‘Power does reveal what people are really like’: Scapegoating migrants old as history
The Liberal Party looks like following the rot that set in with John Howard – Tampa and dog-whistling about Asian migration, argues former Department of Prime Minister Secretary, CEO of Qantas and ambassador to Japan, John Menadue.
The Liberal Party looks like following the rot that set in with John Howard – Tampa and dog-whistling about Asian migration.
But this time the Liberals might be kicking an own goal because of the electoral clout of our migrant communities.
The warning signs for the Liberals are clear. They have offended voters with Chinese and Indian backgrounds and paid the electoral consequences at the past two federal elections.
New leader Angus Taylor says that in migration matters he will focus on “Australian values … protecting the Australian way of life”. Whatever that is.
He says that “immigration standards have been too low”.
Who does he have in mind? Muslims, where we keep blaming all Muslims for crimes of individuals. Do we blame all Italian Catholics for the mafia?
Taylor is harking back to the Australia of 50 years ago. Modern Australia is very different, with 32 per cent of our population born overseas and about half of it either born overseas or having at least one parent born there.
There have been major surges in migrants from China and India. Political parties will ignore these new demographics at their peril.
Australia-Chinese voters
The “China threat” highlighted by the Liberal Party has caused concern among Chinese voters.
Senator James Paterson has been particularly active on this. Peter Dutton was vocal on Chinese naval ships circumventing Australia.
There have been trade disputes with China that the Liberal Party has sought to exploit.
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At the federal election last May Senator Jane Hume – now deputy Liberal leader – warned us about “Chinese spies”. She followed with a dissembling apology that made her offence even worse.
Not surprisingly, all of this antagonised many Chinese who are small business people with strong family ties and usually voted for the Liberal Party.
Seats like Bennelong have large numbers of Chinese Australian voters. Photo: AAP
But not now. At the 2022 election, at least five seats with significant Chinese voters, including Reid, Chisholm, Bennelong and Tangney, tipped the result to the ALP.
Without those extra seats, the Albanese government would not have had a majority in the House of Representatives.
In its post-2022 election review the Liberal Party said: “The swing against the Liberal Party was significantly greater in electorates which have a higher concentration of voters of Chinese ancestry. In the top 15 seats by Chinese ancestry the swing against the party (on a two-party-preferred basis) was 6.6 per cent, compared to 3.7 per cent in other seats”.
At the 2025 election, the swing of Chinese voters to the ALP was further entrenched. In electorates with high Chinese populations, the ALP won seats like Banks and Deakin.
Chinese voters in these electorates supported the ALP at approximately 65 to 70 per cent in 2PP votes compared to 30 to 35 per cent for the Coalition.
Australia-Indian voters
Jacinta Price offended Indian voters in the 2025 election suggesting that the Labor government was giving special treatment to Indian migrants because they would vote for the ALP.
Despite many opportunities, she failed to genuinely deny these anti-Indian comments.
The Indian Australian community, with over 916,000 migrants in 2025, is projected to overtake the UK as the country’s largest migrant group.
A 2022 Carnegie survey found 43 per cent of Indian-Australians identified with the ALP compared to 26 per cent for the Coalition.’
Jacinta Price offended Indian voters in the 2025 election. Photo: Getty
Victoria seats with high Indian populations such as Calwell and Gorton voted strongly ALP in the 2025 election.
(The above analysis has been assisted by James Reed and posted in Race, Culture, Nation in May 2025)
Chinese and Indian voters were clearly very important in the 2025 election result.
Will the Liberal Party keep offending them and other migrant groups that might find themselves typecast as of lesser value in a multicultural Australia?
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Many of the Liberals’ shadow ministers who offended Chinese and Indian voters so thoroughly are now back in the shadow ministry – Hume as deputy leader, Price and Paterson.
Andrew Hastie has also joined the shadow ministry. He recently stoked the racist fires that we now “feel strangers in our own home”. It sounds like the “civilisation” erasure that Donald Trump and the extreme right around the world keep talking about.
These political misfits in the Liberal Party keep taking their cues from NewsCorp and Sky. How can the ALP be so lucky?
And what of the record on migration of the Liberal Party in government?
To this day the Liberal Party keeps repeating the lie that Abbott and Morrison stopped the boats. The Canberra press gallery, as on so many issues, swallowed this lie and remains unwilling to admit its mistake.
The Abbott government encouraged boat arrivals by voting against the Malaysian arrangement. By the time the much-vaunted Operation Sovereign Borders commenced in December 2013, the boat arrivals had been reduced to a trickle.
Dutton then stepped in with his maladministration of migration. With boats stopped, people smugglers and racketeers – particularly from China and Malaysia – commenced arranging for “asylum seekers” to come to Australia by air rather than boat.
The number of Protection Visa Applications by air increased from 8480 in 2012/13 to 27,931 in 2017/18.
Former senior Department of Immigtration official Abul Rizvi described the Dutton failure:
“In 2017/18 Dutton has set a record for the number of asylum seeker applications received. The record is likely to be exceeded in 2018/19. Tackling the chaos in our visa processing system will cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly north of a billion dollars and take many years. Is the government’s border protection mantra a diversion from its real border protection failings … The Home Affairs annual report says a large portion of these applications (by air) are “unmeritorious” … and that these “unmeritorious” protection visa applications undermine Australia’s arrangements for protecting people who are genuinely in need of our help.”
This Dutton failure still has serious implications. Asylum seekers arriving by air now constitute most of the onshore protection claims in Australia. About 26,000 people are waiting a decision on their refugee status. Most came by air. Few will be successful.
More than 48,000 people are still awaiting outcomes at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. There is a major problem in clearing the backlog of asylum seekers that came to Australia by air when Dutton was minister.
The Liberals have a very unfortunate record in immigration/refugee policy and administration. Though vehemently denied, it has really been about race. It started with Howard.
It was a long and difficult road to rid ourselves of White Australia. The really substantive move was the abolition of White Australia from Labor’s platform in 1965.
Don Dunstan and Gough Whitlam initiated this reform. Then followed the Whitlam government’s Racial Discrimination Act. The test of the ending of White Australia came with the welcome the Fraser government gave to 250,000 Indo-Chinese people. That included refugees, family reunion and an orderly departure program.
Will the Liberal Party, fearful of One Nation, seek to turn all this around with dog-whistling and weasel words about values and balance?
The government is also shirking its moral and legal responsibility to asylum seekers. With climate change and rising sea levels, we are likely to see massive displacement of tens of thousands of people in the low-lying parts of Asia. Will we help them? Are we getting ready?
We continue our cruelty to asylum seekers. We shunt off them off to Nauru at great expense. We refuse entry to Australian wives and children from camps in Syria.
They have made mistakes but where is our forgiveness and humanity? These women and children can be carefully processed and monitored on return to Australia.
Our Prime Minister boasts about the decision to reject these women and children – “if you make your bed, you lie in it”. What a brutal thing to say. Power does reveal what people are really like. He doesn’t show the same toughness to those who commit genocide. Or the Australian citizens fighting for the Israel Defence Forces.
The Albanese government inherited a migration mess from successive Liberal ministers. But it has been too slow to fix the mess.
A serious administrative problem that the government has not addressed is the inclusion of immigration within the Department of Home Affairs. This has resulted in critical issues of settlement and social cohesion taking second place to the department’s focus on security and borders.
Humanity keeps losing out to security, time and time again.
John Menadue was formerly secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, ambassador to Japan, secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas
This article first appeared in Pearls and Irritations. Read the original here
