The Unlikely Realignment: Why Some Immigrants Are Turning to Australia’s Populist Right

MELBOURNE — In the neatly manicured suburbs of Melbourne, where the Australian flag now flutters from a pole in Ronil Prasad’s front yard, a quiet but profound political shift is taking place. For decades, the conventional wisdom governing Australian politics dictated that multicultural communities stood as an impenetrable bulwark against the nation’s populist right. Yet, the political reality on the ground is proving to be far more complex, fluid, and challeging to conventional progressive narratives.

Mr. Prasad, a small-business owner who migrated to Australia from Fiji with his family 40 years ago, has stepped directly into the center of a national conversation on identity and integration. Appearing on a recent broadcast of the SBS program Insight, Mr. Prasad stunned commentators and viewers alike by throwing his vocal support behind Pauline Hanson’s One Nation—a political party historically defined by its hardline, anti-immigration rhetoric.

“I reckon she’s fantastic to be honest with you,” Mr. Prasad said during the televised discussion, dismissively brushing aside decades of accusations that the One Nation leader is driven by racial prejudice. “Someone who loves her own country so much, that’s not racist.”

To mainstream political analysts, Mr. Prasad’s endorsements sound like a paradox. One Nation burst onto the Australian political scene in the late 1990s on a platform that explicitly warned the nation was danger of being “swamped” by Asian immigration, later pivoting to staunchly anti-Muslim and anti-asylum seeker rhetoric. For a non-white migrant to champion its leader represents a remarkable ideological crossing of lines.

Yet, sociologists and polling experts suggest that Mr. Prasad’s perspective is emblematic of a small but growing segment of established immigrant communities. These voters are increasingly embracing assimilationist politics, drawing a sharp distinction between those who “earned” their citizenship through time and hard work, and newer waves of arrivals.

For Mr. Prasad, the core of his political philosophy is rooted in absolute cultural conformity. “I call myself Australian, I don’t call myself Fijian or Indian,” he stated firmly during the interview, emphasizing a complete break from his ancestral roots. “You come to this country and embrace the Australian way of living, or you know what, you stay where you are.”

This “pull up the drawbridge” mentality is not unique to the Australian suburbs; it mirrors political realignments observed across the democratic world. In the United States, Donald Trump has made surprising inroads with Latino and Black working-class men, while in Western Europe, second-generation immigrants have occasionally voted for anti-immigration parties out of a desire for economic protectionism and social stability.

In the Australian context, the phenomenon reveals a deep-seated frustration among older migrant cohorts who feel that modern multicultural policy devalues the sacrifices they made to assimilate. Mr. Prasad’s family fled Fiji following a tumultuous military coup, arriving in an Australia that still demanded a high degree of cultural conformity. Having successfully navigated that era, many established migrants view current policies celebrating hyphenated identities with deep skepticism.

For Pauline Hanson and One Nation, the public support of a Fijian-Indian small-business owner is a public relations goldmine. The party has long struggled against the label of systemic racism, which has historically limited its electoral appeal to older, rural, Anglo-Celtic voters. Endorsements from individuals like Mr. Prasad allow the party to rebrand its platform not as racially exclusionary, but as patriotically protective.

The ruling Labor government, alongside the green-left political establishment, has viewed these developments with quiet alarm. For years, the progressive strategy relied on the assumption that demographic shifts—namely the rapid growth of non-European migration—would naturally dilute the electoral viability of populist, right-wing parties. Mr. Prasad’s public declaration shatters the illusion of the immigrant community as a political monolith.

Furthermore, economic anxieties are driving small-business owners within immigrant enclaves toward the right. High inflation, rising interest rates, and soaring energy costs have squeezed Melbourne’s suburban entrepreneurs. When One Nation couples its cultural nationalism with promises of deregulation, tax cuts, and slashed immigration numbers to relieve housing pressure, it strikes a chord with working-class business owners regardless of their ethnic background.

Scholars of multiculturalism argue that this trend highlights a failure in how mainstream institutions communicate the value of diversity. When the discourse around multiculturalism is perceived as an elite, academic exercise detached from the values of hard work and national pride, it alienates the very people it aims to protect. Populist leaders are highly adept at exploiting this disconnect.

The backlash to Mr. Prasad’s comments on social media was immediate and fiercely polarized. While conservative commentators praised him as a model citizen who embodies true patriotism, progressive critics accused him of suffering from internalized prejudice and acting against the interests of his own community. The vitriol of the debate underscores how uncomfortable the political establishment is with minority figures who deviate from expected ideological scripts.

Inside Melbourne’s diverse communities, the reaction has been more nuanced. Several community leaders, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that under current economic pressures, quiet conversations about limiting immigration are no longer taboo among older, established ethnic groups who worry about infrastructure congestion and job security for their children.

This internal friction points to a changing of the guard within Australia’s diaspora communities. The older generation, which arrived under different socioeconomic compacts, often holds deeply conservative views on social integration, crime, and national security. They are increasingly at odds with their university-educated, politically progressive children who view Australian identity through a post-colonial, pluralistic lens.

As Australia marches toward its next federal election, the major parties will forced to reckon with this complex demographic landscape. The conservative Liberal-National Coalition has already begun tailoring its messaging to appeal to socially conservative migrant families, realizing that the path to reclaiming outer-suburban seats runs directly through multicultural small-business hubs.

Ultimately, Ronil Prasad’s flagpole is a symbol of a broader, unresolved struggle over what it means to be Australian in the 21st century. Is Australian identity an expansive, ever-evolving mosaic that accommodates multiple cultural allegiances, or is it a rigid, singular mold that demands total assimilation as the price of admission?

The fact that an immigrant who fled political instability abroad now looks to a populist right-wing icon to preserve his adopted home suggests that the answer is far from settled. As the nation’s political boundaries continue to blur, the story of a Fijian migrant standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Pauline Hanson may well be remembered as the moment the old rules of Australian politics were rewritten for good.