Ley posts videos in attempt to clean up mess after Price comments about Indian community

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has moved to repair relations with Indian Australians after Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price suggested the government was favouring the community for immigration because they tended to vote Labor.

Ley on Friday sent video messages to the Indian diaspora and has also been distributing videos on Chinese social platform WeChat months after senator Jane Hume caused controversy by mentioning “Chinese spies” just before election day.

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

Ley, whose office pushed Price into reversing her statement shortly after she made it on Wednesday, will ramp up her engagement with multicultural groups next week after a parliamentary sitting period dominated by a debate over attitudes towards migration.

In a WeChat video, Ley said: “Our Australian-Chinese communities contribute enormously to our economy, education, culture, and society.”

Price’s decision to specifically mention Indian migrants, who protesters targeted at anti-immigration rallies last weekend, complicated Ley’s post-election promise to rebuild the Coalition’s reputation in multicultural communities that have turned against the opposition.

“As we have seen, you yourself mentioned, that there is a concern with the Indian community, and only because there’s been large numbers, and we can see that reflected in the way the community votes for Labor at the same time,” Price said after ABC host Patricia Karvelas asked a question about Indian migrants earlier in the interview.

After Ley’s office pushed Price to backtrack, the Coalition’s defence industry spokeswoman issued a statement that said: “Australia maintains a longstanding and bipartisan non-discriminatory migration policy. Suggestions otherwise are a mistake.”

Ley said on Thursday that Price had “corrected her comments” after the opposition leader faced a barrage of questions about the firebrand senator.

But Price later that day said, “I don’t believe I have anything to apologise about” and said the ABC had pushed the issue.

Liberal senator Dave Sharma, who has Indian heritage, said he “fundamentally rejected stereotyping of any migrant community”, while Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Australia did not have a race-based migration system, “nor should it”.

The Coalition is attempting to build better ties with migrant communities at the same time as representing conservative voters, including some with non-Australian backgrounds, who have developed concerns about the post-COVID spike in migration, inflation and house prices.

Keith Wolahan, a former Liberal MP who lost the suburban seat of Menzies at the last election, has partly attributed his loss in the electorate that includes a large Chinese-Australian population to the Coalition’s rhetoric on relations with China.

“I worked particularly hard with those communities,” he said on a John Curtin Research Centre podcast last month, “but we have managed to … find new ways to offend them.”

Wolahan, one of many city-based Liberals to lose their seats in recent elections, noted that before the 2019 election, the Coalition held 12 of the 20 seats with the highest proportion of people with Chinese ancestry. This figure dropped to two in 2025.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.