Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has admitted her frustration at being sidelined during the federal election campaign, placing blame on the media and a lack of Coalition policies for Labor's election victory over the weekend.
The NT Senator, who will once again be the only conservative representing the Territory after being re-elected on Saturday night, also argued the Coalition didn't utilise the Voice referendum victory enough, appearing to argue 'culture wars' should have played a bigger part in the campaign.
After arguing the Coalition would "Make Australia Great Again" at a gathering in Perth, and the subsequent emergence of a photograph of her wearing a 'MAGA' hat, Senator Price seemed to be sidelined from campaigning by the Coalition, something she told Sky News on Monday was "absolutely frustrating".
"That's a frustration for me, that's a frustration for others," she said.
"Watching the way the media, you know, like a bunch of vultures, will absolutely goad you on one particular issue and smear you with, you know, another country's president.
"That was a significant role...some of the media played."
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Senator Price had already criticised media reporting after the loss on Saturday night, telling the ABC that media "mudslinging" was partly to blame for the Coalition's thumping election loss.
"If you sling enough mud in a campaign, it sticks, and if you mislead the Australian people over and over again, that's what the Prime Minister has done, that's what sticks," she said.
Peter Dutton had earlier labelled some media outlets - including the ABC and Guardian Australia - "hate media", and rarely appeared over the past three years in front of journalists in Canberra.
However, Senator Price accepted on Monday that the lack of Coalition policy announcements until late in the campaign had been detrimental, arguing there was a lot of reflection needed to determine "where our mistakes are".
"We should have locked in our policies and made sure that they were pretty much determined long before the election was even called in terms of putting them to the Australian people," Senator Price said.
Having previously been criticised by Indigenous groups during the Voice campaign for denying the ongoing impacts of colonisation on First Nations people, Senator Price faced Noongar protestors at a campaign gathering in Bunbury a day before her speech in Perth, who argued she didn't seek permission from Elders before coming.
While she outlined calls for audits and a royal commission into sexual abuse in remote communities - the latter widely criticised as unnecessary and politically motivated - as features of Indigenous policy in the lead up to the election, no specific details to help close the gap were forthcoming until the later days of the campaign when the Coalition announced $115 million in remote Indigenous education funding.
National Indigenous Times contacted Senator Price on multiple occasions - including before her appearance in Perth and later "sidelining' - regarding First Nations-specific policy, but often received no reply.
In the wake of its defeat, attention has focused on the Coalition's policy failures, with Liberal politicians openly briefing journalists about their senior colleagues, campaign managers and polling experts.
While arguments have largely centred on the Coalition's need to reform their policies towards a more 'middle ground' and away from so-called culture wars.
Writing on Saturday, Managing Director of National Indigenous Times, Reece Harley, argued Peter Dutton and the Coalition "treated Indigenous issues as political bait" by pushing "culture wars when what we needed were policies".
"The 2025 election result is a direct response to that failure. Voters saw through the empty slogans. They rejected a party that had nothing to offer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but blame, denial, and silence."
However, Senator Price argued there should have been more of a focus during the election campaign on the Voice referendum, telling Sky News the Coalition "probably didn't capitalise enough on the outcome" of it.
"You know the fact that we didn't pin that to the Prime Minister effectively enough, I think that was a lost opportunity there," she said.
