Sky News host Peta Credlin has taken an extraordinary swipe at fellow host Chris Kenny over his stance on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, labelling her colleague “anything but a conservative”.
Credlin took aim at Kenny — one of the only Sky News hosts to argue in favour of the Voice — after he was quoted by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during Question Time.
“You know a Labor PM’s in trouble when he quotes anyone on the right to defend himself under fire in the chamber,” Credlin said on Monday.
“But if he thinks quoting Chris Kenny is a winner for conservatives, well he’s kidding himself. On this issue Chris is anything but a conservative and viewers know it.”
Writing in The Australian over the weekend, Kenny branded the Coalition “ugly” and “cynical” for seizing the “historically significant reconciliation project” as a “partisan, political weapon to be used against the federal Labor government”.
“Senior Coalition figures now see defeating the referendum as their primary political priority to inflict political damage on the Prime Minister,” Kenny wrote.
“Decades of Indigenous advocacy and consultation, including by Coalition governments, driven by the noblest of intentions, are being disrespected. Imperilling reconciliation for partisan advantage is hardcore. Yet this week the opposition led Question Time with scares about the Voice and attempted to censure the Prime Minister, accusing him of running a secret agenda to undermine the nation’s future.”
Credlin, who last week accused Mr Albanese of misleading voters by not talking about the “full” 26 pages of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, slammed Kenny’s piece.
“His commentary over the weekend in The Australian was that it was somehow wrong or disingenuous for the Opposition to use Question Time last week and again today to demand answers about the Voice from a Prime Minister that has been to date unwilling to give any of them,” she said.
“Chris’ position was hard to fathom.”
On his show on Monday night, however, Kenny hit back at Credlin’s claim that the Uluru Statement was 26 pages, saying it was “simply not true, it is nonsense”.
“Credlin’s claim hinges on the fact that in some public service Word document, or some filing, they’ve put another bunch of pages in the same batch of documents,” he said.
“It’s discussion papers and background notes from the meetings leading up to the statement, there are summaries of some of the discussions ... the bureaucracy is chock-a-block with notes like these. These pages are not the Uluru Statement. They are not government policy.”
In his opinion piece, Kenny said the proposed reform, which will change the constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the “First Peoples of Australia” people by establishing an advisory body to parliament, was “designed to unify the nation and eradicate discrimination”.
He noted it had been “devised by Indigenous representatives, constitutional experts and politicians of all stripes across two decades of consultation under the imprimatur of Coalition and Labor government”, and “yet now the Coalition scare campaign seeks to decry this as a secretive plot to rend asunder the nation”.
“It is not a plausible critique and it should not be taken seriously by media or political commentators. It insults the public,” he said.
Kenny said the government had also made mistakes and that there was “no doubt the Yes case has been poorly argued”.
“Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney barely sticks to a script and shows no capacity to rebut criticisms or fashion arguments on the run,” he said. “Albanese has stubbornly resisted getting into the nitty-gritty of explaining how the voice will operate in practical terms because he wants to stay above the fray.”
But he said anti-Voice campaigners were continually broadening their arguments for voting No, such as by appealing to those who don’t like Welcomes to Country or Indigenous place names, which threatened to “turn the No case into a visceral anti-Indigenous exercise”.
“The Coalition is even roping in the cost of living, urging voters to see the voice as an expression of Labor’s disdain for their family budget pressures,” he said. “This is dastardly and clever politics that could hurt Labor. But it is harming the nation, too.”
In her own opinion piece in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, Credlin argued that the PM had been “lying” about the end goal of the Voice being a treaty with Indigenous Australians.
“As is now abundantly clear, the coming referendum is not about recognition – it’s an attempt to undo the last 240 years since settlement, and to retrofit Australia as a country that still belongs primarily to Aboriginal people, and we should just be grateful they let us live here,” she wrote.
It comes after a series of opinion polls showed public support for the Voice plummeting nationwide, with experts now warning the referendum is all but doomed.
But the Yes campaign and the government remain confident the referendum will be successful, with Mr Albanese on Monday saying there was a “long way to go” and comparing current poll results to those for Labor in the lead-up to last May’s election.
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“I remember people telling me that there was no possibility Labor would win the last election and I’m speaking to you from the Lodge,” he told ABC Radio.
“There’s been a whole lot of noise about things that it’s not about, but it’s a simple proposition.”
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