Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Anthony Dillon are right. Their recent arguments in The Australian; Price's call for Indigenous men to step up against sexual abuse and violence, and Dillon's case that Indigenous patriarchy requires cultural change, cut through the ritual language that has long shielded a devastating reality. Vulnerable Aboriginal women and children continue to pay the price for the deification of culture by political and cultural elites. Both pieces demand action, not more acknowledgments.
Price has repeatedly documented the human cost from within her own community and family. In remote areas, elements of traditional culture still treat young women as inferior until they reach senior status. Violence, arranged relationships with older men, and payback practices have been normalised in ways that leave women and children unprotected. She has stated bluntly that there is not a woman in her family who has not experienced physical or sexual abuse, and that the perpetrators were not outsiders. Hospitalisation rates for Indigenous women from family violence remain many times the national average. Price's point is practical: ritual respect for elders, Aboriginal flags, and Welcome to Country ceremonies allow leaders to avoid confronting what is happening on the ground. Lip-service does not stop the next assault.
Dillon complements this by identifying the mechanism that sustains the problem. Because Aboriginal people and their culture are treated as sacred, political correctness deters frontline workers, police, and child-protection agencies from intervening when intervention might cast Aboriginal men or communities in a negative light. The result is selective blindness. All cultures contain defects; some defects are more destructive than others. Romanticising Indigenous culture through daily ritual incantations, speech codes, and university "decolonising" programs has made honest diagnosis politically costly. The consequence is that the most vulnerable remain exposed while institutions prioritise avoiding offence over child safety and women's protection.
These observations are not new, but they remain suppressed. Price has long argued that Closing the Gap fails when it refuses to examine cultural practices that tolerate or enable violence. Dillon has consistently warned that separatism and the assumption of fundamental difference between Aboriginal and other Australians obstruct ordinary standards of accountability. Both reject the idea that criticism of harmful practices equals racism or that only Aboriginal people may discuss them. The alternative, treating culture as beyond scrutiny, has produced measurable failure: high rates of child sexual abuse, domestic homicide, and intergenerational trauma concentrated in communities where customary attitudes toward gender and authority persist without challenge.
Action requires more than rhetoric. It means applying the same child-protection and domestic-violence laws everywhere, without cultural exemptions or delayed responses driven by fear of being labelled racist. It means expecting Indigenous men, like men elsewhere, to face consequences for violence rather than being shielded by narratives of collective victimhood. It means ending the practice of treating symbolic gestures as substitutes for enforcement and cultural reform. Universities and media that currently police speech around these issues should be required to confront the data rather than the sensitivities of elites.
Whether legal and political leadership is capable of this shift remains open. Too many prefer the comfort of sacred-culture language to the discomfort of protecting actual women and children. Price and Dillon have identified the core obstacles: patriarchal norms that harm the weak, and an elite culture of deification that prevents their correction. Both analyses are accurate. Both require implementation if the cycle is to be broken. Continuing the present course is not neutrality; it is a choice to leave the most vulnerable unprotected.