The government condemns anti-immigration rallies

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Australians from multicultural backgrounds have described the fear and disappointment sparked by the anti-immigration rallies held across Australia this weekend.

The demonstrations took place in several capital cities and regional centres.

Now, there were many people there, but also known neo-Nazis speaking at events in Melbourne and Sydney.

The nation's politicians are back in Canberra, they're trying to distance themselves from this, condemn this, but how will they try to shift the dial on these issues?

Welcome to Politics Now.

Hi, I'm Patricia Carvellis.

And I'm Jacob Krieber.

Jacob, thousands of people turned out to what ended up being very much far-right demonstrations over the weekend.

Some weren't huge, others were bigger.

Obviously, it's an uneven story across the country.

Federal politicians involved include politicians like Pauline Hanson, not surprising, Bob Catter, he attended too.

The government stated that all Australians, no matter their heritage, have the right to feel safe and welcome in our community.

But others are defending the broader protests, saying, hey, these people are just concerned about immigration.

Jacob, is it just about immigration without any view as to who are the immigrants?

Diabolical really, the whole thing.

No one wants to see anyone, whether self-described or not,

neo-Nazis on streets in Australia in 2025.

Unacceptable.

That's the starting point.

I'm amazed that's even

controversial in this day and age.

It does show how things have shifted.

There's a lot of anger out there and it's being funnelled.

Some of it is being, you know, people are spending too much time online, going down terrible, terrible rabbit holes, coming up and appearing at these sort of rallies with those extremist positions.

But it is interesting, PK, you've got people like David Pocock.

this morning who's also saying that the behavior is totally unacceptable at these rallies but he's saying we haven't had this proper debate about the size of the country, about the infrastructure that you need to have in place for our population, housing.

Those are all real issues.

And there were people at those rallies, it seems, who held those views about the very thing that David Pocock's expressing, who were not neo-Nazis, who were not extremists.

So I think there's a sense that you've got different groups getting caught up here in this maelstrom.

I think that's right.

You don't show up at these things with a passport that says, I'm not a neo-Nazi, I'm just someone concerned about housing.

And so these things are being manipulated by different forces.

Manipulated is the perfect word, but it is a slippery slope, right?

You know, this isn't just, oh, too many people broadly are coming in and we don't have the infrastructure right.

I don't see placards saying, you know, build more houses more quickly.

This is stop immigration.

It is very, very

focused on brown and black people, Indians,

Islamic immigration.

This is a very white nationalist tone to a lot of it.

And the draping of the flag, can I say the Australian flag represents everyone who is a citizen here?

And the draping of the flag to be co-opted in a way to represent white nationalism.

by many, not all.

I actually find it genuinely really upsetting to see the Australian flag co-opted and therefore this is what I worry about.

Therefore, symbolically, these people trying to own that flag as if it represents their values when it's put up at the top of parliament and I come in for the sitting weeks or when it used to be brought up at my school assemblies for all those years.

To me, it was not a source of those symbols.

It was a source of support to families like mine who were immigrant families who didn't speak English at home.

Like this is a journey that's well trodden in this country, right?

Like this is not new.

There are new communities that come, but I think a lot of us feel very affected by it because it's like, what are you talking about?

Who are you talking about here?

And it seems quite obvious who's being targeted.

So then it takes us to the political paradigm here.

The Liberals have been, I think, largely, do you agree, pretty

smart in distancing themselves from this,

not all with the same tone.

I saw a statement by Jacinta Napa Jupiter Price who condemned the neo-Nazis, but then talked about the other protesters and sympathy for those.

So there's that sort of distinction being drawn.

Paul Scar saying they support, the coalition supports sustainable migration.

We don't know what that means in practice.

The coalition hasn't revealed that.

Neither has the government.

I have to say.

In its current year, we do not know what the skilled migration number will be.

That's an important number.

I pointed this out several weeks ago on 7.30.

We still don't know.

There is complete silence about that.

And the problem

when you have

agitators who know they're going to get a headline, extremists who know they can generate media attention,

One of the things they do is they say the government's not being upfront about immigration levels.

Now, when the government hasn't actually told us what this year's skilled migration number is going to be, they have taken a very small fact and blown it up.

