Jacinta Nampijinpa Price saga highlights Coalition’s challenge in diverse communities

There is open despair inside the Liberal party about how to rebuild its standing in multicultural communities after its new colleague in the party room Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s inflammatory comments about Indian migrants put the brakes on that already monumental task.

But the party’s fear goes beyond those comments alone. One Liberal MP told this column that some wanted the party to emulate One Nation and that strategy would further drive them “off the cliff”.

The car is already hanging off on two wheels, and the final push is coming if the immigration debate continues to go off the rails.

Demography is destiny

The fear some have expressed privately is that the latest saga is baking in a view that the Liberals have a fundamental problem with multicultural Australia and that there is no future for the party without cultivating these diaspora communities.

Demography is destiny, and the Labor Party has already begun weaponising the saga to paint the Liberals as hostile to the Indian community.

Liberal Senator Dave Sharma, who has Indian heritage himself, has said he regrets the hurt caused by colleague Price’s inflammatory comments about Indian migrants, insisting they did not reflect the view of the Liberal Party.

He was not the only one, either. Liberals were desperate to distance themselves from this view, trying to send out the message that they had changed, and they denounced this language that demonises communities.

Coalition MPs were in damage control after Price said on Wednesday last week that the federal government was bringing in migrants “from particular countries over others” to win votes, naming the “Indian community” as an example.

On Sunday, Price disputed Sky News Australia’s reporting of the fallout over her comments within the party, claiming the manager of opposition business Alex Hawke rang her office on Thursday to “berate” one of her staff members before the pair spoke that evening.

“If people want to talk about a so-called ‘woman problem’ in the Liberal Party, then it’s this: we don’t stand up for women when they are mistreated by our own colleagues,” Price said.

“Of course, I regret not being clearer in my comments on the ABC last Wednesday.

“I know that many Australians of Indian ancestry — and Indian migrants living in Australia — are distressed.”

Price then claimed journalists had “wrenched” her comments from context and said her concern was not migration itself but “the magnitude of migration”.

Hawke on Sunday released his own statement that said he had spoken with Price and “accepted her explanation of how her comments have been misinterpreted and subsequently weaponised by Labor”.

Concerns among Liberals

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley on Friday and over the weekend sent video messages to the Indian diaspora and has also been distributing videos on the Chinese social platform WeChat after Victorian senator Jane Hume stirred controversy by mentioning “Chinese spies” just before election day.

“You contribute as Australian Indians so much to our country,” Ley said in a video.

“We know how hard you work, your family values, and the contribution you make across this country, and as opposition leader, I value that incredibly.”

Liberals are still nervous about the Chinese vote — and there are risks that their criticism about the participation of former Victorian premier Dan Andrews, being caught up in attending China’s enormous military parade in Beijing on Wednesday, may backfire and create the impression that they are excessively anti-China.

Andrews’s presence in the “family photo” with the world’s dictators worried many people in Labor and was the central complaint, but politics is about perceptions.

Labor wasn’t prosecuting the criticism the way the Liberals were — and the pushing of this argument carries risks in how it’s perceived in the Chinese community, even if it was targeted at Andrews himself.

That’s not to suggest that Andrews himself doesn’t deserve rebuke, but there is always a fine line that must be politically walked.

But the private reaction of Liberals to Price’s comments about Indian migrants has opened a new concern for many that the party is now being perceived more widely as anti-immigration across several marginalised migrant groups.

The Liberals have argued that their issue isn’t with race — that they continue to support a colourblind, non-discriminatory migration program. They say the issue is with the core numbers coming in and the impact it has on infrastructure.