Comment

Paul Bongiorno
The powder-keg politics of immigration

Australia’s multicultural affairs minister, Anne Aly, has no doubt the March for Australia rallies that dominated much of the political debate during the week were organised by Nazis with the main purpose of protesting “immigration from countries that have brown people”.

Research by the ABC and several other media outlets concurs with the minister’s view. The Crikey news site traces the genesis of the demonstrations to a now-deleted TikTok post that drew more than a million views and pitched the idea as a nationalist answer to the recent massive pro-Palestinian marches.

The brazenness of the Nazis who attended in their menacing black attire, many wearing balaclavas, was confirmation enough.

Aly, a former academic who is a counterterrorism expert and considered a world authority on the radicalisation of young people, told Radio National Breakfast the marches were “a con by the far right neo-Nazis to prey on some of the legitimate concerns around housing and around cost of living in order to propagate their anti-immigration, racist agenda”.

Aly was not alone among Anthony Albanese’s senior ministers calling out the organisers’ nefarious motives, which were spelt out in flyers instructing protesters about what flags to carry and nominating immigration from the Indian subcontinent as a target for their ire.

The politics of race and immigration is a dangerously combustible commodity, which helps to explain not only the tenor of the prime minister’s response but also the government’s handling of the announcement of a $400 million deal to deport former migrant detainees to Nauru.

Albanese surprised some of his MPs by readily agreeing with an interviewer that there’s “always good people” who turn up to demonstrate their views on particular issues. He did quickly speak about “neo-Nazis being given a platform”. Surely it was more a case of them establishing a platform for themselves.

In Labor’s caucus meeting on Tuesday, Victorian backbencher Mary Doyle asked the prime minister to clarify his “good people” comments, querying where the line should be drawn, as “bad things did happen at the rally”.

In Melbourne, worse things happened after the rally, when notorious neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell allegedly led a group of his thugs to attack the First Peoples’ protest site Camp Sovereignty, across the Yarra River from Victoria’s Parliament House. Four people were injured, including two women who were hospitalised. Sewell has some gall championing anti-immigration, being himself a New Zealand-born migrant.

The attack unmasks immigration as a cover for a deeper white supremacy agenda.

Indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe likened the camp attack to terrorism and said it was a hate crime that the Federal Police must investigate.

Victoria Police on Tuesday arrested Sewell and two of his accomplices on numerous charges, including assault and incitement to violence. The arrests came after Sewell disrupted a news conference being held by Premier Jacinta Allan. After being blocked by security he hurled insults at her and called her “a coward”.

The premier later said she was “unharmed and undeterred” and noted that the state’s new anti-hate laws, when they apply from the end of the month, will protect the people the Nazis love to attack: “multicultural people, LGBTIQA+ people, First Peoples and Jews”.

Albanese described the disruption of Allan’s press conference as “horrific”. He said the Nazis need to be called out, but in response to Doyle’s question, he said, “We have to make sure we give people space to move away and not push them further down that rabbit hole.”

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley struggled to find a way to score points over Albanese after the weekend. She refused in interviews to say what elements of the migration program she would cut but committed to cutting something, probably – as long as it is not family reunions or skilled labour or student numbers. Unlike her predecessor Peter Dutton, Ley is more aware of the pitfalls of alienating significant migrant groups such as Chinese and Indian Australians.

RedBridge Group pollster Kos Samaras says minor political leaders such as Pauline Hanson and Bob Katter, both of whom attended weekend rallies, can afford to play to the resentment stirred by the racists. They need to appeal only to the more extremist fringe for their political success.

Samaras says blaming migrants for cost-of-living pressures is “the cognitively ‘cheap’ option”, because “it transforms a complex crisis into a single, human-shaped culprit”.

“Humans evolved with a zero-sum mentality: if someone else gets food, shelter or status, then I lose,” Samaras says.

For major party leaders such as Albanese and Ley, however, when they talk about migration numbers and the housing crisis, for example, migrant communities think they are being used “as a stalking horse”.

Former deputy secretary of the Department of Immigration Abul Rizvi believes the major parties have left a vacuum of information to explain population policy and migration.

Anne Aly agrees more could be done by way of explanation, but she says she is cautious about conflating economic issues with migration because the marches were “very blatantly racist, or at least had a very racist undercurrent in them”.

“People are driven by emotion, not by facts.”

It’s a situation made worse by misinformation on the so-called immigration crisis. A press release from the Institute of Public Affairs before the rallies claimed 457,560 net migrants had arrived in the 2024/25 financial year. Migration expert at the ANU Alan Gamlen says this figure is a misrepresentation of the ABS data wrongly conflating tourist movements with net overseas migration data. Whatever the quibbles over the statistics, they were being used to inflame the situation.

Distorted facts are a potent political tool, as the Labor Party discovered in the 2001 election when the Howard Liberal government played on xenophobic fears about a wave of boat people swamping our shores.

In 2013, after Kevin Rudd returned as prime minister, he was determined not to leave Labor vulnerable to another border security scare. He announced that no boat arrivals after July of that year would be allowed to settle in Australia, even if they were declared to be genuine refugees. That didn’t save Labor at the election – but it was the shambles of a disunited government that was blamed for Tony Abbott’s victory, rather than Labor’s ruthless refugee policy.

The legacy of these decisions has played out since, with Liberal and Labor governments refusing to change tack. Indeed, the Albanese government’s task has been made harder by the High Court’s ruling that the indefinite detention of the so-called NZYQ cohort of foreigners refused visas was unconstitutional.

The Greens’ David Shoebridge says legislation passed in the past two weeks has denied up to 80,000 people procedural fairness, and the $400 million deal to make Nauru “a new penal colony” for the former detainees is a new low.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says he’s not sure if Senator Shoebridge is being melodramatic, but he’s plain wrong on the 80,000 number, and “it’s hardly new – if a person has had their visa cancelled, they have to leave”.

The Coalition joined the Greens in forcing a two-hour Senate inquiry midweek into the Nauru “arrangement”, as Albanese calls it, without confirming its costs.

It is not new for the Coalition in opposition to take a softer line on immigration if it suits its political purposes. Then Liberal leader Tony Abbott refused to allow the Gillard government to enact laws to send boat arrival refugees to Malaysia. Sussan Ley, however, may not want to gamble on any of the cohort, many of whom have criminal convictions, committing new crimes in Australia, if she joins the Greens in the Senate blocking the new Nauru “Pacific Solution”.

While all of this was happening, Barnaby Joyce continued undermining the Coalition leadership on net zero by letting The Australian report that he had advised one of Ley’s putative rivals, Andrew Hastie, not to vote for his private member’s bill.

Joyce warned Hastie it would be better for him to remain in shadow cabinet and influence policy development, and of course build his profile and bide his time.

Ley is certainly under pressure, but the opposition did have its first big win over the government this week. The Coalition teamed with the Greens and independent David Pocock in the Senate over releasing 20,000 home-care places for Australians now rather than waiting until November.

Ley was quick to claim victory, saying, “This is not a deal, Prime Minister. This is a defeat…” She said, “Labor has been forced into a humiliating backdown.”

Labor praised shadow health minister Anne Ruston for the outcome, while in the House of Representatives the government blamed Ley for being the minister responsible for the aged-care mess it had inherited.

In this instance, vulnerable older Australians were the winners and Ley’s claim to being a more effective opposition leader gained some credibility.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 5, 2025 as "Free-range fascists and a prison island".

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