JENI O’DOWD: When voters’ voices aren’t being heard the results can get ugly

I never thought I’d say this, but for the first time in my life, I feel ashamed to be Australian.

Watching Sunday’s so-called “anti-immigration rally”, hijacked by neo-nazis in black shirts and the ugly fallout that followed, showed our nation at its worst.

It’s not that many people at the rallies didn’t have a point. Immigration is a real issue. We can’t keep adding record numbers when housing isn’t there, hospitals are already under strain and infrastructure is buckling.

Calling for immigration to be scaled back isn’t racism; it’s realism. But there’s a line between arguing numbers and fuelling hate.

When the government ignores people’s concerns, frustration spills into rallies, and that space is quickly seized by those with far darker agendas.

Those neo-Nazis weren’t concerned families worried about grocery bills or power prices. They were people desperate to drag Australia back into a past most of us want nothing to do with.

And to the rest of the world, we look backward, diminished, even pathetic.

Which brings me to Bob Katter. The great Akubra-wearing, cattle-country maverick. He has built a career on the image of a bush politician standing up for “real Australians”.

Yet Katter’s story is a migrant story. His grandfather came here from Lebanon. Like millions of us, his family’s roots lie elsewhere.

Why isn’t he proud of that? If there was ever a time to stand tall and embrace one’s heritage, it’s now, when extremists are trying to pretend Australia was forged from some mythical monoculture.

It wasn’t. It was shaped by convicts, settlers, migrants and refugees. Every one of us comes from somewhere else: Irish convicts, Greek café owners, Chinese market gardeners, Vietnamese boat people, Lebanese farmers. That mix is our nation.

Katter had the perfect chance to remind people that his own family were migrants. Instead, he answered a question on the subject with anger and threats.

At last weekend’s press conference in Brisbane, when Katter threw his weight behind the anti-immigration rallies, 9News reporter Josh Bavas asked him about his Lebanese roots.

Katter cut him off, waved a fist in his face and snapped: “Oh mate, don’t say that because that irritates me. I’ve punched blokes in the mouth for saying that, don’t you dare say that. My family have been in this country for 140 years.”

He has not apologised and is facing a parliamentary inquiry that could result in a dock in pay or even a suspension. His son Robbie, also an MP, even excused it, saying he couldn’t see how anyone could be intimidated by “an 80-year-old man”.

But a raised fist is a raised fist. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from a teenager outside a pub, a pensioner at the shops or a veteran MP in a park. It’s still intimidation.

And here’s where Anthony Albanese must shoulder blame. His government flung open the doors of record migration without a clear plan for where people would live, how they’d be housed, or how schools and hospitals would cope.

He talks the language of compassion and multiculturalism, but ignores the basics of management. That failure has left millions furious and created the vacuum that extremists are only too eager to fill.

Yesterday, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke confirmed that Australia’s permanent migration figures would remain at 185,000 for the 2025-26 financial year, exactly the same as 2024-25.

Despite the fury, the protests and the real social damage we’ve seen since Sunday, the government hasn’t shifted its stance by a single digit. Not one place has been cut.

Governments should listen to the people who voted for them, and MPs should ground the debate in honesty by sharing their own stories.

When an MP can’t even acknowledge and be proud of his migrant roots, it creates space for extremists to fill the void, as we saw on Sunday.

And when a Prime Minister can’t listen to the real concerns of thousands, it leaves ordinary Australians feeling abandoned, allowing the ugliest voices to step in and claim the microphone.