And that's unfortunately the problem here with some of this debate.

Governments are terrified of this particular debate.

For all the reasons that you've just alluded to, that's not who we are.

But we do have migration.

We have one of the world's highest migration rates.

We are also one of the richest countries on earth.

We've always been able to manage that in the past.

And what these groups are targeting is a sense that maybe we can't manage it anymore, that it's getting out of hand.

We are not building the suburbia, the infrastructure, the hospitals, the schools that we need to manage that community.

Now, I'm someone who's always written in the past from a very, very pro-migration point of view.

I think that's our magic source as a country.

But it means you've got to work at it.

You have to get all the other building blocks in place

to do it.

And there's a sense now that we're losing that.

I think that's a legitimate concern.

I think it's terrible that it's been co-opted by a group of people who really have no place in our society.

Well, that's why people like James Patterson, who's now the shadow finance spokesperson for the Liberals, basically said, you know, think about the company you keep, you know, in terms of turning up to these rallies.

So even if you did have concerns about the level of immigration, I don't see that as contentious if it's colourblind, right?

If it's just based on, oh, like, you know,

do we have enough houses at the moment?

And

it's a perfectly legitimate conversation to be having about how fast, jobs, what we're doing, right?

Of course, there's another side of that too, which is, you know, you put the brakes on immigration for five years.

That's one of the things that these rallies were calling for.

A freeze on migration for five years.

I can tell you what economic collapse looks like, my friends.

I'm so glad you brought that up because...

Well, it's key.

I'm so glad you brought that up because anyone who's gone gone to a hospital, gone to an aged care facility, gone to a dental clinic, hell, I'll make it personal.

I want someone to come and make pavers in my backyard, okay?

I put it on

one of those apps where you get bids then from tradies.

Do you know who showed up?

Within 20 minutes, a new recent...

arrival from China, a young man, showed up, could barely speak English.

We communicated through Google Translate about the job.

So from my small micro example to the entire hospital system, it would collapse without the sorts of people that we're talking about arriving in this country, eager and keen to get going.

Yep, I think that's right.

And, you know, there's not a universal view on migration too.

There is a lot of coverage being given at the moment to high rates of immigration, but there are mixed views.

I mean, some people really do see the benefits of it, not just in a, oh, we like diversity and we like trying different food, but there is, I think, been a long uh view in australia about the benefits economically of it the productivity commission has written no i don't mean just wonks i mean ordinary people i talk to right who who are like this city i mean i live in inner city melbourne yeah this city would collapse without the international students like we know how important they are and i don't mean to ever

trivialize people because everyone has humanity as if they're just economic units but they are really key economic units too so there is yeah it's a complex puzzle and i think you're right broadly that the government needs to lead it better, right?

All governments need to lead it better, more transparency, more discussion.

Now they're trying to do that, to be fair to them, in the housing discussion, accelerating housing.

All of that is about telling that story.

But when we see a far-right movement grow, even if some say it was they were just at the fringe,

I can't quantify whether they are just at the fringe or whether they have a more sinister, larger role.

But what I can tell you is that those slogans are alarming.

They're not good for Australia.

They're not good for us feeling safe.

And I'll give you an anecdote.

I've got a friend who works in a very multicultural primary school in Melbourne who said for the whole week before these rallies, a lot of the black and brown kids whose parents are working overnight as taxi drivers in this country, they were scared.

They were asking their teacher about it because it was running in their WhatsApp groups, like in their family, like this thing is happening.

They were actually scared.

These are 10-year-olds.

You know, she was like, wow, they were really aware of this thing coming up.

Now, I know people in the city who weren't even aware it was coming up.

I think if you feel like you're being targeted,

there is a real fear.

And I think that's where there is, this isn't just words or us just talking on a podcast.

Yeah, no, this is real.

This is real stuff.

Especially the sort of get rid of them, send them out.

People get really scared about this stuff.

The we're full sort of crowd that runs those stickers that you see on the back of it now we're recording this before question time but i know that the prime minister is going to make a statement about this in question time i suspect it'll be very similar to the sorts of comments we've heard from multicultural affairs minister anne ali who has talked about the racism inherent in these protests the fact that it was co-opted by neo-nazis but she was also

i think really smart and there was nuance in what she said, don't you think?

