By Shaun Carney

Copyright smh

In her ABC interview, Price appeared to suggest that the Albanese government applies some sort of political test to prospective migrants in India and allows in only the ones who will vote Labor. Or that Indians are simply implicitly Labor-leaning. It’s hard to tell. It’s bonkers, basically, and it fed into the anti-Indian sentiments of some of those who’d marched a few days earlier.

You might well ask why the opposition minister for defence industry and defence personnel was rattling on about immigration on national television, but that would be so yesterday. On Wednesday night, Ley dumped Price from her frontbench. Regardless, long gone are the times when frontbenchers respectfully declined to talk about matters that weren’t in their portfolios. This is a garrulous age, where politicians will freewheel on anything, reinforcing the agreed lines of the day. Anyway, minding her Ps and Qs would be especially off-brand for Price, whose rapid rise since entering the Senate in 2022 owes much to her willingness to involve herself in whatever culture war issue is on the go.

Soon after making her comments on the ABC, Price put out a statement that has been characterised by the media as her walking them back. The statement began: “Australia maintains a longstanding and bipartisan non-discriminatory migration policy. Suggestions otherwise are a mistake.” Was that a walkback? Those “suggestions otherwise” were made by whom? The family cat? Like one of television’s most famous characters, Arthur Fonzarelli (ask your parents or grandparents, kids), Price has trouble admitting straight out that she was wrong.

Her behaviour does make some sense. Price’s political persona is built entirely on her grim-faced certainty about everything and her positions on policies for Indigenous Australians, which sit outside the orthodox prescriptions favoured by a large proportion of her fellow Indigenous people. She won fame as a vocal proponent of the No case in the Voice referendum and was very much in touch with mainstream opinion. It made her a superstar among the Coalition rank and file. Her early success encouraged her to say whatever came into her head, such as her call to “make Australia great again” and her instruction to the media to stop obsessing about Donald Trump during the election campaign. That was her first disaster.