Her behaviour is bonkers, but the Liberal Party’s rank and file can’t get enough of Jacinta Price

4 days ago 10

Opinion

September 11, 2025 — 5.00am

Ah, those golden days. I’m talking about early last week, when politics was following its natural rhythms. Thousands had marched in cities around the country, protesting about immigration. Some of them were especially animated about the increasing number of Indian migrants in our midst.

Much chin-stroking commentary followed, imploring the Albanese government to explain its immigration policy. If it would only do that, supposedly, community nervousness about immigration would evaporate and racists would retreat to the shadows. This seems unlikely to me, but anyway. The underlying narrative was in the grand tradition of Australian politics, which is that if something disturbing is going on, it must be due to either the actions or inaction of whoever is in power.

But on Wednesday, September 3, opposition minister for defence industry and defence personnel Jacinta Nampijinpa Price appeared, at first cloaked in an Australian flag in the Senate to mark Flag Day, a real but niche national day. She decided to create a new narrative, one that would flip the attention to the opposition.

Her first narrative involved a Labor plot to swamp Australian society with Labor-voting Indian migrants. The second, which has taken hold in the past few days, was to portray Sussan Ley’s factional sponsor Alex Hawke as a brute and then to suggest that Ley was weak for not bringing Hawke into line. That has sparked a proxy leadership battle inside the Liberal Party. Not bad work for Price, who has been a member of the Liberal party room for only four months.

In her ABC interview, Price appeared to suggest that the Albanese government applies some sort of political test to prospective migrants in India and allows in only the ones who will vote Labor. Or that Indians are simply implicitly Labor-leaning. It’s hard to tell. It’s bonkers, basically, and it fed into the anti-Indian sentiments of some of those who’d marched a few days earlier.

You might well ask why the opposition minister for defence industry and defence personnel was rattling on about immigration on national television, but that would be so yesterday. On Wednesday night, Ley dumped Price from her frontbench. Regardless, long gone are the times when frontbenchers respectfully declined to talk about matters that weren’t in their portfolios. This is a garrulous age, where politicians will freewheel on anything, reinforcing the agreed lines of the day. Anyway, minding her Ps and Qs would be especially off-brand for Price, whose rapid rise since entering the Senate in 2022 owes much to her willingness to involve herself in whatever culture war issue is on the go.

Soon after making her comments on the ABC, Price put out a statement that has been characterised by the media as her walking them back. The statement began: “Australia maintains a longstanding and bipartisan non-discriminatory migration policy. Suggestions otherwise are a mistake.” Was that a walkback? Those “suggestions otherwise” were made by whom? The family cat? Like one of television’s most famous characters, Arthur Fonzarelli (ask your parents or grandparents, kids), Price has trouble admitting straight out that she was wrong.

Her behaviour does make some sense. Price’s political persona is built entirely on her grim-faced certainty about everything and her positions on policies for Indigenous Australians, which sit outside the orthodox prescriptions favoured by a large proportion of her fellow Indigenous people. She won fame as a vocal proponent of the No case in the Voice referendum and was very much in touch with mainstream opinion. It made her a superstar among the Coalition rank and file. Her early success encouraged her to say whatever came into her head, such as her call to “make Australia great again” and her instruction to the media to stop obsessing about Donald Trump during the election campaign. That was her first disaster.

Her refusal to apologise for her comments has carried a kind of logic. Most of the demands from some of her colleagues that she apologise are prompted by a desire for the controversy to end. But she is a modern populist. For her, what’s most important is what she says when she gets riffing about the terrible state of things, especially if her supporters think that too. And they’ll probably think that because she does. It’s a circular relationship. Liberal deputy leader Ted O’Brien was right when he said on Wednesday that an apology from Price would seem inauthentic to the public.

For all her troubles in the past eight days, she would certainly still be more popular among the Coalition rank and file than her leader. Ley’s card was marked early in this term when she was labelled as a moderate and at her first appearance at the National Press Club when she began by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land. Price’s strategy of digging in and refusing to apologise has intensified the focus on Ley. You know it’s reached an absurd stage when there’s pressure on Ley to apologise on Price’s behalf. It was Price who uttered the conspiracist nonsense, not Ley.

And while that’s gone on, others with an axe to grind, like Jane Hume, dumped from the frontbench by Ley, have offered a view. Hume says the whole thing has been poorly handled by Ley. It’s important to remember that in May, Price’s stocks were so high that she was enticed from the National Party and nearly ran on a leadership ticket with Angus Taylor that fell just three votes short of victory. For Ley, there’s more trouble ahead.

Price is likely to still be the darling of the grey hairs who make up most of the party membership, but her demotion is just part of trying times for her too. Two years ago almost to the day, she told the National Press Club that overall, British settlement had benefited Indigenous people because now they had running water and readily available food. Her speech received a standing ovation from her party colleagues, including Nationals leader David Littleproud, who described it as one of the most powerful he had ever heard. Asked this week if he would welcome Price back to his party, he demurred, saying that her comments were “outside mainstream Australian values” and he wouldn’t be encouraging talk of her return. His meaning was clear: it was up to the Liberals to work out how to handle her now.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

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