In a Facebook video from a Sydney anti-immigration rally on Sunday, as a man dressed like a medieval knight watches on, One Nation leader upper house candidate Stuart Bonds launches into a speech against “mass” migration.
“Make no mistake, we are being demographically replaced inside our own nation,” he says.
“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.”
In an apparent allusion to the “great replacement theory”, a far-right conspiracy theory that white westerners are being actively “replaced” by non-white immigrants, he continued: “That’s the socialist plan, is to destroy and bring down and tear down the fabric of your civilisation.”
The comments sparked a wave of criticism, but the party has shown no signs of taking Bonds off the ticket for the ۲۰۲۷ New South Wales state election. One Nation did, however, dump one candidate this week: the Victorian branch disendorsed a lower-house candidate over an old social media post describing Hitler as the GOAT, an acronym for the greatest of all time.
The rally was not a one-off. On a podcast released on Monday with the rally’s organiser, the Australian Lobby Group, Bonds appeared to double down on the remarks. He did not challenge host Scott Challen’s assertion that Labor governments were building “ethnic voting blocks with Middle Eastern and subcontinent people … to stack the numbers to entrench power for themselves”, instead responding: “Mate, and that’s why we’re going to get rid of all of the multicultural grants, right?”
On Wednesday, in an interview with ABC Upper Hunter, Bonds responded to questions about his comments by citing Australian Bureau of Statistics data that shows the proportion of Australians born overseas has trended upward since the end of the second world war, from ۱۰% in ۱۹۴۵ to ۳۲% in ۲۰۲۵. He did not mention that the proportion of Australians born overseas was at its highest – ۳۲.۴% – in ۱۸۹۱, the first year of available data.
Bonds said with the Australian birthrate beneath the ۲.۱ required to replace the population, “I would just like to know what people assume is going to happen.”
“Where are these people going to come from?” he said.
NSW Labor pounced on the rally comments immediately, with the state’s premier, Chris Minns, calling them “frankly outrageous and racist”. The government passed motions in both houses censuring Bonds, not yet a member.
The Coalition followed four days later. On Wednesday afternoon, the opposition leader, Kellie Sloane, said Bonds’ language was “clearly divisive”.
But she did not rule out a confidence and supply arrangement with One Nation after the March state election.
“We will not form a coalition with One Nation, [but] we’ll work with anyone post-election if we’re in a minority government,” she told reporters.
The Australian Financial Review has reported many of her MPs privately expect the party to go into a Coalition with One Nation. And with the Coalition consistently polling behind One Nation, that makes Bonds not a fringe candidate, but a potentially influential figure.
One Nation could ‘clean the deck’ in regions
The ABC’s former election analyst, Antony Green, said the remarks played straight into Labor’s hands.
“This will certainly be something the Labor party uses in all those multi-ethnic seats in Sydney,” he said – seats like those on the rural fringes of Sydney, which One Nation said it plans to target.
Indeed the deputy premier, Prue Car, who has Indian heritage and whose electorate of Londonderry is one of the seats in question, gave an impassioned critique of Bonds’ comments in question time on Tuesday.
“Who’s he [Bonds] talking about when he talks about this?” she said. “I tell you who he’s talking about – he’s talking about families like mine, and families that I represent.”
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Kos Samaras, a former Labor strategist who is now a director of polling group Redbridge, said that while the comments likely won’t play well in Sydney seats – including alienating moderate Liberal voters worried about the party going into Coalition with One Nation – “you might be able to get away with it in certain parts of NSW”.
And Bonds, a former coalminer, has made his base in the Hunter.
Samaras said One Nation could “clean the deck” in the regions, including Labor-held seats in the Hunter, and “pretty much anything else the coalition hasn’t got bolted down to the ground”.
The NSW One Nation leader, Mike Newman, who in September said he “made a mistake” when he told a Sydney rally he wanted to stop abortions, did not respond directly when asked if he agreed with Bonds’ comments or if he would rein in his first-placed upper house candidate.
“What I will say is that what Stuart Bonds is a patriotic Aussie. He’s a coalminer. He has very, very strong views,” he said on Tuesday.
Newman, who previously rejected claims that One Nation was racist, said on Tuesday: “What we want to do is … protect Australian values, and that is the fundamental thing that Stuart Bonds is pushing for. It’s about assimilation.”
The NSW treasurer, Daniel Mookhey, whose parents immigrated to Australia from India in the ۱۹۷۰s, told the ABC that Bonds’ comments were not grounded in reality.
“I think he’s saying that there is a deliberate conspiracy to use migrants to replace the way he puts it, native-born Australians for political reasons,” Mookhey said.
The quota for election to the upper house is ۴.۵%, making Bonds all but guaranteed to be elected, with One Nation polling in the high ۲۰s and low ۳۰s in recent months.
Green expects the party to pick up four or five seats in the upper house; so far it has only named three candidates: Newman, Bonds and Jeff Bacon, a firearms manufacturer who is second on the upper house ticket.
But unlike Victoria, NSW has optional preferential voting, which means when that state goes to the polls in March, lower house preferences flows aren’t guaranteed.
But Bonds has downplayed whether he may have jeopardised a future preference deal with the Coalition.
“If the Coalition have a problem with facts, the same as the Labor party, then maybe it will,” he told the ABC.
“But I’m not here to impress the Coalition.”
