“We will always be attentive to your interests and attentive to the Indian Australian community, and we want to be thankful for the contribution they made to Australia.”

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Ley said she was “fighting for every single Australian, no matter where you came from”.

“And our Australian Indian community is amazing, you contribute as Australian Indians so much to our country,” she said.

“We know how hard you work, your family values, and the contribution you make across this country. And as opposition leader, I value that incredibly.”

Liberal frontbencher Julian Leeser, who is the chair of the Parliamentary Friends of India and has a large Indian community in his northern Sydney electorate of Berowra, did not directly criticise Price.

He told ABC Radio National that Indian Australians were a “wonderful community” involved widely in civic endeavours in his electorate and had fought for their country.

But as Liberals sought to mitigate the fallout, Labor launched a political attack on the opposition.

“All week, we’ve seen Coalition senators falling over themselves to get into the media and blame migrants for housing shortages the Coalition oversaw,” Environment Minister Murray Watt said during question time in the Senate. “And of course, it led to yesterday’s interview on the ABC by Senator Nampijinpa Price – someone the Liberals were so desperate to poach from the Nationals – who made a terrible smear on the Indian Australian community.

“That community makes a huge contribution to our country, and it’s one that our side of parliament is incredibly proud of. Senator Nampijinpa Price and the leader of the opposition should apologise for these offensive remarks.”

Multicultural Affairs Minister Anne Aly also addressed the Indian diaspora in question time. “They’ve told me that they did not feel safe and they did not feel secure after the rallies that we saw on Sunday. And they’ve also told me that comments by some political leaders have exacerbated their fear and shattered their sense of security,” Aly said.

“I want to say to Indian Australians, this is our message. You do not have to justify your belonging in this country. We know you. We value you.”

Price blames ABC questioning for remarks

Price’s comments came after Indian Australians described being afraid to travel into cities because last weekend’s rallies singled out high levels of immigration from India in their promotional material. One man described being pointed at while someone shouted, “deport, deport, deport”.

The senator said she only wanted to talk about Labor’s “mass migration agenda” when she appeared on the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing on Wednesday.

“Then I was further pursued on this line of talking,” she said.

“What I did was point out the fact that, yes, Indian migrants are the second-largest migrant group to this country, and soon to be the largest migrant group to this country. A recent Redbridge poll told us that 85 per cent of those who have Indian ancestry – and that’s my children included by the way – 85 per cent voted for Labor … So, these were the facts that I was pointing out.”

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Sharma on Thursday said, “that is not how we see it”.

“I am not attracted to this idea that we should be parcelling people up according to how we think they vote on, what their political sympathies are. That is a recipe for social division and the opposite of social cohesion,” he said.

A transcript of Price’s ABC interview shows she first raised the false claim about the government preferencing certain migrant groups after she was asked whether she thought Australians marching about immigration were concerned about the number or type of migrants.

“It is definitely the core number. And of course there is focus from this government to be getting them from particular countries over others,” Price responded.

She was then asked twice to clarify whether that meant Labor was actively running a migration program to bring in people open to the government’s ideas. Price said: “absolutely”.

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Host Patricia Karvelas then asked twice who, in particular, Price was referring to.

The first time, Price said: “Those that are more Labor leaning”. The second time she said: “As we have seen, you yourself mentioned, that there is a concern with the Indian community.”

“There’s been large numbers, and we can see that reflected in the way the community votes for Labor at the same time,” she said.

Karvelas, earlier in the segment, had cited strong anti-Indian sentiment at the weekend’s marches.

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