Senator Nampijinpa Price talks to the Outsiders Panel, Outsiders, Sky News

3 May 2026

Subjects: Alice Springs; Kumanjayi Granites; Indigenous child abuse; Town camps; Cultural practices; Government accountability

E&OE……………

ROWAN DEAN:

Ok, you will see on your screen, in breaking news, Northern Territory Police have charged Jefferson Lewis with murder and two counts of sexual assault. Here's Northern Territory Police Commissioner, Martin Dole, just a few moments ago.

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COMMISSIONER MARTIN DOLE:

I can announce that yesterday evening, Jefferson Lewis was formally charged with one count of murder and two counts of sexual assault. This remains a deeply distressing matter and our thoughts are firmly with Kumanjayi’s family, loved ones and the wider community that have been deeply impacted by these events.

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ROWAN DEAN:

Jefferson Lewis has been remanded and is expected to appear in Darwin Local Court on Tuesday. Let's bring in Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Jacinta, great to see you. Awful, awful circumstances in which to be seeing you and chatting to you. Your thoughts on the news that we've just broken and on the situation that unfolded during the week. Senator.

SENATOR JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE:

Utterly horrific, utterly disgusting and disturbing. At the same time, knowing this now, confirms what I felt had already happened even from the early stages of this little girl going missing. I get so frustrated over and over and over and again when I feel like I'm just banging my head against a brick wall, to bring these issues to light. I will say, you mentioned previous leaders. I worked very hard with Peter Dutton, who called for a Royal Commission into the sexual abuse of Indigenous children, and the wave of pushback against it. I think I found that really shocking. The government, the Greens, the Teals, the ABC are all complicit in the fact that they would rather turn a blind eye to little children like my niece who was raped and murdered. To the many other Indigenous kids in remote communities whose lives haven't been taken, but who certainly have been raped by grown men. And you don't get to hear about their plight because quite often that just flies under the radar. It doesn't make it into the media. But it goes on. It goes on and it frustrates the hell out of me that there is such a wall that we are up against in trying to actually do something serious about this, in actually trying to address this issue — they call it truth telling, I say telling the goddamn truth. There are so many who are complicit in putting up that wall and I am absolutely sick to death of what it is that I’ve certainly been up against for many, many years in addressing this exact issue, this exact problem, and the fact that our very own Indigenous Affairs Minister is an Aboriginal woman who is aware, acutely aware of what goes on, but toes a party line. Toes a party line. She has been a child protection minister in the Northern Territory before. You know, her counterpart, Marion Scrimgeour, she's been the Deputy Chief Minister of the Northern Territory. With that knowledge and understanding and their connection to remote communities, why do they continue to push back? Why do they continue to silence? Why do they continue to vote down when they have the power to execute a Royal Commission to the sexual abuse of Indigenous children? When they have the power to demand accountability from those organisations who are responsible, who are funded with taxpayer dollars, they make the decisions to fund these organisations that are supposed to be about this bullshit Closing the Gap. Like I'm just, I'm over it, Rowan. But I can't stop fighting. I can't stop fighting.

RITA PANAHI:

We're talking about children who are being abused, but there's also just such horrific rates of neglect. Tell me about the manner in which the bureaucracy, the government bodies deal with that, because the way I see it, there seems to be a real systematic racism where they will leave children in situations that they should not be in, whether it's neglect, whether it is abuse, whether they're at risk. Where they would never leave a white child in that situation, but because of this fear of taking children away from their community, their family, their whole stolen children history, that that seems to dictate how they treat a vulnerable child.

SENATOR JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE:

It's all ideology. It's all ideological thinking. It has nothing to do with upholding the human rights, the basic human rights of children in this country, of Australian citizens in this country. I have no idea why, for some reason, if your background is Western culture, you can rebel against it. You can burn your bra, you can stand up for women's rights, you can demand equal pay. But when you belong to Aboriginal culture, it's hands off. If you're someone like me who's calling out the fact that there are elements of our culture that accept that girls underage can be married off, that accept violence, that you don't think that perhaps this might be contributing to what we're seeing more broadly. But if you call that out, somehow you're a race traitor or you're coconut or you are a sellout and everyone else is too damn scared to actually do anything about it, stand up for what is right. This fear of being called racist makes people incompetent, makes people unwilling to do what is right. And I'm done with it. I am done with it. When I've known that there have been children whose foster parents are police officers, who the police officers are being told, your child is now going to be sent to a remote community that it's never known, because you've had this child since it's a baby. Now it's five, six years old. Your child is going to be sent to remote community, which is 700 kilometres away, which doesn't have all the needs available to this child, which it has in the suburbs of Alice Springs, the community, the school, the friendships. We're going to send this kid out there because suddenly someone's put their hand up and said, I'm kin, even though this child doesn't even know that person. And those police officers who are, the police officer who is well aware as a foster parent that there is a perpetrator in that household. They're about to send the kid there and are fighting the system hopelessly. But yet they still send that child because to them, the child's culture and connection to country is more important than the fact that that kid ends up being re-traumatised, abused again, and then, oh, we were wrong. We'll now bring that kid back to you. Like Aboriginal kids are sacrificed on the altar of political correctness in this country, and it's okay. As long as you stand up and you pay your respects and do your acknowledgements to country, it's OK to do this. I want to use far stronger language than I'm using right now, but I know I can't because I'm on television.