There was.

She talked about the pressures people are under and why some people have grievances.

So the government would be smart to engage with that part of it and condemn the extremism, but also that's going to take a bigger piece of work.

Not just, you don't just condemn people.

You have to take people with you, right?

Condemning people is the easy bit.

Do you think this stuff waxes and wanes with the health of the economy?

Well, I remember the 90s where neo-Nazism was quite...

Yeah, so we've been around, we've seen these cycles, they come and go.

And it does get worse when people are struggling, people are doing well, it tends not to be as noticeable.

But I think it feels to me there's something different going on here as well.

On top of this now is the ability of groups such as this to organize that is unrivaled.

And so, yes, the kids in that school that you're talking about become aware of it.

I don't think

that's not the case from the past.

I can't remember that being the sort of way this stuff was disseminated.

It's much more powerful now.

And that's, again, this is this social media world that we live in.

You can whip this stuff up in no time.

I mean, the Cronulla riots was another notorious example.

What's that, now, 20 years ago, I guess?

That was sort of a pre-internet or a pre-social media thing.

And that built over weeks and weeks and weeks, my memory of it.

I was actually overseas those years, but now you whip it up in no time at all.

Yeah, that's right.

Now, Susan Lee's put out a statement which I think says a lot about where the coalition is positioning on this, talking about basically Australia's social cohesion crisis.

She calls out the protests, right?

But she also calls out the protests on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Aatolla signs.

So they're trying to raise equivalence here, that there's extremism left and right, which positions them where they're comfortable.

I think that's really interesting.

I think there were some extremists, protesters, and symbolism on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

I don't think that was the majority at all, though, as far as I could see.

It was certainly what was picked up by my understanding is quite a lot of, you know loud voices in Israel noticed that the Jewish community was left very very unsettled by it

and I think there was more of it over the weekend I've had images sent to me by someone also making that point where where this sort of heads I don't know it's it feels tricky to me talking about those two things at the same time To me it does too.

That's not to say that I think holding the sign of the Aatollah is acceptable.

I don't.

And extremism, anti-Semitism, I don't.

But I think to describe that protest across Sydney Harbour Bridge as overwhelmingly dominated by that is not true

I agree with you it's just not true

that doesn't mean that some of those people weren't there but they were not the majority now in terms of the anti anti-immigration rallies I also don't think Nazis per se were the majority either right so that too but when they got given access to the mics I think everyone went what you know because because they try to make out like this wasn't linked to the Nazis and yet the Nazis seemed to think it was their space and so I think that's a relevant question right like they they they seem very comfortable in that space and so what are we talking about here what did what and what is this kind of

what we saw where camp sovereignty in Melbourne, which is kind of a spot

very close to the botanical gardens,

big sign camp sovereignty.

There's one here too in Canberra.

Oh, I wasn't aware of that.

So is this camp sovereignty?

Are these the sovereign sovereign citizen groups oh absolutely not this is aboriginal australians first nations movement on an ancestral site oh well there's the tent embassy isn't there it's similar to that concept right and the neo-nazis have come and ripped up the camp sovereignty site the footage is really scary and alarming Again, here we're talking, you know, that's when you know it's pure racism, right?

I reckon most people listening to this would agree that the only non-migrants to this country are Indigenous Australians, people with lineage, obviously.

I don't think you have Indigenous heritage from what I know.

I certainly don't.

I can tell you the ship we came on.

So, you know, the date we came.

Convict ship?

No.

That's not date.

No, no, no.

There was a vision.

But

your point is...

Here we have right-wing nationalists attacking camp sovereignty in Melbourne.

We've got a problem here, right?

They're not immigrants, man.

They are First Nations people.

My point is we've got a problem with race.

It's a race issue as well.

And so that is a really, really tricky, complex issue.

This is about difference, dominant groups, and you know, just calling out racism, some of the things we traditionally talk about, that's just...

That is one part of this, but that's not going to solve all of this.

We need a deeper, deeper thinking about how we manage these tensions in our community because we don't want to go down the road where we're living as a bunch of tribes.

