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The Coalition faces critical lessons following a controversial period sparked by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s unfounded accusation that Labor is prioritizing Indian migrants to gain electoral advantage, experts suggest.
Price has been removed from the frontbench, and Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has issued an apology on behalf of the Liberal Party to “all Indian Australians and others affected by the remarks”.
Despite demands from Indian community leaders for a personal apology from Price, she has yet to do so. Nonetheless, she admitted her remarks were “clumsy” with no disrespect intended towards the Indian community.
Liberal Senator Jane Hume acknowledged mishandling by all parties involved, expressing hope that the Coalition could learn from an “entirely unedifying week”.
“The positive take is, we’ve addressed the issue,” she said on Seven’s Sunrise program Friday.
“We are going to move on now and talk about what’s important to ordinary Australians,” Hume said.
But what are the lessons the Coalition should take from this “unedifying” episode, and how should they better connect to “ordinary Australians”?
‘Acting like a bunch of babies’
Redbridge director of strategy and analytics Kos Samaras said the imbroglio showed the Coalition still hadn’t learned important lessons from the last two elections.
The former Labor Party strategist said that, while it’s true that Indian Australians do skew towards supporting Labor, the Coalition needed to take a far more constructive approach to dealing with its lack of popularity.
“With the Labor Party, when we were presented with stats about how Labor was struggling with particular constituencies, we did not reject them … we did not demonise the community that was attached to them. We tried to find out ways to fix that problem,” he said.
“Instead of behaving immaturely, they should approach their roles professionally and find solutions to improve the situation.”
Redbridge’s research showed two-party-preferred support for Labor among Indian Australians in the 2025 election was in the “mid-60s”, Samaras said recently.
Meanwhile, new polling from Roy Morgan suggests that, among Indian-born Australians, 45 per cent back the ALP, compared to 39 per cent support for the Coalition.
Around 48 per cent of Chinese-born Australians now support Labor, while only 34 per cent favour the Coalition, the recent Roy Morgan poll suggested.
‘They don’t like us’
While many Chinese and Indian Australians had socially conservative values that the Coalition should be able to appeal to, Samaras said, this opportunity had been squandered by a perceived antipathy towards these groups.
“When we interview Indian Australians in particular … they have socially conservative views on a whole range of issues. We say: ‘Well then, why aren’t you voting for the Liberal Party?’ Their answer is: ‘They don’t like us’.”
He said to avoid continuing electoral erosion, the Coalition needs to “embrace the reasons why diverse Australians come to this country in the first place”.
“The aim should be to establish families who thrive and enjoy a harmonious life. Understanding that this is the aspiration of most newcomers to Australia in search of a promising future,” he mentioned.
Successful political leaders in Australia understand that elections in Australia are won from the centre, Samaras said, warning that Price’s comments seemed to be imported “from an environment which is all about mobilising and energising your base”.
Importing United States-style culture war issues into a country with compulsory voting was bound to fail, Samaras said, “because you have to actually find out ways to connect with the disengaged, the undecided”.
Price’s implication that Labor favors migrant groups likely to support them politically is reminiscent of a claim often used by American conservatives against the Democratic Party.
‘A cautionary tale to get the house in order’
Continuing fracture in the Coalition will also be poorly received by voters, Zareh Ghazaria, a political scientist in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University, said.
“One of the things that we’ve seen in Australian politics is that once voters get a sense that a political party is divided over policy, over personnel, then they tend to turn away from that party,” he said.
Victoria, where the Coalition has been out of power for over 10 years, provided federal conservatives with “a cautionary tale to get the house in order”, he said.
“The Victorian Coalition has struggled with internal discord and debates over personnel and policies, leading voters to look elsewhere,” he observed.
While the Liberal Party has always had ideological divisions, Ghazaria said, “the trick has been for successful leaders to somehow accommodate both strands”.
“The current situation and the current tension between the more progressive and more conservative Liberals has really been amplified by the fact that it suffered such a heavy loss at the last election,” he said.
Following the Coalition’s disastrous 2025 federal election result, many Coalition figures pushed for a change of direction.
Veteran Senator Simon Birmingham, who is departing, emphasized the necessity for “reforming the party to resonate with contemporary Australian society” while openly criticizing “exclusive or divisive mindsets”.
Opposition immigration spokesperson Paul Scarr told The Guardian it was a “profound tragedy” that Chinese, Indian and other diaspora communities had turned away from the Liberal Party.
In a television interview this week, he again emphasised the importance of ensuring that debate about immigration “doesn’t become a debate about any particular part of the Australian community”.
“When we’re talking about these issues, we’re talking about failures of government policy.”
A ‘contest for what the party stands for’
Ghazarian also said if the Coalition wanted to have a debate about immigration, it should be “a debate that focuses on the government’s performance”.
“I think we’ve seen hints of it, where it’s been linked to economic prosperity and service delivery,” he said.
“That provides the Opposition with a platform to demand more from the government to increase investment in infrastructure, to demand investment in service delivery, to demand investment in schools, education, hospitals, and so on.
“That plays to the Liberal Party’s strengths, you’d think, in that it focuses on economic management.”
“I don’t think migration was a huge turning point for this election or the previous election. The election was very much focused on cost of living and economic policy,” he added.
The recent controversy showed the Liberal Party was still in the midst of a “real contest for what the party stands for,” Ghazarian added.
“Is the party wanting to potentially portray itself as being a broad party that can represent the interest of all sorts of views in the community, or is it going to seek to pursue much more narrower policy focus, which looks at things like immigration, things like cultural identity, and so on.”
Since demoting Price, Ley has said the Coalition would remodel its policy development processes to seek input from a wider range of voices.
She told The Australian that the Coalition’s policy development process would “evolve throughout the term in response to internal and external feedback, emerging issues, and ongoing engagement with the community”.
However, Samaras believes the Coalition won’t find it easy to shift towards a more centrist policy platform.
“I think the grip that right-wing echo chambers have on the Coalition’s membership is strong.
“And I think the Coalition’s membership is going to continuously animate their MPs and make it very difficult for the parliamentary wings to completely detach from a form of politics that clearly is not popular in this country.”
