With apologies to Rudyard Kipling: If, as a neo-Nazi, you attend an anti-immigration rally, which you insist provides an opportunity to show common cause with middle Australians who hold valid concerns about the level of overseas migration, and then you follow it up with a violent attack on a peaceful gathering of Aboriginal people, who are about as far removed from the title of “immigrant” as it’s possible to be, then you are saying the quiet part out loud.

Uncle Robbie Thorpe speaks with police at Camp Sovereignty on Monday after Sunday’s attack by neo-Nazis.Credit: Justin McManus

Your problem is not with immigration, in general, it’s with brown and black people, specifically, and any culture which you designate as too different from whatever you claim yours to be.

The same goes if you say you are “highlighting the fact that there is a huge concern for Labor’s mass migration agenda”, which is placing pressure on “housing, infrastructure and services”, but you end up singling out a particular nationality – Indian people – as “a concern”.

So was the claim made by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price on the ABC this week, when she said that “there is a concern with the Indian community … and only because there’s been large numbers and we can see that reflected in the way that the community votes for Labor at the same time”.

She implied that Labor was bringing in Indian people – who do represent the largest cohort of permanent migrants to Australia – because they vote Labor.

Senator Price later walked back the comments, noting that Australia’s immigration system is non-discriminatory. “Suggestions otherwise are a........

© The Sydney Morning Herald