Long may Liberal Jacinta Nampijinpa Price say the quiet bits out loud

Senator Jacinta Price’s blunt words have thrown the Liberal Party’s quiet racism strategy into chaos, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

HARD-RIGHT SENATOR Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is a problem for the Liberal Party. The problem is not that she thinks differently from her colleagues, but rather that she does not hide her party’s strategic appeals to racism better. That is, she says the Liberal-quiet bits out loud and her loose lips are liable to sink the Liberal ship.

The Liberal Party has a simple political strategy that aligns with other right-wing parties across the world, including the Trump MAGA movement. Since right-wing parties represent elite interests and not the interests of the masses, they have to come up with ways of building voting coalitions large enough for them to be elected.

The Liberal Party, MAGA Republicans, the UK Tories and to a greater extent, Reform UK share the same strategies to overcome this electoral problem. They blame genuine grievances about economic inequality on outgroups, including migrants and other marginalised groups.

No matter the spots, the Liberal leopard remains the same

Despite calls for reform, the Liberal Party’s core purpose – serving elite interests through fear and division – remains unchanged.

These outgroups are used as scapegoats to divert attention from the real causes of wealth inequality and all its ills, including housing scarcity and unaffordability — the elites that the right-wing parties exist to serve. In a nutshell, right-wing parties stoke racism and White supremacy to direct grievances at “people who don’t look like me”, and away from the billionaires who both cause the inequality at the heart of structural economic grievances, and who benefit from it. It’s a neat trick!

Trump’s MAGA movement used his promise to deport South American immigrants, a promise he has delivered on in spectacularly violent and authoritarian brutality, to underpin his electoral success. Reform UK’s overtly racist Nigel Farage leads in the polls by apparently convincing a majority of UK voters that structural economic and health system problems can be blamed on immigration.

The Liberal Party, however, faces a barrier when it comes to making this strategy work for it: Australia’s compulsory voting system.

Since all Australians vote, the electoral segment of voters willing to be overtly racist and openly anti-immigrant is watered down. A large part of this watering down is the votes of immigrants themselves — 31 per cent of the Australian population was born overseas. For this reason, overt racism is thankfully not a potent electoral strategy in Australia.

This is evident in the fact that Pauline Hanson’s openly racist One Nation Party has only four Senate seats. There is arguably only one lower-house seat held by an openly racist politician – Bob Katter – who revealed himself so in his violently aggressive response to a question about his own Lebanese cultural heritage and his embrace of the March for [White] Australia protest movement.

This electoral reality means that when the Liberal Party stokes racist-anti-immigrant sentiment, it has to do it quietly. Successive Liberal prime ministers have used the art of racist dog-whistling to imply that people’s grievances with wealth inequality are the fault of (non-White) immigrants, particularly asylum seekers.

Let’s not forget that in 2011, Norwegian mass-murder White-supremacist Anders Breivik praised John Howard in his manifesto, congratulating Howard for urging ‘Islamic migrants to adopt Australian values’.

Inside the Liberal Party: Where power is bought and policies sold

The Liberal Party claims to represent middle-class Australians, but fails even its own members. A dissident's political memoir of their time in the Liberal Party.

This political strategy, however, comes unstuck for the Liberal Party when their hard-right politicians use megaphones instead of dog whistles. A particularly disastrous example of this for the Liberal Party occurred last week when Jacinta Nampijinpa Price claimed on the ABC that the Labor Government deliberately inflates migration from India because Indian voters are more likely to vote Labor.

As soon as Price made these comments, the Liberal Party went into meltdown. Price was made to apologise. Although I note that back home on Sky News, Price is saying she has no reason to apologise and “stands by” her comments, which she bizarrely claims the ABC took out of context.

Recognising the electoral problem Price’s comments have caused, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley went into crisis communication mode, saying “our immigration program is long-standing, bipartisan, and non-discriminatory” and recording an apology video for the Indian community.

Yet, at the very same time that Ley was pulling the megaphone from Price’s hands, she was getting her Liberal dog-whistle out, arguing that Labor’s migration numbers were heaping pressure “on every corner of the country... on infrastructure, on housing and our way of life”.

This shows how the Liberal Party wants to have its cake and eat it too on its anti-immigration agenda, a strategy straight out of the Trump and Farage playbook, but one that it has to walk a fine line on lest the quiet bits are said out loud.

This talking-out-of-both-sides-of-their-mouths weasel-words racist dog-whistling reveals the true colours of the Liberal Party and its use of division and hate as an electoral strategy. It wants to subtly legitimise and benefit from anti-immigrant racism, without its racism being so overt that it creates backlash from immigrant communities.

It strikes me that Price must be a little confused about why she is suddenly a pariah in the Liberal Party for saying what they’re all thinking. She was held up as the Liberal, Advance and News Corp darling of the racist “colonisation was good for Aboriginal people” No campaign during the Voice Referendum, and now that brashness is a political liability.

I hope that Price refuses to be quiet and continues to hold up the megaphone for the Liberals’ overt-racist core. By exposing the truth of the Liberals’ anti-immigration agenda, long may the Liberal Party shed voters in Australia’s wonderful compulsory voting system, ensuring we don’t end up in the disaster of Trump America, or what looks to be a future racist-corrupt-incompetent Reform UK government.