The cohesion is about being kind of a one people with your complexity.

Look, adjacent to all of this in terms of a kind of discussion about,

well, home affairs, immigration, different, but you know, stay with me, Jacob, I know you can.

The government.

It didn't make an announcement so much as quietly, sort of, if you went searching, revealed on Friday that Australia and Nauru have signed a memorandum of understanding allowing the government to deport about 280 members of the NZYQ cohort that's a group of non-citizens living in Australia whose visas were cancelled on character grounds some of them very unsavoury people like people you don't sort of want to be living next door to fair enough right

some serious crimes some of them have committed government has been having a big political problem with this group, right?

Obviously, it blew up last year.

Peter Dutton jumped on this as a big political issue.

Quiet deal.

Pretty expensive deal too, though, Jacob.

For a deal that's

$400 million, $70 million a year for related costs that's ongoing.

Holy doorly, I mean...

Here we are again.

Here we are again.

Now, if the coalition had announced that, and I suspect they would have gone for a similar deal, to be honest, I don't see much difference in the policy.

I imagine a lot of chest beating and, you know,

tough on the border kind of vibes.

This government takes a different tone, same policy, you know, same-ish-ish policy.

I can't prove that it'll be exactly the same, don't you reckon?

They don't want to lean into it, but they want to do it too, to neutralise a political issue.

Okay, let's go back to the basics then.

This wasn't announced, you know, on a quiet news day.

Take out the trash day.

It was announced sort of weirdly on a Saturday.

Oh, by the way, the Home Affairs Ministers just popped over to Nauru and met the local leader there.

Oh, and they've signed this deal.

I mean, you have to sort of laugh.

It's not only Take Out the Trash Day, it's just, I mean, this is textbook stuff.

Oh, yeah.

I think the same minister put out a press release on Friday about Don Bradman's baggy green hat.

And isn't that great that we've got it and we're selling it to the National Museum?

And yay, yay, yay.

How's that?

The press release said.

How's that indeed?

Look over here, look over there.

So, yeah, look, people might accuse us of being a bit cynical here, but

this one has been slipped out under cover of darkness because they don't want to hang a light onto this.

They knew there would be some attention on it, but you do it on a Friday into a Saturday for a reason.

You don't want people to notice.

Now, people have noticed it's hugely expensive.

Why are we going back to this particular policy weapon or tool?

Maybe weapon's too strong a word, but tool.

I mean, I don't know if you recall the Nauru files.

We had a lot of evidence for why this is such a cruel.

terrible way to treat people.

They are criminals.

Some of these people, as you said in the beginning, are serious criminals.

But really?

And we're doing it with a country that's one of the poorest countries on earth who do not have alternative forms of income.

So they need the money.

Yeah.

So we

apparently

are talking about essentially there is the sort of deep double standards which involve that our government has decided they're so unsavory, no one wants to live near them, so to speak, right?

We don't want to be near them.

And, you know, there's been some high-profile cases that grandmother

was assaulted in WA by one of these people in the cohort.

Okay, that is alarming.

People have a right to be alarmed about that.

So that means we, us Australians, with our 26 million people that live in this country, we don't think we're safe around these people.

We've decided, it seems.

Bipartisan position, not safe around these people.

But we think Nauru.

I mean,

seriously.

No,

I'm reading James Campbell here in the Herald Sun.

Fair to say, pretty conservative commentator, no friend of Labour's generally.

But I think he made a reasonable point.

If these criminals are that bad, why should we be imposing them on a tiny country of 12,000 people?

Indeed.

And I'll tell you why, because governments govern them.

This is, you know, Politics 101 is nationalism many ways for the people that they're in charge of.

And I don't think they care so much.

It's a big price tag, though.

What is that, like a million bucks a person?

It adds up fast.

Yeah,

I haven't done the crunch on it, but it's a big price tag for what seems to me to be, I'm not saying there is no community risk because there clearly is, and there's been some examples of that, but what is more dominantly a political risk.

So, fine, I get all that.

Sometimes realpolitik is real and hurt and is the Pacific solution, basically, as it was once called,

has long been embarked on in this country.

