The fourth-generation Australian sick of being told he is Indian

A senior National Party MP said he is tired of being referred to as an Indian despite being a fourth-generation Australian.

Gurmesh Singh, the party’s deputy leader in New South Wales, spoke up after Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was dumped from the Opposition frontbench for suggesting the federal government was importing large numbers of Indian migrants to shore up the Labor vote.

Mr Singh slammed what he said was “identity politics“ and multiculturalism’s undue focus on emphasising differences in skin colour.

“How many more generations does it have to be before I stop being an Indian-Australian and just an Australian? I think that’s the question we all have to answer,” he told The Nightly.

The National Party is often stereotyped as being filled with old, white men but their leader in NSW Dugald Saunders is one-sixteenth Indian and his deputy has Sikh Punjabi heritage.

Divisive conversations

Mr Singh, the member for Coffs Harbour on the state’s mid-north coast, is critical of multiculturalism for placing undue emphasis on ethnic and cultural differences.

“Some of these conversations end up being divisive rather than bringing people together,” he said. “I don’t like identity politics. I think it’s more important who you are, not what particular groups you might be a member of.”

The fourth-generation Australian, whose great-grandfather Bella Singh came to Australia in the 1890s, used a parliamentary speech on Thursday to suggest there was racism against Indians who didn’t support left-wing political parties.

“My experience of racism has been really different to a lot of people in this house,” he said. “People who support and enjoy the support of your candidates in my electorate; they support Labor, the Greens and the teals, have called me LNP’s ‘useful idiot of colour’.

“Water off a duck’s back but I will say these comments went unchallenged, they continue to go unchallenged to this day and I won’t be holding my breath for an apology because I know it won’t come.”

Mr Singh told The Nightly the state Labor government had used Question Time to unfairly accuse his side of politics of having problems with race.

“You guys are just as guilty of this as well but we’re not here bringing it up every day,” he said. “I don’t want to bring too much attention on myself for this issue again because it makes you even more of a target, as has been already on my Facebook posts. I’ve had to hide and delete a lot of comments.”

He spoke up in Parliament the day after federal Opposition Leader Sussan Ley dumped Senator Price from the Coalition’s frontbench because she refused to apologise for last week telling the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas the government favoured Indian migration because “the community votes for Labor at the same time”.

Mr Singh declined to criticise Senator Price, who made the comments after a series of anti-immigration rallies around Australia. “I’ve not seen her interview in full,” he said. “I don’t want to comment on what she may or may not have said.”

Indian voters

India was Australia’s most common overseas country of birth, after England, in the 2021 Census with 673,352 from there. That was more than double the 295,400 number a decade earlier, when India was fourth.

Labor overwhelmingly won polling booths with a high Indian population, including Parramatta where the ALP vote after preferences was 71 per cent.

At nearby Harris Park, 45 per cent of residents were born in India, a level well above the Australian average of 2.6 per cent.

Rather than being rusted-on Labor voters, Australia’s Indian diaspora are more likely to be swing voters. Polling by the Indian Link Media Group found the Coalition won 38.2 per cent of the Indian vote in 2019 under then Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison, compared with 37.9 per cent for Labor under Bill Shorten.

This year, Labor had 43 per cent of the Indian vote as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese won the biggest ALP landslide since 1943, leaving Peter Dutton’s Coalition with just 27 per cent of Indian supporters after calling for a more dramatic cut to immigration levels, the survey found.

Long connection

While the sub-continental influx is often regarded as recent, the Indian community’s connections in Coffs Harbour, a banana-growing region, go back to the nineteenth century.

Mr Singh’s great-grandfather Bella left Punjab in 1895 with 13 other men from nearby villages to come to Australia. Several generations continued to prosper despite the White Australia policy that wasn’t formally dismantled until 1973.

Before being elected to the NSW Parliament in 2019 Mr Singh, born and raised in Coffs Harbour, was a third-generation local farmer and the son of a banana grower.

He was selected for a safe seat a year after joining the National Party, which represents regional electorates that are less multi-racial.

“The National Party judges people based on their merits, not what they may look like,” he said.

“I joined the National Party because they were the only party that I could see that were actually fighting for regional areas, regional industries and regional people. Every other party seemed to be more city-centric.”

Senior trailblazers

On the Labor side of state politics, Deputy Premier Prue Car and Treasurer Daniel Mookhey both have Indian ethnicity.

The Sydney-born cabinet ministers from the party’s right faction are the first Australians of Indian heritage to simultaneously hold two of the most senior positions in a government.

“Two capable individuals within their own parties rose to the second and third ranks within their government. Good on them but I’m sure they got there on their own merit,” Mr Singh said.

Labor’s senior ministers have used their heritage to accuse Senator Price of stirring up hatred. Ms Car, whose grandparents migrated to Australia from Durgapur west of Calcutta during the 1960s, said Indians had been unfairly marginalised.

“For the past week, I have been saddened to see our Indian community targeted with misinformation and harmful tropes. I feel your frustration and I feel your hurt,” she said on Facebook. “Indian migration is not just part of my story, it is part of OUR story as a country.”

Upset

Mr Mookhey told The Australia Today, a publication catering to Indian diaspora readers, that Senator Price’s comments were as upsetting as neo-nazis gatecrashing rallies against immigration on August 31.

“As a member of the Australian-Indian community, it’s equally as disappointing to see pretty prominent federal parliamentarians like Jacinta Price give the comments that she gave that were unhelpful and quite divisive,” he said.

“I feel the same way lots of Australian Indians feel, which is why is our particular part of the Australian community being singled out and why are we being subject to this level of hate?”

Two days before being dumped from the Opposition frontbench, Senator Price visited the Darwin office of Indian-ethnicity MP Jinson Charls.

Last year, the Kerala-born man became the Minister for People, Sport and Culture in the Northern Territory’s Country Liberal Party government after winning a seat from Labor, less than 14 years after moving to Australia.

As a senior MP, Mr Singh said there were more important issues than skin colour.

“It’s time for us all to move beyond this type of politics and actually start getting to the things that really matter to people and that is the cost of housing, spiralling crime, the health system in crisis, spiralling government debt and all the other issues that make Australians of every background worry about the future for themselves and their kids,” he said.