NSW premier responds to NSW One Nation candidate’s claim about Australians

The New South Wales premier Chris Minns and the Australian Human Rights Commission have criticised comments by Stuart Bonds who heads One Nation’s upper house ticket in NSW, after Bonds said Australians faced demographic replacement unless “mass migration” was curtailed.

Bonds will be the first candidate on the rightwing party’s NSW upper house ticket and on current polling is likely to be elected in March’s state election. He made incendiary remarks at an anti-immigration rally in Sydney’s CBD on Sunday, claiming that Australians are being ‘demographically replaced’ by migrants.

Bonds claimed that the “socialist plan” was to “destroy and bring down and tear down the fabric of your civilisation” pointing to European countries “on fire”, making Australia go down a path “of becoming a special economic zone within Asia,” and that it needed to “re-establish ourselves as a proud Australian nation”.

Minns criticised Bonds’ comments as ‘outrageous and racist’. The race discrimination commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman, said comments that some Australians were superior to others sowed “division and hate”, especially when Australia has always been shaped by successive generations of people who came from around the world, as well as having the longest continuous culture.