Price’s complaints are just dragging us further down the road to xenophobia

About the least damning thing a person can say about Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s complaints about Indian immigration to Australia is that if anybody were entitled to divide us by how long we’ve been here, it would be someone with her First Nations ancestry. If Australia’s current immigration restrictions on boat people had applied when the First Fleet first docked, our history would certainly have been rather different (I‘d be Irish, for one thing).

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be quite what Price is saying. She’s opposing Indians not because they can’t show 65,000 years of local ancestry but because they’re not sun-bronzed and picket-fenced Aussies. When Price was calling us to Make Australia Great Again she wasn’t trying to roll history back to 1787, just to 1945, when the White Australia policy was in full flower and Immigration Department officials processing suspiciously tanned people getting off ships were advised to check under their fingernails to sort out the coloureds from the whites.

Price’s opposition to Indian immigration is superficially because she thinks they always vote Labor. Even this is an accusation of either ethnic stupidity (not bright enough to understand neoliberal economics the way we do) or cultural deficiency (lacking the necessary 800 years of the Westminster tradition), but that’s not the heart of it. To the extent that Price isn’t simply parroting what someone said last night on Fox News, she’s objecting that a shadowy cadre of rootless cosmopolitans are stacking Australian politics with dummy voters, a position that attempts to delegitimise our whole political system.

If you want to see what Price’s positive policy prescriptions would be, you only have to look at how the Americans are travelling. Trump’s acolytes are taking the country apart to ferret out every deviation from Christian whiteness and eliminate it. Trump’s enthusiasm for President William McKinley rests in part on a shared support for tariffs and in large part on the fact that McKinley presided over an era where the white man was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

This kind of criticism is too easy, so let me rephrase it into a positive injunction. There’s no unchanging eternal national essence. Any country is what the people living in it say it is. You could make adjustments to that principle at the margins – I wouldn’t want Tuvalu to become an American territory because three large cruise ships had docked at Funafuti – but it’s a good starting point. Discussions of national identity shouldn’t be like News Limited, where the Murdochs as the founding fathers have four times the voting rights as everybody else.

There’s simply no excuse for devaluing particular groups of the polity. Everyone’s interests are level, whether they originally came from England, India, or, umm, Mordor (and I bet I still get letters). Yes, they retain many of the political enmities they evolved in their old haunts, but Australia has proven itself a remarkably good solvent of old prejudices. We used to care deeply about the difference between Catholics and Protestants – look at Barry Humphries’ comedy routines from the seventies – and nowadays it’s just a question of whose schools have the best ATAR scores.

Price says now that her concerns are not about Indians in particular but about “mass immigration”. That’s an easy out, because “mass immigration” for most people means “more immigration than I’m happy with”.

Which is where the argument begins. Because around the world, immigration of any kind is becoming increasingly unpopular. In nation after nation, immigration is coming to be the one issue above all others that determines whether right-wing parties will get on to the government benches. It’s even possible that the Trumpist model – deluded and incompetent grifters without any actual answers to the problems they exploit – will bring Nigel Farage to power in the UK and Marine Le Pen in France. Thanks in part to an electoral system that approximates fairness, Australia has dodged that particular bullet so far, but it would be foolish to believe we’re immune.

We have to discourage xenophobia wherever it appears, because it’s a real threat. It’s not just Indians who should be outraged at Price’s prejudices, it’s anybody who wants to address Australia’s actual problems rather than summon up imaginary bogeymen.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600000 not-for-profits.