Category: Australia

While Cartwright walked away from negotiations with a $600,000 package that included expenses – higher than any other trade commissioner – Brown said he had expected $800,000 when his appointment was transferred to her agency from NSW Treasury.

“There seemed to be unmatched expectations between the candidate and what I saw as within my delegation to be able to sign off on,” she told the inquiry during her third appearance.

“I had to deliver some hard messages to the candidate, [that] some of the conversations that had happened previously weren’t going to turn out to be the reality.”

Brown said she did not know where Cartwright’s expectations had come from, since she was not able to pay more than $487,000 under the government sector employment act.

“In my mind, it was a difference in interpretation. [But] rereading the correspondence, I can’t be certain of that,” she said.

Brown said she had conversations with then-premier Gladys Berejiklian and then-treasurer Dominic Perrottet’s offices because she thought a “salary that high for any public service role is ridiculous”.

She said Berejiklian’s office agreed that the figure – which Labor said would have made Cartwright the state’s second-highest paid public servant – was unrealistic.

However, Perrottet’s chief of staff Bran Black told her to consider paying a “private sector size salary”.

“He said, you know, we haven’t had anyone in the country for a long time and let’s make sure we choose someone of high caliber.”

“[It was a] strong opinion,” Brown said. “I got the impression that I should consider the candidate’s requests very seriously.”

In a statement after Brown’s evidence, Black said he made it clear that while the “trade commissioner roles were very important and represented an excellent opportunity for the state”, $800,000 was an excessive salary.

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Instead, he said he suggested a base salary of $400,000 and an incentive component of $200,000. “I did not tell Ms Brown to pay Mr Cartwright at private sector levels. I did not tell Ms Brown that she should take her remuneration requests seriously,” Black said. He also did not raise it with Perrottet, who was a treasurer at the time.

Brown said her negotiations with Cartwright felt “threatening” when they continued into October, after Perrottet had become premier.

“It was at that point he was saying that he would talk to [Department of Premier and Cabinet secretary] Michael Coutts-Trotter, or even the minister or the premier,” she said.

“It was actually the name of the premier that jumped out at me… I found it quite threatening.”

Brown told the inquiry that Cartwright sought the intervention of Ayres via WhatsApp in March this year, regarding his concerns about how his pay was structured.

She said it was “highly inappropriate” for him to go above her head as an employer, but that Ayres did not exert any pressure.

“[Ayres] contacted me and said: Look, you can do what you like because Mr Cartwright is your employee, I just want to give you a heads up [that] I’ve got this message,” she said.

“I’m not telling you what to do and I really don’t care about the outcome, basically.”

Brown said she later made “a few passing comments” about the issue to her boss, Coutts-Trotter. “It was more of a whinge,” she said.

the herald sent questions to Cartwright through his employer, Investment NSW. A spokesperson said the agency was unable to comment.

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In her maiden speech, she pointed out that Indigenous Australians are not a unity ticket when it comes to supporting the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

It would be easy to dismiss Price as just a darling of right-wing commentators.

It would also be foolish.

When Price says there are more pressing issues than the Voice facing Indigenous communities, she speaks from personal experience.

Price fell pregnant with her first child at 17, completing year 12 assessments while in hospital with early contractions.

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As a victim of domestic violence in a subsequent relationship, Price was forced to flee her partner after he attacked her with a lamp. Soaked in blood, she ran to a neighboring property, believing if she did not get away she was going to die.

Price’s aunt and nephew were both murdered, the latter the result of a family feud.

While we talk about the hardships facing Indigenous communities, she has lived them.

In a 2016 speech to the National Press Club, Price spoke of how, in many cases of brutality, she was related to both the victim and perpetrator. She said she had been encouraged to ignore the fact they had committed acts of physical and sexual violence against someone she loved.

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Price came to political prominence after having the courage to expose family violence and sexual abuse in her own community and challenging the “cultural excuses” that protect perpetrators.

On her decision to speak out, she said: “I got to a point in my life where we had that many deaths in our family. We had that many women traumatized by family violence and children traumatized by family violence. And this ‘growing up yapa [Aboriginal] way’ is always like, you don’t talk about the really tough things. You pretend like they don’t exist … You’re supposed to turn a blind eye to that. And I think I got to a point where I went, ‘I’ve had enough of this’. And I became quite vocal.”

In her maiden speech, Price said the government had failed to show how a Voice would deliver practical outcomes for Indigenous people and noted in that very week that there were two clear examples of governments’ “failure to listen” to them.

The first was the recent decision in the Northern Territory to lift alcohol bans that Price says will allow “the scourge of alcoholism and the violence that accompanies it free rein, despite warnings from elders of those communities about the coming damage”.

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The second was the removal of the cashless debit card that, according to Price, has allowed families to “feed their children rather than seeing their money claimed by kinship demand from alcoholics, substance abusers and gamblers in their family group”.

Having run an election scare campaign on the cashless debit card nationwide, the government had little choice but to make good on its promise to abolish it.

But it was difficult listening to Price as she rose in the Senate to talk about the consequences that will flow from that decision.

Price has been speaking to income management recipients since the first trials in 2001 and her voice choked with emotion as she shared stories of how it has improved the lives of Indigenous women and children.

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She called on her parliamentary colleagues to “get out to some of these remote communities, where people – who are out of sight, out of mind to you – can’t clearly articulate to you because English is not their first language”.

She says she will bring to parliament their messages “over and over again” because “we’re trying to save lives here not toe the line of ideology”.

Whether it is the Voice, the movement to change the date of Australia Day or acknowledgments of country, Price says she has had more than her fill of being symbolically recognised.

She laments that “we spend days and weeks each year recognizing Aboriginal Australia in many ways, in symbolic gestures that fail to push the needle one micro-millimetre toward improving the lives of the most marginalized in any genuine way”.

Price’s arrival in Canberra makes us question which Indigenous voices the government is prepared to listen to and how it will respond to those it finds inconvenient.

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