JAMES MORROW:

Senator, we've seen the violence that's broken out around Alice Springs in the wake of this horrific, horrific crime. Is it time, and because this has been going on for a long, long time, the things you're speaking about, is it time to reconsider this whole town camp system? Is it to say this has a failure, this system, it's time to do something else.

SENATOR JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE:

Well, if this doesn't tell us that we need to have those bloody tough conversations, what the hell will? Do we need to lose another child under these circumstances? How many more people do we have to lose? I mean, I've been talking about this for so damn long. I've put out a documentary about this, about the loved ones in my family. I talked about the fact that in this particular town camp, my niece was stabbed and killed, she drowned in her own blood because she actually wanted to remove her children from Alice Springs and give them a life elsewhere. And her ex-partner didn't want her to have the freedom to do that. So he stabbed and he killed her. In another town camp, not very far, less than a kilometre away, my aunt was stabbed and she was killed by a group of women. In that town camp I've lost two uncles to alcohol. You know these are hellholes. Those politicians that try to stand up and say, Murray Watt, you in particular, mate, trying to accuse those of us who are connected to this, who are sick to death, burying our own family, of trying to get political mileage out of it, all the while getting political mileage out of that, you have no right, absolutely no right to stand up and posture when you have not picked up your own family members and put them into body bags yourself. I mean, these politicians disgust me. They utterly disgust me that they posture. They posture, you'll see them. You'll know exactly who they are because they're the ones posturing and pretending they give a damn while doing absolutely nothing, while turning a blind eye and at the same time, attacking somebody like me. They have blood on their hands because they are completely and utterly unwilling. But we do need to have these very serious conversations about these town camps. If it was anywhere, if it were a situation in the suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne, where there's a concentration of violence, of sexual abuse, then something would be done about it immediately. Places would be knocked down, proper villages built if it's villages that need to be built, but people would be able to be dispersed and become part of the community in itself. My cousin died two years ago, a couple of years older than me. She lived her life in a town camp bringing up other people's kids. And she died because of poor health, because in the end, the town camp killed her. But she was bringing up everyone else's children because their parents were either locked up or leading a life drinking, where there's violence. But the town camp got her in the end because of her ill health. Like I'm done with it.

RITA PANAHI:

You have lived this. You've just told us about some family members. And we've been focusing on children. But this is also an issue for women. Indigenous women are more than 30 times likely to be hospitalised due to domestic violence than the rest of the Australian population. I mean, that is just horrendous. Can you just tell me a little bit about, you were talking earlier about practices or belief systems that are destructive, that you're not allowed to challenge. And I know again, within your own family, you've experienced that with an aunt who was married off young and this process of breaking her. Can you just tell the audience about that, because I think so many Australians don't know what's happening in their own country.

SENATOR JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE:

Yes, my mother was promised in marriage. I mean my mother, I suppose, was lucky enough to have a father and even a promised husband who recognised that things were changing and respected her wishes in the end. But I know lots of young women who have been forced into marriage. Again, my documentary was about the fact that I have an aunt who was forced to be with the promised husband who had already done jail time for murdering his first wife. She was 14. She has been missing for three decades now. And we're not supposed to talk about this. And recently, police put out that she was missing, I reported her missing after these decades, but the rest of my family pretended as though she had run away and she was living a life elsewhere. Everyone is complicit in this. There's many situations where my aunt's been forced into marriages to the point where, and there are a number of cases out there where this happens, forced by their own family into these marriages where they have been raped by their promised husbands. We are talking about 13, 14, 15 year olds. And you know what pisses me off the most is that Fairfax media have written, they wrote six page exposé on me and they tried to play down the seriousness of this issue, or to suggest that somehow I was full of it, when I know of the lived experience of the women in my family who have been you know described as being tied up like a kangaroo and repeatedly raped at the age of 14, and never, ever, have had justice because they've been petrified to report this to police. Then you've got the likes of the member for Gwoja, Chansey Paech, who says, if you know of these things, Jacinta, why don't you report them? Mate, what the hell are you doing? Get off your backside and do more than just pretend to be Warlpiri, and pretend to adopt a skin name for votes in this country. Like, seriously, get off your back side and do something about this. Now you've seen it. How much more do you have to see? There was a 13-year-old who was found pregnant last year because she was forced into an arranged marriage. What more evidence does the left-wing media and do these bloody lefties in these parliaments need to get off their backside to do something to protect our most vulnerable?

ROWAN DEAN:

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, there is a reason why you are probably the most popular politician in Australia. You speak the truth, you speak it honestly and more importantly — well, I've known you for over 10 years and I know how hard you've fought on this and I've known how you fought on all sides and I have known the toll it has taken on you and your family. But Jacinta, you have to keep fighting. Women, girls and people around Indigenous communities around Australia need you, and Australia needs to start listening to you. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, thanks so much for coming on Outsiders, and we'll chat again soon.

SENATOR JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE:

Thank you.

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