulnerable Aboriginal kids. The pair went on to travel the country with Yamba, visiting thousands of children across remote communities with the help of at least $359,000 in government funding for their production company.
But Price truly went national in January 2016, with a 1400-word Facebook post defending the date of Australia Day.
“Without any warning, it changed my life,” Price, who was then an Alice Springs councillor, writes in her memoir, Matters of the Heart, released this year. “Suddenly the media was contacting me and I was inundated with requests to speak … The fact that I was a young Indigenous woman from the bush, and that I called it as I saw it, added a new dimension to the discussion.”
Senator Price campaigning against the Voice to parliament.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
The Centre for Independent Studies, a conservative think tank, invited her to give a talk on domestic violence. An invitation from the National Press Club followed. She began appearing on Sky News, writing opinion pieces for News Corp publications, and became a spokesperson for a new conservative lobby group, then known as Advance Australia.
“Would you rather offend someone, and save a life, or keep your mouth shut?” she asked in a 2018 interview with Peta Credlin, a Sky commentator and former chief of staff to Tony Abbott.
By the time Price gave her maiden speech in parliament in 2022, wearing a traditional feathered headdress, she was one of Australia’s leading conservative voices on Indigenous affairs. Then the No campaign transformed the charismatic, plain-speaking senator into a rare character for Australia: a political celebrity.
Senator Price delivers her first speech to parliament. Credit: James Brickwood
Tickets to see her speak sold out. People lined up for photographs and signatures. She has more social media followers than any other Coalition MP. Her presence at a fundraising dinner can command $10,000 a seat. In both 2023 and 2024, Resolve Political Monitor polls ranked her among Australia’s most well-liked leaders. Her closest colleagues call her a “rock star”.
The boosters
Open the Advance website today, and the first face you see is Price’s.
The right-wing campaign group has become a central part of Australia’s conservative ecosystem since it launched as a “grassroots” organisation in 2018, backed by a handful of Australia’s richest people. Its network of prominent donors includes board members of the Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public Affairs, both right-leaning think tanks that have influenced Liberal Party policy for decades.
All three organisations have embraced Price and propelled her political career, covering flights or accommodation for her to attend their events, according to her register of interests. Price’s partnership with Advance has been the closest: her role as lead spokesperson for the Voice campaign involved Advance covering “modest expenses” at its events, including a 12-day speaking tour, and flying one of her sons to Brisbane.
This kind of support is not a new phenomenon, says Dominic Kelly, author of Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The Hard Right in Australia. “When they do emerge, these Aboriginal voices who are conservative, the groups like the CIS and Quadrant and the IPA are very keen to get in touch with them,” Kelly says. “They saw that Jacinta was a star that they could get behind.”
The outspoken senator says she cannot be manipulated.
“I don’t doubt at all that there are those who would regard me as a gift to the conservative side of politics,” she told Australian Story. “But there’s no way I would allow anybody to use me.”
Price hasn’t declared any professional relationship with Advance since the referendum. A spokesman for Advance said: “While there is no formal or financial relationship between Advance and the senator, she will always have the backing of our [463,825] supporters.”
But two years after the referendum’s defeat, Price and Advance still appear closely aligned. “Nearly everything she does is pushed by Advance,” says a Liberal MP, one of several who were granted anonymity to speak frankly for this article.
After the Coalition’s election loss in May, Advance emailed its mailing list, asking supporters to become monthly donors. The email was signed off by Price.
“Become an Advance partner and help Australia win again,” Price wrote, as first reported by independent news website The Klaxon.
A consultancy linked to Advance also helps write Price’s supporter emails and manage her inbox, according to invoices released last month under freedom of information laws.
Whitestone Strategic describes itself as “Australia’s conservative campaign consultancy” and was contracted by Advance during the No campaign. The firm’s director is Advance campaign strategist, Stephen Doyle, whom Price described in her book as one of the “sharpest political strategists I’ve ever worked with”.
Whitestone billed taxpayers $2750 in August, October, November and December last year, and January this year, for its services to Price. That included $2000 for “supporter communications” and $500 for “inbox management”, plus GST. The company also charged the senator almost $70,000 over 2023 and 2024, The Guardian reported last year.
Advance is now running three campaigns: to dump net zero climate targets; stop “mass immigration”; and end Welcome to Country ceremonies.
Not one of these stances is Liberal policy. Price has been vocal on all three. She appears as the face of Advance’s fight against Welcome to Country. She vowed to fight “the ramifications of mass migration” and “the economically immiserating and freedom-eroding policy of net zero” in her first statement as a newly unshackled backbencher.
“Advance will always encourage politicians who align with our supporters and criticise those who don’t,” the Advance spokesman says.
It was Price’s freelancing on the topic of “mass migration” – a phrase rejected by Liberal immigration spokesman Paul Scarr – on the ABC this month that went further than any of her colleagues and landed her in trouble. A Liberal Party source says they believe Price wanted to show her support for recent anti-immigration rallies, which she did not attend.
“It was the view of the right … to say these were great. She was trying to replicate that part of the ecosystem,” they say.