You know, I wrote a column about this on Saturday for our website.

Go and have a look.

Pointing out that we've got 94 members of Labor in the lower house.

93 of them are in caucus because the Speaker doesn't go into caucus.

Where are the voices and where are the debates on the Labor side about all of this?

There's something very interesting going on with the government.

This is a government where that kind of open dissent is almost completely abolished.

People don't take risks in these sorts of arguments with the government.

They are, I'm told, and I wrote, worried worried about the repercussions for themselves.

There's a lot of younger, junior people on that back bench.

And they're trying to make their way up the little greasy pole of the labor hierarchy.

And they've all got the memo that if you stick your head out, you will not make your way up.

Now, I wrote that, and it was interesting.

I got quite a few texts from caucus members saying that, yeah, I was onto something with that, with that, with that dissent-crushing.

One of them said to me, it's essentially just a cipher the way it's set up now.

So, yeah, interesting that we then do Nauru again.

In the midst of that.

Okay, this is my view on this.

I have a strong view on this.

We are only a couple months into the second term.

Anthony Albanese, through his strategy, just won a whopping majority, as we say.

And so I'm not terribly surprised that right now in the political cycle, there is some discipline.

If there still is this level of discipline and people haven't worked out some things to push on, and you're right, you know, you keep your government healthier and better by pushing at the edges on different issues, then I do think you need to do a, you know, we all need to do a sort of prayers for the Labor caucus and worry about their general ability to be an effective government.

I don't think we're there yet.

We're not on that point because the government's not under any real political pressure, like of any existential type political pressure.

But one of the narratives narratives is

this unity is required because when we didn't have it, we had Rudd, Gillard, Rudd, and we don't want to go back to that world.

There's a sort of sense that no one dare slide down

that hill to that terrible story.

They don't want to end up back on that, you know, that woeful trajectory.

But that forgets the history of caucus.

Caucus has always been a bit of a furnace.

It has tended to be very active in good governments, state and federal, for labor.

That's where ideas get tested.

That's where people have it out.

And that's where you find out who your next generation of talent is.

You see who's good at this.

You see who's good at mounting an argument.

And as I wrote on Saturday, tip for young players, that's how Anthony Albanese started.

Yeah, I think that is an excellent tip to end on.

Look, oh, been a bit of it, like we've been trying the world.

Yeah, but it's been a heavy podcast too, right?

Like

it's just one of those days, isn't it, where the topics are pretty grim yeah we should never forget though just on that sort of my last comment about multiculturalism which is a big big you know story of my own personal life and my own neighborhood you know we do largely in this country i mean i saw those scenes yesterday and they did disturb me and then i thought that is not that is not what my community looks like like

you know the

Asian woman down the road, the Muslim woman down the road, like we're all kind of, you know, making jokes about my annoying puppy or, you know, oh, God, could you get the kids into the car this morning to get into school?

Like most people are sort of just living their lives straight.

I think most people are they're not they're not interested in these fights.

They want to live in a community and they don't really care what people look like.

I still think that is true of Australians.

So do I.

By and large, overwhelmingly, I do believe that.

And I hope it's not because I'm quote unquote, you know, I live in a bubble, but I genuinely do think people...

people do get on when they get to know each other.

It's when they're looking at the other through an internet where they're not in front of you that it becomes seemingly possible to say terrible things about other groups of people or assert that they're destroying your society or

whatever the talking point is.

You do it through the internet.

It's not personal.

It's very different doing it to the person at your bakery or your hairdresser or wherever it is you live because humans aren't sort of wired that way.

And don't forget it, the people looking after your kids in the childcare centre, the people teaching your kids in the private school.

Looking after your parents, your aged parents.

In your aged care home, the people serving you, the people delivering your Uber Eats because the day was too long and you couldn't cook.

Hopefully, building my pavers.

Well, you know what?

That's the main reason

that you're continuing to be pro-immunched.

Everything is personal.

And look, you know, it's not all about food either.

That's it for politics now for today.

We'll be back tomorrow in your feed.

You can send your questions to me and Mel Clark at the party room at abc.net.au on Thursday.

See you, Jacob.

See you, FK.