The prime minister says the country must be “vigilant” against politicians seeking to return to a bygone era of Australia that was less accepting of migrants, following the South Australian election in which One Nation overtook the Liberal Party on a platform that included opposing migration and multiculturalism.
With just over half of the vote counted, One Nation has received about 22 per cent of the vote in SA, with the Liberals trailing behind at 19 per cent — an enormous 16.9 per cent swing against the party, almost entirely to the benefit of One Nation.
One Nation’s federal party proposes deporting about 75,000 migrants currently residing in Australia on overstayed visas, capping visas to 130,000 a year, and banning migration from countries “known to foster extremist ideologies”.
The party also opposes multiculturalism.
Barnaby Joyce, who defected to One Nation last year, told Sky News this morning that if people were upset by the party’s demand for assimilation, “then be upset”.
“When you get cultural Balkanisation, you get friction, you get heat, you get death,” Mr Joyce said.
“We took a long while to get over the Catholic-Protestant thing, and we don’t want to go back there again.
“There has got to be a form of assimilation … you have to conform with an Australian culture no matter where you come from.”
Barnaby Joyce says One Nation is opposed to multiculturalism, and migrants should conform to Australian culture. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)
Labor mounts defence of multiculturalism
One Nation has maintained an anti-immigration stance since its inception in the 1990s, but the party has rarely received more than a fraction of the federal vote.
One Nation’s undercard fight had one key target
Mr Joyce said the party’s result at the SA election confirmed months of polling showing One Nation was no longer on the fringe of politics.
At his victory speech on Saturday night, returned Premier Peter Malinauskas reflected on a conversation he’d had with a Vietnamese man at a polling booth that morning, who had expressed pride in being able to vote.
Mr Malinauskas then read a poem about patriotism written by Henry Lawson not long after federation at the turn of the 20th century.
“It is the duty of Australians in the bush and in the town to forever praise their country, but to run no other down,” Mr Malinauskas read aloud.
“It is our duty when he is foreign and his English very young to find out and take him somewhere where he will hear his native tongue.”
Peter Malinauskas says Australians have a duty to migrants. (ABC News: Dean Faulkner)
The premier said Australians should be proud of Australia’s “distinct” patriotism, which “sometimes means sitting with a stranger and having a cuppa or a frothy, and having an argument about the footy, not our faith”.
This morning, speaking at an event recognising Vietnamese Australians, Mr Albanese mounted a defence of multiculturalism, saying Australia at its best was a beacon to the world of how a nation could be enriched by people of different faiths and backgrounds coming together.
Mr Albanese noted that it was only just before the wave of Vietnamese refugees arrived in Australia in the late 1970s that the former Whitlam government officially ended the longstanding White Australia policy, which restricted non-European immigration to Australia.
“We need to be vigilant. There are some, including some in political life [who] want to turn back the clock to an Australia that is no longer who we are, and we need to call out those people, and we need to continue to cherish our diversity as a strength for our nation, which it is,” Mr Albanese said.
“The fact that people have come from all over the world … people who are now our doctors, our nurses, our teachers, our academics, our construction workers, our people who have made such an incredible contribution to Australia. We should not take it for granted.”
The ongoing war in Gaza has fuelled social tensions in Australia, and on Friday the prime minister was heckled while attending Eid prayers at a mosque in Lakemba, in western Sydney over the government’s stance on the conflict.
Anthony Albanese was heckled when he attended Lakemba Mosque on Friday. (ABC News)
Those social tensions have fed the debate on immigration to Australia, particularly after the antisemitic terror attack at Bondi Beach last year.
Liberal South Australian senator Alex Antic said One Nation’s result at the state election was a reaction from voters who were never asked whether they supported “mass migration”.
“This is the reality of the Australia we have created. It is a very, very different place … we now are seeing an Australia which is divided on a range of grounds, some of them religious, some of them demographics of economics,” Senator Antic told Sky News.
“I don’t think Australians ever asked for what they saw in the footage [at the Lakemba mosque].”
Push to cut migration
Net overseas migration has fallen from its peak of 755,000 over the year to September 2023, after borders reopened post-pandemic, to about 306,000 last financial year.
But while the migration rate has fallen close to pre-COVID levels, the issue remains a priority for voters, the majority of whom, according to Lowy Institute polling, say remains too high.
On Friday, Shadow Immigration Minister Jonno Duniam said while the migration rate had returned to its long-term average, Australia needed time for infrastructure and services to catch up.
“It’d be fine to bring those people in if you had put in place the houses, the hospital beds, the schooling places, the roads and rail needed for them to get about efficiently, all of that would be fine. But the reality is we haven’t,” Senator Duniam told 2GB.
“We’ve got to catch up with what people in this country need in order to preserve the way of life we have.”
Australia however also faces a shortage of workers in critical fields, including health care and housing construction, and is reliant on migration to fill those gaps.
The Coalition campaigned at the 2025 federal election with a promise to slash migration to ease pressure on housing, and suffered the worst defeat in its history at that election.