Price says she was disappointed by colleagues who did not back her argument.
Advance is also willing to attack Liberals on the issue. A recent Advance Facebook post warning of worsening traffic and fraying social cohesion included a picture of Scarr with members of the Sikh community. Several other Advance posts feature AI-generated images of people with dark hair and brown skin massing in queues at the airport or outside a rental property.
“In relation to your question about our content, Advance opposes Labor’s mass immigration policies for no other reason than they are undermining this nation’s security and prosperity,” the Advance spokesman says.
“But asking us if we are racists in the same breath as you question our support for an Indigenous senator is what we’ve come to expect from the mainstream media.”
A Facebook post from conservative activist group Advance.Credit: Advance
Maurice Newman, a businessman who helped establish the Centre for Independent Studies and has served on Advance’s advisory council “since day dot”, denies Advance’s immigration campaigning is racist.
“This whole discussion about racism is totally unnecessary and divisive,” he says. Asked about the group’s attacks on Liberals, Newman responds: “If the cap fits, it should be worn.”
The mentor
Colleagues who observe Price see a senator searching for relevance. “She’s looking for her Voice 2.0,” says one. “She took that thing and killed it. That’s what she’s seeking again.”
After the referendum, Price said she wanted to focus on transgender issues. Then she called for a national debate on abortion, saying pregnancies ended after the first trimester were immoral. But that was slapped down by then opposition leader Peter Dutton. In her memoir, published months later, she wrote that she had no moral objection to abortion and “totally supported a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body”.
Some MPs say these episodes have exposed Price as a political amateur who rose up the ranks too fast and is out of her depth on policy. “There’s only been one or two issues she’s been able to pick up and take off, and they’re the very divisive ones,” says another Liberal.
Price (centre) with former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard at the Liberal Party campaign launch on April 13. Abbott supported her defection to the Liberal Party.Credit: James Brickwood
“But she’s got conservative right-wing support throughout the country because of her stance on the Voice. ”
Price also has a powerful supporter in Tony Abbott. Still active behind the scenes of the Liberal Party, he is a long-time member of Advance’s advisory council.
Abbott helped orchestrate Price’s move to the Liberals, as well as her failed deputy leadership bid. “Tony Abbott has long been a strong supporter of Jacinta,” says Natasha Griggs, president of the Northern Territory’s Country Liberal Party. “He spoke with me earlier this year and again made clear his view about the contribution she can make.”
Those interventions frustrate Liberals who disagree with Abbott’s vision for the party.
“Abbott is behind all of this. He pretends he’s doing nothing, but he’s actively trying to drag the party, kicking and screaming, to where Advance is. They think they’re Nigel Farage and they’re going to save Australia,” says one MP.
“She gets a lot of guidance from him. The connection with Advance is there. Every time something happens for her, she’s on [Sky News with Peta] Credlin. That’s her safe space because they’re the people that guide her.”
Abbott declined to comment. In a post on X he said: “Jacinta Price will be a big loss to the frontbench but I’m confident that she will continue to make a strong contribution to our public life.”
The family
Fifteen years ago, Lasseters Casino in Alice Springs refused entry to a 49-year-old Aboriginal woman on the grounds she was intoxicated.
“I put it down to racism,” the woman would later tell the media, denying she had been drunk. After police attended “they lifted me and threw me,” she said. “I was taken to the police station and treated like a blackfella.”
The woman was Jacinta’s mother, Bess Nungarrayi Price, a Warlpiri activist known for speaking out against domestic violence and for supporting the Howard government’s “intervention” in Aboriginal communities.
Two years later, as she ran for NT parliament, a journalist profiling her for The Weekend Australian magazine noted she had not mentioned racism in their time together. “I have never faced racism,” she told him. “Maybe once, in a clothing shop.”
Senator Price with her mother, Bess Nungarrayi, a former Northern Territory government minister.Credit: Jeff Tan
Jacinta is in many ways her mother’s daughter. Both have won office as CLP politicians (Bess Price served one term, becoming a minister). Both have attacked Aboriginal leaders living in capital cities as out-of-touch “elites”. Both say the media is preoccupied with racism and that they are more likely to be racially vilified by other Aboriginal people. Price has called the insult ‘coconut’ – brown on the outside, white on the inside – an example of hate speech.
Price’s father, Dave, is another important influence. In his younger days, he was “a long-haired hippie who loved nothing more than tossing a backpack over his shoulder and heading off on his motorbike in whichever direction the wind was blowing”, the senator writes in her memoir.
These days, there’s little hippie left in Dave Price.
In a 2023 interview with Andrew Bolt, he called Aboriginal culture “particularly misogynist”. Writing for Quadrant in 2020, he demanded an apology from “Aboriginal ‘leaders’ who have convinced governments that the best we can do for these children is to leave them in the hellholes they die in as long as they are ‘on Country’, practice their ‘culture’ and speak their language”.
