The Coalition’s path back to government runs through roughly 25 seats. The overwhelming majority of them sit in greater Sydney and greater Melbourne where the combined Indian and Chinese population is already large and still growing fast. These diaspora hear the Coalition talk about out-of-control migration and vote accordingly. 

The Coalition’s natural voter just became Australia’s largest diaspora. It doesn’t vote for them. Picture a Saturday morning in Wyndham Vale. Or Schofields. Or Glen Waverley. The father is a GP or a civil engineer working on a rail project or a senior nurse running a ward. His wife is a pharmacist or runs the family business on the side, a chemist, an IT contracting outfit, a small NDIS provider, a 7-Eleven manager. Two kids in private school uniforms are climbing into the back of the SUV for Saturday tutoring. The mortgage on the four-bedroom house is heavy but manageable. Private health insurance is non-negotiable, not a lifestyle choice. The grandparents live in a granny flat out the back or a self-contained level downstairs. Sundays might mean temple or gurdwara. Politics, when it comes up at the dinner table, runs to the right of the suburb’s average, expressing concerns about crime, social order, whether the school is teaching the right things.

If you described this household to a Liberal Party strategist in 1995, they would have told you you were describing the median Coalition voter: aspirational, small-business minded, family first, educationally ambitious. socially conservative, privately insured, home-owning. at the heart of Howard’s battlers, give or take a postcode.

This week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) confirmed that this household is now the largest overseas-born demographic in the country. As of June 2025, for the first time in our history there are 971,020 people in........

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