Race discrimination commissioner accuses One Nation and Coalition of scapegoating immigrants

One Nation and the federal opposition are “dehumanising” and “scapegoating” immigrants while drawing on a “deep vein of racism”, Australia’s federal race discrimination commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman says as part of a panel discussion at a Brisbane seminar on human rights, hosted by the state’s human rights commission.

Sivaraman said the country was facing “a very pronounced political fault line”. “On one side of that fault line you have two parties, a populist party and now the federal opposition, who are dehumanising, scapegoating migrants,” he said on Wednesday. Together, they encouraged people to blame migrants for everything from the housing crisis and traffic to the cost of milk, which is implicitly racist, because the only signal as to whether someone is a migrant usually is the colour of their skin, or their name, or their accent, and it draws on this deep vein of racism that’s always existed from the time of colonisation.

Sivaraman’s call-out is a response to Opposition Leader Angus Taylor announcing a new policy on immigration last month, while claiming “many” migrants would be a “net drain” on Australia and announced that his approach would be to “discriminate based on values”. Sivaraman also said that over the next two years, he expected an escalation in “the racism that accompanies” blaming immigrants, posing a “significant issue” for his work.