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Senior Liberal Alex Hawke has privately urged the Coalition’s shadow cabinet to challenge the polling Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price used to claim that Indian Australians overwhelmingly favoured Labor, and warned about the “ongoing public demonisation” of the community.
Hawke, who is a key backer of Liberal leader Sussan Ley, texted his colleagues on Wednesday morning with links to alternative data after Price last week justified her claims about Indian migrants by pointing to figures from Kos Samaras, a former Labor strategist and commentator who runs the RedBridge polling company.
Senior Liberal Alex Hawke has told his colleague not to rely on the statistics about Indian Australians’ voting patterns quoted by Senator Jacinta Price.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“A recent Redbridge poll told us that 85 per cent of those who have Indian ancestry… 85 per cent voted for Labor,” Price said last Thursday, as she clarified her earlier suggestion that Labor was bringing in Indian migrants to win votes. “So, these were the facts that I was pointing out.”
Samaras has been forced to clarify those figures. He told this masthead a more appropriate characterisation of the Indian diaspora’s vote for Labor across Australia in the May election was in the “mid-60s” on a two-party preferred basis, according to his research.
Samaras first raised the 85 per cent figure on an X livestream hosted by controversial political activist Drew Pavlou, who frequently comments about immigration on his account. It had not been published in any report.
“Eighty-five per cent of the Indian diaspora voted for the Labor Party at the last election, or thereabouts. It varies across the country,” Samaras said. “In our polling, whenever we poll them, they’re about that, two-party preferred.”
The figure has since been quoted by far-right social media accounts and in posts by March for Australia, the group that organised this month’s anti-immigration rallies and targeted Indian Australians in their promotion flyers.
Asked to clarify those figures on Wednesday, Samaras said: “The vote is as high as 85 per cent in some places but can be as low as in the 60s in others.”
He did not give specific examples, but said RedBridge would soon publish a report on its election findings. Samaras said the data was based on interviewing people from a range of communities, tracking them over a period of time, and combining the information with polling booth results.
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Samaras said the more accurate reading of his findings from the most recent election was an Indian diaspora vote for Labor in the mid-60s, on a two party-preferred basis. That refers to which major party receives a vote after preferences are distributed.
Veteran polling analyst Peter Brent on X described Samaras’ initial claim as “preposterous” and “bullshit”. He cited data from former YouGov pollster Shaun Ratcliff, who collaborates with Samaras, showing about 45 per cent of Australians with South Asian heritage gave their first preference vote to Labor at the last election, and 34 per cent to the Coalition.
Another data set from the Australian Election Study shows that, between 1987 and 2022, 45.7 per cent of the Indian diaspora voted Liberal and 42.4 per cent voted Labor.
Hawke, who is Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s key factional ally and the manager of opposition business, texted his senior colleagues on Wednesday morning with a Twitter link to that alternative data.
“Team, given the ongoing public demonisation of the Australian Indian community - from many now based on this one 85 per cent figure from a Labor aligned pollster - there is plenty of information available to demonstrate this successful Migrant community is like any other that have come here: open to both major parties,” he wrote.
“This is more in line with reality. Worth continuing to stick up for all our supporters from Indian Sub Continent and South Asian communities nationally there are hundreds of thousands/ millions of them.”
About 10 per cent of voters in Hawke’s north-west Sydney electorate of Mitchell have an Indian background. The Liberal MP suffered a 6.7 per cent swing at the May election, making his seat marginal. Hawke’s office declined to comment.
The Coalition has been in damage control with the Indian community since last Wednesday, when Price first told the ABC that the government was bringing in Indian migrants to bolster its vote.
While Price quickly backtracked on her remarks, her refusal to apologise has upset Indian Australians, infuriated many Liberal colleagues and put pressure on Ley’s leadership.
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Price’s public allegations of “cowardly and inappropriate conduct” against Liberal MP Alex Hawke, who has denied speaking angrily when he asked her to apologise in a private conversation last week, fuelled the fallout.
Shadow attorney-general Julian Leeser and the NSW Liberals and Nationals have since apologised to Indian Australians on Price’s behalf.
Senator Jane Hume, who fell out with Ley after being dumped from shadow cabinet, claimed the Price saga had been “so poorly handled, it’s now blown out of control”.
She told Sky News that Ley or her office, not Hawke, should have spoken to Price: “I think that the leader’s office would probably now acknowledge that if the leader wanted an outcome she probably should have picked up the phone herself rather than sending a henchman.”
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