Lisa Wilkinson jokes about Aboriginal Senator Jacinta Price’s name during Brittany Higgins lunch

Lisa Wilkinson has been caught joking about shadow Indigenous affairs minister Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s name before comparing the Liberal Party Coalition preselecting an Indigenous candidate to a white family ‘hiring a black cleaner’.

The comments from an audio recording were made during a lunch between Wilkinson, Brittany Higgins, her partner David Sharaz and Channel 10 producer Angus Llewellyn, in January 2021. 

The five-hour meeting took place before Ms Higgins’ interview on The Project on February 15, 2021, where she aired bombshell accusations of sexual assault.

The former Liberal Party staffer alleges she was raped by Bruce Lehrmann in Parliament House after a night out in 2019 when they were colleagues working for then-Defence Minister Linda Reynolds. Mr Lehrmann has always denied the claims.

During the lunch, both Wilkinson and Mr Sharaz spoke about politicians who could potentially add weight to Ms Higgins’ accusations and the perceived culture of misogyny within the Liberal Party.

‘[The Liberal Party] has preselected over twenty new and wonderfully diverse and strong female candidates like, and what’s her name, Nam… Nampinjumba? [sic]. She’s an Indigenous woman,’ Wilkinson could be heard saying in an audio clip obtained by Sky News. 

Mr Sharaz responded: ‘She clearly got in. Clearly it was a safe seat.’

‘That’s the thing, it was – as soon as I looked at it I thought, “Oh, you’re joking,”‘ Wilkinson said.

Mr Sharaz added: ‘They’ve been preselected in unwinnable seats.’

Wilkinson’s producer Mr Llewellyn then chimed with a joke about the Liberal Party hiring Ms Price.

‘See, we know brown people,’ he said.

Mr Sharaz joined in on the quip, saying, ‘It’s like, “I’m not racist, I have a black friend.” It’s that argument.’ 

‘I don’t have his number, though,’ Mr Llewellyn said.

The ex-Project host then added: ‘And our cleaner’s black.’ 

It comes as Anthony Albanese and other Labor heavyweights this week were forced to deny they colluded with Wilkinson and Ms Higgins while in Opposition to ‘weaponise’ the sexual assault allegations.

But a trove of leaked text messages on Wednesday between Mr Sharaz and Ms Higgins appear to show the couple had ‘direct contact’ with those at the highest levels of the Labor Party.

Wilkinson had claimed during the lunch Mr Albanese and Ms Plibersek were ‘friendly MPs’ who ‘could fire questions in Question Time’ regarding the rape allegations.

While Mr Sharaz said: ‘I have a friend in Labor, Katy Gallagher on the Labor side, who will probe and continue it going.

‘So sitting week, the story comes out, they have to answer questions at Question Time, it’s a mess for them.’

The leaked audio of Wilkinson’s planning meeting comes after Price publicly clashed with the TV presenter’s husband, Peter FitzSimons, in August last year.

FitzSimons had interviewed the Country Liberal senator for the Northern Territory via telephone for a Nine newspaper article – but Price later accused the left-wing journalist of being ‘rude’ and ‘aggressive’ towards her, which he denied.

She claimed FitzSimons had ‘imposed’ his view on her about the Indigenous Voice to Parliament and accused her of ‘giving racists a voice’.

Price, a first term NT Senator and Warlpiri/Celtic woman, is against the Voice to Parliament and changing the date of Australia Day from January 26.

With a whirlwind of controversy surrounding Wilkinson since the recordings were made public, she has embarked on a mass social media blocking spree to mute her critics amid calls for her to hand back her Logie for the Ms Higgins interview.

‘If I was in her position, I would definitely have offered to hand the Logie back,’ Sky News Australia contributor Prue MacSween told Daily Mail Australia.

‘Journalists are supposed to remain objective, not driven by their own agendas. Clearly this became much more for Lisa than a scoop. 

‘No journalist should seek to insert themselves or become the story.

‘But Lisa was “feeding the beast” with her involvement in the women’s protest outside Parliament House and the #MeToo political theme that drove this whole storyline. 

‘I would not like my professional ethics questioned as hers now are.’

Veteran entertainment journalist Peter Ford claimed Wilkinson had crossed a line by feeding Ms Higgins politically-loaded lines to say in the interview. 

‘It’s a fine line,’ Ford told Sunrise host Natalie Barr. 

‘But I generally think when someone says, ‘I don’t want to put words in your mouth’, that is exactly what they do want to do.

‘Certainly Walkley Awards can be revoked. I can’t think of an example where a Logie Award has been revoked but time will tell.

‘I guess people are waiting to see how the ongoing situation plays out.’

The Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen branded Wilkinson’s interview with Ms Higgins ‘shoddy journalism’ in an op-ed and said she should return her Logie now.

‘The proper thing to do would be for Wilkinson to hand in her Logie for her Higgins interview,’ she wrote.

‘That interview has been nothing but trouble for her, for the justice system, for good journalism and for people who deserved to be treated better.’

Many now claim Wilkinson has hit back at her critics by blocking them online, effectively silencing them by censoring their comments from her timeline.

Among those hit in the spree is former South Australia senator Cory Bernardi, who tweeted: ‘Proud to be a member of the ‘blocked by Lisa Wilkinson’ club.’

