It might have started with a rush of blood to the head. Several weeks ago, in a podcast hosted by online Australian identity Drew Pavlou, Redbridge Group director Kos Samaras stated that 85 per cent of Indian Australians voted for Labor after preferences at May’s federal election. The transcript is as follows:
Samaras: “85 per cent of the Indian diaspora voted for the Labor Party at the last election. Thereabouts, it varies across the country.”
Pavlou: “What was the number sorry Kos?”
Samaras: “85 per cent. Whenever we poll, in our polling, they’re about that, two-party-preferred.”
The first I saw of this number was in an article by the Institute of Public Affairs’s Adam Creighton in the Australian on Friday, a typically tendentious cherry-data-picking effort that I used as brain exercise here.
But the 85 per cent figure had apparently been making the rounds of the internet, or certain corners thereof, for a couple of week before that. According to Nine papers, it has been “quoted by far-right social media accounts and in posts by March for Australia, the group that organised last month’s anti-immigration rallies and targeted Indian Australians in their promotion flyers.”
It slots in very nicely with a far-right meme that has the Labor government carefully selecting the type of migrant who will vote for them. Hence all the Indians! It collapses immediately when faced with the fact that immigrants can’t become citizens and vote for at a minimum of four years after arrival, which would mean the Morrison government was in on the act. But no matter, it’s out there.
It was Wednesday last week when one obviously very-online federal MP, Coalition frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, made her now infamous assertions about Indian migrants on the ABC. The following day, in a partial backtrack, she explained that “a recent Redbridge poll told us that 85 per cent of those who have Indian ancestry… voted for Labor… So, these were the facts that I was pointing out.”
Now, facts shouldn’t be supressed simply because bad faith actors might misuse them. None of this would be Samaras’s problem if that 85 per cent number accurately reflected what his research had found. (It might cause us to question his methodology, although Redbridge has a good record for voting intentions at elections.)
But it’s not accurate. To anyone who has thought about these things, it’s obviously way too high. Kos at first doubled down, but was reported yesterday in Nine Papers as downgrading the figure to “mid-60s” two-party-preferred, which is believable, given the overall 55 per cent vote for Labor in May.
(When Samaras also described Indian people voting Labor “for sectarian reasons,” Pavlou responded that he’s “really concerned for the future of the country if we get these sectarian voting blocs.” This sent me to Google search in case there was some variation of that word’s meaning that I wasn’t aware of. I found none. It’s a bizarre, more inflammatory assertion.)
There’s a question hiding in all this about how people of Indian ancestry really did vote in May, or at any election. No one knows. They probably comprise around 3 per cent of the electoral roll, and any polled numbers are just too small to come to a robust conclusion. As far as I know, Accent’s Shaun Ratcliffe has the best data on federal election 2025, within which, as he says, voters born in India are a tiny subsample. The primary vote support from Australians of South Asian ancestry (about 70 per cent of them are from India) implies a Labor two-party-preferred vote in the low 60s. So maybe it’s that, give or take 5–10 per cent.
This might invite another question: how then would I or anyone else know that 85 is too high? The answer is that it’s way too high for any ethnic group in this country, apart from Indigenous Australians. In the United States (for which large datasets exist) African Americans regularly register that figure or more for Democrats; Indian Americans voted about 60 per cent Democrat last year, around the same advantage as Labor’s here.
If Price really was motivated by the 85 per cent misinformation, it has now led to her departure from the opposition frontbench after she publicly declined to affirm support for leader Sussan Ley.
We’ve seen all this before, an MP adored by the Coalition’s self-proclaimed base and far-right media outlet Sky After Dark destabilising the Coalition. It ended Malcolm Turnbull’s premiership in 2018. With such a right-wing Liberal party room it just makes life more difficult for Ley. As one wag on X put it, “Some people are trying very hard to make it 85pc next time.”
Indeed. By all accounts another big name among the “base,” Tony Abbott, was a key holder of the shoehorn that brought Price into the Liberal party room this year. This weekend it’ll be ten years since Liberal MPs unceremoniously voted him out the highest office. This is one very cold dish. •
