Sussan Ley sacks Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from Liberal frontbench

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has sacked Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from the Coalition’s frontbench after a week of infighting engulfed the Liberal Party over the firebrand’s inflammatory comments about Indian migrants.

Ley asked Price to resign from the shadow ministry on Wednesday afternoon after the senator refused to back Ley and declined to apologise to the Indian community in a six-minute press conference, aggravating the dispute that has rocked the opposition for eight days.

“Despite being given sufficient time and space to do so, Senator Nampijinpa Price failed to apologise for remarks which have caused Australians of Indian heritage significant hurt,” Ley said in a statement on Wednesday night.

“She also refused to provide confidence in my leadership of the Liberal Party and sadly, that has made her position untenable in my shadow ministry. The Liberal Party I lead will respect, reflect and represent modern Australia.”

The past week has emerged as a test of Ley’s leadership and new direction for the Liberals after the election as Price’s claims made on the ABC – that Labor was bringing in Indian migrants to win votes – derailed her efforts to rebuild trust in multicultural communities.

While Price walked back her remarks, she did not say sorry. She then accused Ley’s key backer, Liberal MP Alex Hawke, of “cowardly and inappropriate” behaviour and suggested Ley was not standing up for women in the Liberal Party.

The saga upset many Indian Australians and infuriated colleagues. The allegations against Hawke deepened the fallout, while Price’s ongoing defiance undermined Ley’s leadership and led other MPs to question why it had been allowed to drag out so long.

After Price made her Wednesday comments, Liberal senator Dave Sharma said she ought to resign. “What are you doing in the shadow ministry if you don’t support the leader’s direction? I just don’t think the two positions are compatible,” he told Sky News.

In the press conference preceding her axing, Price conceded her comments to the ABC were “certainly clumsy” but that she would not be silenced on the issue of “mass migration”. She did not apologise despite repeated calls from her colleagues, but thanked her supporters.

Price then refused three times to say whether she backed Ley’s leadership – saying “those matters are for our party room” – in a provocative move that ultimately led to her sacking.

Ley said she called Price shortly afterwards. “My call to her was to advise her of the decision that I have made and to advise her that today, critically, she refused to express confidence in my leadership of Liberal Party,” the opposition leader said on Wednesday night.

“Confidence in the leader is a requirement for serving in the shadow ministry.”

Former prime minister Tony Abbott, a prominent supporter of Price, said she would be “a big loss to the frontbench but I’m confident that she will continue to make a strong contribution to our public life”.

Price vowed to keep speaking out from the backbench but accepted Ley’s request to quit the shadow ministry as the defence industry spokeswoman. “I have accepted the leader’s decision. And I reiterated my regret in not being clearer in my comments on the ABC last Wednesday,” she said in a statement.

“Nevertheless, I took the opportunity to express to the leader my disappointment that some colleagues disregarded the key point I was making about the damaging impacts of mass migration. And that some colleagues instead chose to indulge agenda-driven media commentary on this matter.”

“To reiterate comments from my earlier statement: I never intended to be disparaging towards our Indian community. And I wish no ill-will whatsoever to the Indian community – or any other migrant group.”

Pollster clarifies murky numbers used in migration debate

Price last week justified her claims about Indian migrants by pointing to unpublished figures from Kos Samaras, a former Labor strategist and commentator who runs the RedBridge polling company.

“A recent Redbridge poll told us that 85 per cent of those who have Indian ancestry … 85 per cent voted for Labor,” Price said last Thursday, as she clarified her earlier suggestion that Labor was bringing in Indian migrants to win votes. “So these were the facts that I was pointing out.”

But Samaras clarified those figures when asked by this masthead. He said a more appropriate characterisation of the Indian diaspora’s vote for Labor across Australia in the May election was in the “mid-60s” on a two-party preferred basis, according to his research.

“The vote is as high as 85 per cent in some places, but can be as low as in the 60s in others,” he said.

That refers to which major party receives a vote after preferences are distributed. The national two-party-preferred vote at the May election was 55 per cent to Labor.

Samaras first raised the 85 per cent figure on an X livestream hosted by controversial political activist Drew Pavlou, who frequently comments about immigration on his account. It had not been published in any report.

“Eighty-five per cent of the Indian diaspora voted for the Labor Party at the last election, or thereabouts. It varies across the country,” Samaras said. “In our polling, whenever we poll them, they’re about that, two-party preferred.”

The figure has since been quoted by far-right social media accounts and in posts by March for Australia, the group that organised last month’s anti-immigration rallies and targeted Indian Australians in their promotion flyers.

Hawke, earlier on Wednesday, had privately urged the Coalition’s shadow cabinet to challenge the polling Price had used to claim that Indian Australians overwhelmingly favoured Labor, and warned about the “ongoing public demonisation” of the community. He texted his senior colleagues on Wednesday morning with a Twitter link to that alternative data.

Veteran polling analyst Peter Brent on X described Samaras’ initial claim as “preposterous” and cited data from former YouGov pollster Shaun Ratcliff showing about 45 per cent of Australians with South Asian heritage gave their first preference vote to Labor at the last election, and 34 per cent to the Coalition.

Another data set from the Australian Election Study shows that, between 1987 and 2022, 45.7 per cent of the Indian diaspora voted Liberal and 42.4 per cent voted Labor.

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