One Nation’s top NSW upper house candidate alluded to the far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theory in a protest speech at the weekend that Premier Chris Minns labelled “frankly outrageous and racist”.
Stuart Bonds, the top upper house candidate for the party in NSW, told protesters at a rally against “mass migration” on Sunday that “we are being demographically replaced inside our own nation”.
“We are in the fight of our lives. Make no mistake,” he told protesters in Sydney, adding the “socialist plan” was to “destroy and bring down and tear down the fabric of your civilisation”.
Minns on Monday described the remarks as “horrific” and reliant on “a conspiracy theory that’s been imported from the US here to Australia”.
“It makes me think: well, this bloke’s heading the ticket for One Nation,” he said. “If they win the election, what ministry is he going to have? Trade, education, treasury?”
One Nation is a growing threat to NSW Labor in the March 2027 state election and Minns repeated his view that Mike Newman, One Nation’s leader in the state, will “either be the premier or the opposition leader”. Resolve polling shows 25 per cent of NSW voters intend to vote for One Nation in March.
After joking about a man named “Sanjay” who had crashed into the protest organisers’ truck before the event on Sunday, Bond said he would fight against Australia’s “demographic suicide” and becoming a “special economic zone of Asia”.
The great replacement theory, which began in the late 1800s, posits that European and Western populations are being deliberately and systematically replaced by non-Western populations. Bonds made references to Asia in his speech.
Federal Assistant Multicultural Affairs Minister Julian Hill said it was “sadly not surprising a lead One Nation candidate is openly pushing racist, white supremacist conspiracy theories”, according to AAP.
“The ‘great replacement theory’ is a widely discredited far-right, nationalist conspiracy with antisemitic roots. It’s also mathematically nonsensical … Australians can draw their own conclusions as to why One Nation constantly gets embroiled in issues of race and culture and want to import that kind of chaos and division into our beautiful country.”
During the speech – in which Bond also covered abortion rates, white South Africans on “stolen land” and the Bondi Beach shooters – the One Nation candidate said he didn’t accept that “an immigrant arriving yesterday is as Australian as you or me”, to cheers from the crowd.
“If we don’t support Australian mothers having Australian children, we are going to pay for other cultures’ children to be brought up in our lands,” he said.
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