Anthony Albanese will not attend Garma festival, despite vowing to attend every year as prime minister | Indigenous Australians

Anthony Albanese will not be attending this month’s Garma festival, breaking a commitment made just 12 months ago to travel annually to north-east Arnhem Land for Australia’s largest Indigenous cultural gathering.

Last year the prime minister vowed to continue participating in annual celebrations of Yolŋu culture while in office.

“I promise to be here and with you every year that I have the great honor of being Australia’s prime minister,” Albanese told the Garma Key Forum in 2025.

“This is a journey that has a long way to go.”

However, according to the ABC’s initial report, the prime minister will not travel to this year’s event, which will take place between July 31 and August 3, due to other commitments.

Foreign affairs minister Penny Wong and Indigenous Australian minister Malarndirri McCarthy are among several Labor ministers set to attend.

McCarthy said Albanese’s absence would be disappointing for Yolŋu representatives and the Yothu Yindi Foundation (YFF), which hosted the event.

But he was happy for Wong and other ministers to attend.

“I know that he [Albanese] It is trying to reach out to many communities across Australia and I know this is disappointing for Yolngu representatives and the YYF in Garma,” he told ABC Darwin on Friday.

“But I’m extremely pleased that Senator Penny Wong is coming. I have to say, she’s one of my favourites, and I mean no disrespect to you, prime minister, but I think it’s great to have the foreign minister come and we certainly have so many ministers coming.”

The Yothu Yindi Foundation said in a statement: “Mr Albanese is a good friend of the Festival and has been to every Garma since 2019.”

Albanese used the 2022 event to lay out his preferred approach to the referendum on indigenous voices in parliament. The proposal was rejected in the 2023 national vote.

At last year’s event, he touted his agenda for First Nations economic empowerment while criticizing the “dry valley” of culture wars that “get us nowhere.”

Hosted by the Yothu Yindi Foundation and local Yolŋu people, Garma is an annual celebration of Indigenous culture and tradition, bringing together community leaders, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocates, policy makers, business groups and artists.

Shadow Indigenous minister Julian Leeser will also attend the festival.

Prof Megan Davis, co-chair of the Uluru Dialogue, did not criticize Albanese’s planned absence.

“Going to Garma is not public policy,” he said. “It would not be fair to use Garma participation as an objective measure of a prime minister’s political commitment to Indigenous policy.

“Our communities are concerned about real federal policies and the failure to close the deficit, a problematic framework that Labor inherited from the ever-expanding, multi-headed serpent LNP.”