Scores have posted their own notifications that they have also been blocked by Wilkinson, with one adding: ‘Welcome – there’s plenty of good people in this club.’

Another added that the TV star and her columnist husband Peter FitzSimons had both been muting their opponents.

‘She and her hubby are very busy today with limiting their Twitter audience to yes-people,’ they said.

‘Where great leaders surround themselves with no-people to promote debate to reach high achievements, poor leaders surround themselves with yes-people to silence debate.’

One posted: ‘Lisa Wilkinson blocked me, yet I have never ever Tweeted to her. 

‘Clearly she is blocking anyone that says anything negative about Brittany Higgins or people who refuse to worship Anthony Albanese and Labor.’

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Wilkinson for comment. 

EXCLUSIVE: Read the texts between Lisa Wilkinson’s husband Peter FitzSimons and Jacinta Price that reveal the REAL fallout after the Liberal senator’s interview with the left-wing columnist – and why their VERY different backgrounds matter

Peter FitzSimons and Jacinta Price both furiously insisted they had witnesses backing their accounts of an August 2022 phone interview in which the new senator claims the left-wing author was ‘rude’ and ‘aggressive’ towards her.

Daily Mail Australia has obtained the furious text messages FitzSimons exchanged with the Country Liberals senator for the Northern Territory in the wake of the interview being published in the Nine newspapers.

Ms Price has gone public saying she felt FitzSimons – the husband of TV host Lisa Wilkinson – ‘imposed’ his view on her during their chat about the merits and faults of the Voice to Parliament. 

In a Facebook post after the article was published, Senator Price alleged FitzSimons ‘accused me of giving racists a voice but that wasn’t printed’, and later told media he was ‘aggressive’ and ‘rude’ and shouted at her.

FitzSimons strongly denied her claims – as did his boss, who tweeted he had listened to the interview – with FitzSimons texting asking her to remove the Facebook post, which she did.

The full text exchange between the pair shows they both claimed to have witnesses to the phone call as they argued over what happened.

‘Senator, I urge you to withdraw these defamatory accusations, as you know it is nonsense,’ FitzSimons wrote.

Senator Price hit back: ‘We did yell at each other. I’d like a copy of the interview… you did accuse me of empowering racists.’ 

FitzSimons insisted there was ‘not a single raised voice on either side’ but she replied: ‘I recall I had to yell, as did my chief of staff, who was present while you were on speaker.’    

The author responded by saying: ‘I have a witness at my end as well. But it doesn’t matter. It is all recorded.’

FitzSimons again asked her to withdraw her allegations before Senator Price ended the argument by replying: ‘Please stop bullying me. I don’t ever want to communicate with you again.’ 

Senator Price and FitzSimons originally chatted to discuss Anthony Albanese’s proposal to change the constitution to establish a Voice to Parliament, a group of Aboriginal people that would advise politicians on policies for Indigenous people.

FitzSimons is in favour while Senator Price is against, believing it will not help improve the lives of Aboriginal people. 

After FitzSimons denied being rude to Senator Price, she urged him to release the recording of the interview so the public could make up their own minds.

‘I’m quite happy for him to release the recordings if that will just settle things,’ she told Daily Mail Australia.

‘It’s been a bit of a drain and there’s obviously a lot of more important issues that I want to focus on and get to work on as a new senator. It’s been a not-so-welcome distraction,’ she said of their dispute.

‘My idea of more respectful and effective journalism is to have conversations about issues without having the opinions of a journalist imposed upon you and being made to feel as though you’re somehow wrong or incorrect.

Senator Price said it is wrong for journalists or commentators to be surprised when an Aboriginal person speaks out against the Voice to Parliament.

‘There has been a racial stereotype created around how Aboriginal Australians think and act and behave and we don’t generalise in that way about white Australians, or Italian Australians or Asia Australians,’ she said.

‘So why should we continually have that way of thinking imposed upon us as Indigenous Australians? Again it is a racial stereotype and I won’t have a bar of it.’

Senator Price said people need to be more accepting of diverse views within the Aboriginal community.

‘The narrative that we are a country of oppressed people and oppressors – we’ve got to get away from that. It’s not helpful, it’s not constructive,’ she said.

‘It provides for a very narrow view of how we are as a diverse bunch of Australians and we’ve got to take it back to basics of what it means to be human.’

Senator Price said the Voice the Parliament is a bad idea because it will entrench the idea that Aboriginal people are all victims.

‘Enshrining it in the Constitution suggests that as a race we’re forever going to be in need of special measures and as a race what somehow defines us is being marginalised,’ she said.

‘But it’s not race that determines our marginalisation – there are those of us of Indigenous heritage who are doing really well, we’re fine and have managed to take advantage of the modern world to live successful lives.’   

FitzSimons said he only confronted Senator Price over ‘mistruths’ and that he gave her views a fair airing his column.

‘What I sought to do was have her correct the record on the nature of our interview, which she partially did by deleting the post, and acknowledging to me I was not shouting,’ he said. 

‘As to suggestions of bullying… simply not true. The senator posted a complete and demonstrable untruth. I called her out on it, and she took down the post.’