Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s comments turn up the heat on Libs’ immigration crisis
The Liberal Party faces an existential crisis as one senator’s remarks about Indian migrants expose a deep rift between its base and electoral reality.
To understand just how angry her colleagues are with Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price for saying Indians are being brought to Australia to boost the Labor vote, you need to know how white-hot the issue of immigration is at the moment in Liberal land.
Ahead of last Sunday’s anti-immigration March For Australia, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley posted a video to social media seeking to distance the Liberals, warning “violence, racism and intimidation” would not be tolerated.
The response from Liberal supporters was vicious.
She was tagged “Mrs Turnbull” and “Mrs Albo”, and was told she “may as well be the Labor Party”.
Other Liberals who sought to distance themselves from the rallies were similarly abused.
Price, on the other hand, backed the March then on Wednesday claimed Australians are worried about “the core number, or the type, of migrants that are coming in”.
Her comments were seen as stoking anti-immigrant sentiment among rank-and-file party members – most of whom are old, and for whom Price is rock-star popular.
But it was her remarks about Indian Australians that terrified her colleagues.
Worse, despite being clearly told by Ley’s office that she needed to apologise, Price refused and instead doubled-down on Thursday, quoting a Redbridge poll that found 85 per cent of those who have Indian ancestry voted for Labor.
“Now 100 per cent are going to vote Labor,” was the exasperated response of one her Senate colleagues.
“We’ve just said: ‘F..k off, we don’t want your vote’.
“It’s bad. It’s very, very bad. It’s the equivalent of the Chinese spies comment,” another said.
A third was even blunter: “We’re under water with the Chinese. We’re under water with the Lebanese. It’s ugly.
“If she wants to join One Nation, she should just go on and do it.”
The comments particularly infuriated some MPs because they are worried about the growing hostility to immigration among members, some of which is clearly being stoked by the far right.
“I’m looking at Facebook and some of the stuff they’re reporting and saying I’m really depressed about it – I’m worried,” a federal MP said.
The reason he and his colleagues are worried about this turn among the membership is simple.
While being anti-migrant might have worked for Donald Trump in the US and might for Nigel Farage in the UK, despite what some members think, it would be the political kiss of death in Australia.
It’s all about numbers.
The percentage of the Australian electorate that are either migrants or the children of migrants is not well understood, nor how much this has increased in the past 30 years.
When John Howard was elected in 1996, only 23 per cent of people living in Australia were born overseas.
At the end of last year this figure had reached 30.7 per cent, up from 29.5 per cent a year earlier. At the end of April it hit 31.5 per cent.
In other words, over three decades we have gone from roughly one-in-four people born overseas to roughly one-in-three. Between them these migrants and their children were 51.5 per cent of the population according to the 2021 census.
In other words, if there was ever a time when you could alienate migrants and hope to win, that time has long passed.
It’s that second generation that particularly worries some Liberals.
“With anti-immigration it means not only will migrants not vote for us, but their children who become professionals will not vote for us because they will remember how we made them feel,” an MP said.
The stats show the Liberal Party isn’t doing well with migrants.
Of the 50 electorates with the highest percentage of migrants the Liberals hold two – Mitchell and Berowra in outer-suburban Sydney – and both of them are marginal.
One MP said the party members did not seem to grasp this.
“They don’t understand modern Australia. It’s as simple as that,” he said.
“If you look at the under-50s vote – people are having families later, they can’t afford to buy houses – and they’re not shifting conservative in the same way.”
Keith Wolahan, who in May lost the heavily Chinese Melbourne seat of Menzies, points out that in 2019 the Liberals held 12 of the 20 seats with the most Chinese voters, while today it holds two.
He said it was fantasy to think there was a route to victory for the Liberal Party that did not involve winning seats in the migrant-heavy cities.
“You can win the United States without winning big cities,” he said.
“You can win in the United Kingdom without winning London. But you can’t win in Australia without winning the cities.
“Of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives, 88 are urban and Liberals have nine.”
He said the party could talk about immigration but it needed to be extremely careful about how it did it.
“There is a huge political opportunity for the Liberal Party to connect with aspirational migrant families, but it requires discipline and universal commitment to that endeavour.
“It can’t just be the work of a few candidates and members. It has to be everyone’s business because the core equities of migrants – aspiration, reward for effort, quality education, safe streets – they should be core Liberal equities.”
Pollster and former ALP official Kosmos Samaras, whose firm Redbridge has extensively researched political views of migrants, is sceptical of the party’s ability to convey that nuance around immigration.
“When migrants, particularly those from China and India, hear a politician side with sentiments against immigration – even if they themselves have personal reservations about the size of our population increase – they only hear one thing coming out of the politician’s mouth and that is that they are being targeted,” he said.
“We were interviewing young Indian men in Western Sydney and everything about them was conservative – from their desire to accumulate wealth, attitudes to family and religion, views about the role of small business and enterprise – you name it.
“However when asked why don’t you vote Liberal the answer was short: ‘They don’t like us’.”
Originally published as Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s comments turn up the heat on Libs’ immigration crisis
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