The New South Wales premier and the Australian Human Rights Commission have criticised comments by the man who heads One Nation’s upper house ticket in NSW after he said Australians faced demographic replacement unless “mass migration” was curtailed.
Chris Minns described Stuart Bonds’ comments as “frankly outrageous and racist”.
Minns said the replacement theory being espoused by Bonds was “just a conspiracy theory that’s been imported from the US here to Australia”.
Bonds will be the first candidate on the rightwing party’s NSW upper house ticket and on current polling is likely to be elected in March’s state election.
He made the incendiary remarks at an anti-immigration rally in Sydney’s CBD on Sunday. Several hundred people attended amid a sea of Australian flags.
At least one neo-Nazi, Joel Davis, was spotted among them, as well as rightwing figures including the national director of the Family First party, Lyle Shelton, who was previously head of the Australian Christian Lobby.
“Make no mistake, we are being demographically replaced inside our own nation,” Bonds told attendees after referring to abortion rates in Europe, the US and Australia.
“If we don’t support Australian mothers having Australian children, we are going to pay for other cultures’ children to be brought up in our lands.”
He warned that unless it was stopped it would be “impossible to reverse”.
Bonds told the crowd that a country was “a shared culture, a shared border, a shared flag, a shared language and a dominant religion”.
“After ۲۴۰ years, we are told we’re still on stolen land, and we’re meant to apologise for being here,” he said.
“Yet, in the same vein, we’re expected to believe that an immigrant arriving yesterday is as Australian as you and me. I don’t accept that people like the Bondi shooters are as Australian as you and me. I don’t accept that.”
The race discrimination commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman, said comments that some Australians were superior to others sowed “division and hate”.
“The idea that migrants can never truly be Australian ignores both our history and our shared future,” he said on Monday.
“Australia has always been shaped by successive generations of people who came here from around the world and helped build the nation we know today. It has the longest continuous culture in the world.
“Throughout history, periods of uncertainty have often seen minority communities cast as scapegoats. Today, migrants are too frequently portrayed as the cause of Australia’s challenges.
“Reducing complex problems to a simple narrative that migrants are to blame is not only inaccurate, it risks fuelling division, exclusion and racism. Migrants are not separate from the Australian story. They are central to it.”
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Bonds told the rally that the “socialist plan” was to “destroy and bring down and tear down the fabric of your civilisation” pointing to European countries “on fire”.
He said Australia was going down a path “of becoming a special economic zone within Asia,” and that it needed to “re-establish ourselves as a proud Australian nation”.
Minns said voters should ask themselves which portfolio Bonds would have were One Nation to win the election.
“Trade, education, Treasury? I mean, what job will this bloke have in a Coalition-One Nation government?” Minns said.
“And are we going to see some distancing from those kind of views and those horrific perspectives or points of view from the Coalition?”
Comment was sought from the Coalition’s spokesperson on multiculturalism, Mark Coure, and from One Nation’s NSW headquarters.
Bonds’ comments were also reverberating in Canberra.
The federal minister for multicultural affairs, Anne Aly, said Australians with migrant backgrounds were not replacing Australians – they simply were Australians.
“Questioning someone’s right to belong because of their race or ancestry is not a debate about immigration,” she said.
“It’s divisive, dangerous and goes against everything we stand for as Australians.”
– Additional reporting by Australian Associated Press
