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Key Points
- Ministers from both major parties have criticised March for Australia rallies.
- Multicultural Affairs Minister Anne Aly said a small “nefarious” group can use such events to spread misinformation.
- More sensible debate is needed on immigration to build public trust, one senator said.
Groups of Neo-Nazis were present in some of the rallies — including addressing crowds in Melbourne, leading a march in Sydney and handing out flyers in Adelaide.
Emotion driven, not facts: minister
Aly added that immigrants can often be unfairly blamed for infrastructure and housing shortages.
“I think that when we conflate immigration with all of these other issues, then we feed into the very agenda of the far-right organisations that were part of these marches.”
Nazis addressing crowds ‘concerning’
Scarr said a “sustainable” level of immigration is needed in Australia.
Liz Allen, a demographer at the Australian National University Centre for Social Policy Research, described myths that migrants suppressed wages, stole local jobs or inflated house prices as “nonsense”.
Need for ‘sensible’ debate on immigration
“One of my frustrations has been that there is a real lack of appetite from the parliament to actually have a debate about this in a sensible way, and then come up with a plan when it comes to migration and population that actually wards off some of the, I guess, feelings of ‘well, there is no plan’,” he told ABC News Breakfast on Monday.
“When you have your full face covering, if it is not for artistic and safety purposes, we have to ask why you’re allowed to do that. You can’t go into a bank with a motorcycle helmet on. So it is the double standards that are really starting to grind the gears of normal Australians out there.”
Senator Jacqui Lambie labelled some protesters as “embarrassing the country”. Source: AAP / Mick Tsikas
Lambie also took aim at people who attended the rallies, labelling some protesters as “embarrassing the country”.
