A fresh wave of anti-immigrant protests across Australia has taken an unsettling turn, with South Asian communities, particularly Indians, being targeted through racist rhetoric, misinformation, and violent attacks.
From Melbourne to Sydney, far-right demonstrators have framed migrants as scapegoats for the country’s housing crisis, invoking slogans steeped in xenophobia and white nationalism.
Yet these claims collapse under scrutiny: migration, while contributing modestly to housing demand, is far from the root cause of Australia’s spiralling affordability crisis.
More disturbingly, this rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the country’s own colonial legacy, one in which settlers from Europe displaced indigenous people and claimed Australia as their own.
Today’s anti-migrant backlash is not just a social flashpoint, but a revealing reflection of unresolved tensions between Australia’s multicultural present and its colonial past.
Here’s a closer look at what’s unfolding, what’s fueling the rhetoric, and what the evidence really says.
Rallies targeting Indian diaspora
While framed as a protest against government immigration policy and rising living costs, the events were heavily influenced by far-right groups and featured overtly racist messaging — particularly targeting South Asian migrants.
The March for Australia protests in late August notably featured racist messaging targeting South Asian migrants.
It was organised under the banner of protecting Australian values and “taking back the country” and framed as a protest against government immigration policy and rising living costs.
But in cities like Melbourne and Sydney, the marches were marked by white nationalist slogans, neo-Nazi salutes, and violent incidents, including assaults on Indian Australians and attacks on indigenous protest sites.
People in Melbourne and Sydney reported physical assaults on individuals of Indian heritage, violent attacks on train platforms and threatening online abuse.
In Melbourne, neo-Nazis attacked Camp Sovereignty, an Indigenous people’s protest site, injuring women and invoking slogans like “white power” and “white man’s land”, reported The Guardian.
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Protesters blame immigration for housing crisis
Protesters have seized on migration figures, or inflated border arrival numbers, to claim Australia is suffering under “record-high” immigration despite net overseas migration actually falling by 37 percent from a 2022–23 peak of 538,000 to 341,000 by December 2024, as per federal government figures cited in The Guardian.