Editorial
Crying shame

The Australian paused late this week in what has been a stream of doting coverage on Linda Reynolds’ successful defamation suit against the former staffer who was raped in her office, Brittany Higgins.

The paper’s columnists had been revelling in the numbers, the legal costs that will go to the former defence minister, the damages and interest. The zenith was a splash headline midweek: “The price of not saying sorry”.

Irony is an overused term, but the headline might have worked far better the following day, when the national broadsheet trod more carefully around the fate of the rising political star now demoted to the Liberal back bench.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s comments to the ABC – in which she singled out Indian migrants to prosecute her argument that immigration to this country is too high, and alleged that they were favoured to serve Labor’s political interests – weren’t “clumsy”. That is how Price described them, and that framing was widely deployed in reporting them.

A more accurate description would be derivative, as her argument picked up the rallying calls of the neo-Nazis who gave direction and hateful motivation to the recent anti-immigration protests.

That reverberation wasn’t lost on Price’s senior colleagues, and it’s understood that they counselled her to apologise.

The Australian made a virtue of her refusal, however, highlighting for its lead story her comment that “it’s a time for courage, for conviction and for truth if we are to reverse Australia’s decline”.

These are the cadences of Make America Great Again, to match the hat Price wore in the election campaign. Privately the Liberals worry about these trappings, while publicly, even as she is relegated to the back benches, Ley praises her as an “outstanding Australian”.

Asked why Price didn’t apologise to the community she offended, the deputy opposition leader, Ted O’Brien, said, “People use different words to express themselves … Jacinta expressed herself authentically with deep regret.

“Stronger words were called for.”

Stronger words are almost certainly on the way. From her new vantage point, Price will be freer to vent her views.

While the iterations of the non-apology played out this week, Sky News jimmied the Overton window again, with a series of studio guests asking what Price said that was so wrong. Her calls for an abortion ban, made in the midst of the Queensland election and hastily shut down, were approvingly resurfaced. One commentator declared this the “death of the conservative party”.

What her emboldened supporters take away from this episode is that Price is willing to say the quiet things out loud. What the Liberals have learnt is that their rising political star is no politician – but then that’s what too many people like about her.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 13, 2025 as "Crying shame".

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