Dave Price had been a lifelong Labor voter, Jacinta has said, dating her family’s political conversion to the time of the 2007 NT Intervention. But years earlier, Dave was already in John Howard’s camp when it came to the “history wars” fought over colonisation and its legacy.
The Aboriginal flag, flying on Anzac Hill, which Price opposed in 2018 when she was a town councillor. Credit: Patrick Begley
In 2001, Dave told the Alice Springs News that debate over the stolen generations – the removal of tens of thousands of Indigenous children from their families over decades – was being repressed.
“The complexities of the story aren’t aired,” he said. “Politicians and the press look for an Aboriginal point of view. It’s an absolute absurdity. We don’t say, what is the white point of view?”
In a 1999 essay, posted to the website of the cultural consultancy business he ran with Bess, he argued there was more to the stolen generations than “unrelenting and cruel injustice”.
“There were whitefellas involved who acted from the highest motives and did see themselves as rescuing children from intolerable circumstances,” he wrote. “We don’t hear enough from them.”
The benefactors
When Price’s parents flew to Canberra for their daughter’s maiden speech, they found themselves in powerful company. Gina Rinehart made an appearance in the Senate viewing box.
Australia’s richest person has since praised Price for “her endeavours to speak up for truth about marginalised Indigenous Australians”. Last year, Rinehart’s mining company, Hancock Prospecting, made its first donation to Price’s CLP in a decade, $75,000.
The admiration flows both ways. “A remarkable woman, a pioneer,” Price called Rinehart in a 2022 speech. In the same address, Price thanked Lachlan Murdoch “whose family have provided a beacon of light in a sea of woke darkness”. When News Corp celebrated The Australian’s 60th birthday, Price received free flights and accommodation to attend.
But according to her gift disclosures, her most generous benefactor is a retired UNSW maths professor.
James Franklin donated $15,000 to Price’s 2019 election campaign. He flew her family to Canberra to attend her maiden speech, twice covered her legal fees, and paid for her to attend a London conference.
Senator Price with her benefactor, retired mathematics professor James Franklin. Credit: Facebook
For nearly a decade, Franklin maintained an online project called The Australian Database of Indigenous Violence.
“I mean violence to Indigenous people but, as everybody can see, nearly all of it is by other Indigenous people,” he told The Australian in 2008. He said some in the “Aboriginal industry” would call it racist. “I agree it’s problematic to say in some sense that one community is worse than another, but that’s too bad. They are.”
Franklin later joined the board of the Bennelong Society, a now-defunct group devoted to right-wing thought on Aboriginal affairs, which had awarded Bess Price a medal in 2009.
“Indigenous issues, especially as talked about in the city, had a lot of bullshit talked about them,” Franklin says of this time. “I was on the lookout for someone who might be talking some more sense.”
Franklin, who also donated to Bess, describes the Prices as family friends. He has met Jacinta “several times”. But he says they don’t discuss Indigenous policy. “They say that in the end, it’s not policies imposed from outside that can do anything,” Franklin says. “It’s cultural change from the inside that is needed.”
The claims
Where Advance targets “ordinary Aussies”, Quadrant pursues an intellectual audience. For decades, the arch-conservative magazine has provided a platform to the opponents of Aboriginal self-determination.
Franklin sits on the board. Abbott is its chair.
This year, both men spoke at a memorial held for Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle, who concluded “there were no stolen generations” in his 2002 book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.
In his eulogy, Abbott said: “Few, if any, Aboriginal children were removed other than for their own well-being, as best as that could be understood.”
It’s a conclusion at odds with the 1997 report to parliament Bringing Them Home, which found the removal policies amounted to a crime against humanity.
Loading
Price wrote for The Australian last year that “even when misguided policies are pursued, like those that befell the stolen generation, we find that, over time, the efforts to integrate proved more fruitful than policies of separation.”
She went on: “The records show many descendants of the stolen generations now enjoy greater prosperity and success than those generations who were simply neglected and left to live in poverty and squalor.”
By contrast, a 2021 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare study found descendants had worse health and finances than other Indigenous people. They were nearly twice as likely not to own their home.
Price has also argued that child protection authorities are leaving children in unsafe homes to avoid perceptions of new stolen generations.
Jacynta Krakouer, a Minang-Noongar woman and an Aboriginal Enterprise Fellow at the University of South Australia, strongly disagrees.
“The best interest of the child is a legal precedent in all states and territories,” Krakouer says. “And to state that Aboriginal children need to be removed more is an insult to all of the children that are being removed at incredibly high rates – rates that continue to climb year on year.”
Price and husband, Scottish-Australian musician Colin Lillie.
According to her memoir, Price was the one who advised Advance to get involved in the Voice referendum. But it was Advance director, Stephen Doyle, over a coffee in Brisbane, who suggested Price and her family should front the campaign.
What followed was a nine-minute “documentary” featuring interviews with Price and her husband at home in Alice Springs. It opens with Price, perched on a boulder on Anzac Hill, as the sun dips behind the ranges in the distance.
In one of the final images, the Australian flag flies majestically on the summit. The Aboriginal flag, right beside it, was cropped out of view.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.