Anthony Albanese will not attend Garma festival despite vowing to attend every year as prime minister

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will not attend this month’s Garma festival, breaking a commitment made just 12 months ago to travel to north-east Arnhem Land each year for Australia’s largest Indigenous cultural gathering.

At last year’s Garma Key Forum, Albanese said: “I commit here that every single year that I have the great honour to be Australia’s prime minister, I will be here and engaged with you. This is a journey that has a long way to go.” However, as first reported by the ABC, the prime minister won’t travel to this year’s event, which runs from 31 July to 3 August, due to other commitments.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Minister for Indigenous Australians 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 (YYF), which hosts the event. She added: “I know that he [Albanese] is trying to get to quite a few communities across Australia and I know it’s disappointing for the Yolngu representatives and YYF in Garma. But I am incredibly pleased that we’ve got Senator Penny Wong coming. I have to say, she’s one of my favourites, and no disrespect to you, prime minister, but I think it’s wonderful that the foreign minister is coming and certainly we’ve got so many ministers coming.”

In a statement, the Yothu Yindi Foundation said: “Mr Albanese is a good friend of the Festival, and has been to every Garma since 2019.” Albanese used the 2022 event to reveal his preferred approach to a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament, which was defeated at the 2023 national vote. At last year’s event, he announced a First Nations economic empowerment agenda as he criticised the “dry gully” of culture wars that “lead us nowhere”.

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

Shadow Indigenous minister Julian Leeser will attend the festival. Professor Megan Davis, co-chair of the Uluru Dialogue, was not critical of Albanese’s planned non-attendance, saying: “Going to Garma is not a public policy. It would be unfair to use attendance at Garma as an objective measure of a prime minister’s political commitment to Indigenous policy. Our communities are concerned with actual federal policies and the failure of closing the gap, a problematic framework which Labor inherited from the LNP, which is like this ever-expanding, multi-headed serpent.”