Rising hostility towards Indian Australians, and what the evidence actually shows

Amar Singh has spent close to three decades in Australia, and he has spent much of it giving things away. The Sikh charity he founded in 2015, Turbans 4 Australia, distributes up to 450 food and grocery hampers a week across Western Sydney, and has driven supplies into drought, flood and bushfire zones. In 2023 he was named Australia’s Local Hero. So it carried weight when Singh told SBS News that “in close to three decades here, I have not seen this much blatant racism.” Coming from a man whose public life has been built on turning up for strangers, it is not a remark to wave away.

His unease is shared, and it is measurable. It also sits alongside a set of facts that complicate any simple story of a country turning on its newest arrivals.

The largest group, and a lightning rod

People born in India are now the largest overseas-born group in Australia. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for 30 June 2025 put the India-born population at 971,020, narrowly ahead of England on 970,950, out of roughly 8.8 million residents born overseas. Overseas-born people now make up 32 per cent of the population. The shift is historic; for generations the largest migrant group came from Britain. Indian Australians are, on the whole, a settled and successful community, many of them former international students who arrived in the late 2000s and went on to build careers and businesses.

That visibility has made the community a reference point in a louder argument about migration numbers, and some of that argument has curdled.

What the Scanlon data shows

The clearest read on the national mood comes from the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, whose Mapping Social Cohesion survey has tracked attitudes since 2007. Its 2025 report, whose lead investigator is Australian National University demographer James O’Donnell, found the share of Australians who think immigration is too high climbed from 24 per cent in 2022 to 33 per cent in 2023, 49 per cent in 2024 and 51 per cent in 2025, the highest level the survey has ever recorded. Around 30 per cent of respondents held a somewhat or very negative view of immigrants from India, a group the report describes as having positive and negative views close to equally divided. About two in five migrants from Asian and African backgrounds reported discrimination in the previous year based on skin colour, ethnicity or religion.

Yet the same survey pushes back against despair. Support for multiculturalism held at 83 per cent, and overall social cohesion was steady. O’Donnell has cautioned against easy conclusions, telling SBS News that “most people can distinguish their views on migration levels from their attitudes towards people,” while warning that “political rhetoric, particularly when it is divisive and exclusionary, shifts public attitudes.”

When politics names a group

Rhetoric became a flashpoint in September 2025, when Northern Territory Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price claimed the federal government was favouring Indian migrants to shore up Labor’s vote. The claim was false and drew criticism across the political spectrum. Price declined to apologise, called the remarks “clumsy,” and was removed from the Coalition frontbench, as reported by SBS News and SBS Hindi. Sussan Ley, then the Opposition leader, apologised to Indian Australians “who were hurt and distressed.” Community leaders said that was not enough. Gurmeet Tuli, president of Little India Australia, called the comments “a racial slur.” Amar Singh told SBS the apology “doesn’t cut the mustard,” describing the episode as “hurtful, un-Australian, and at best a low blow.” The Australia Today later reported that Price returned to similar themes in 2026, resharing a podcast post that alleged Labor was “importing” Indian voters.

The streets and the feed

The hostility has also been organised. On 31 August 2025, “March for Australia” rallies drew thousands across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Canberra. Al Jazeera reported violent clashes in Melbourne, where police used pepper spray and made arrests, and where a group of men attacked an Indigenous protest camp after the rally, injuring four people; the neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell, who spoke at the rally, was later charged in connection with the attack. Anne Aly, the federal Minister for Multicultural Affairs, said the rallies were “organised by Nazis” and noted the organisers “weren’t protesting immigration from white Western countries.” Promotional material for the marches singled out Indians, with one flyer claiming there were “more Indians in five years than Greeks and Italians in 100.”

Online, the pattern is starker. In a briefing published on 6 October 2025, the Online Hate Prevention Institute documented how Indians had become a favoured target of Australian online hate, built around two recurring stereotypes: that Indians cannot assimilate or contribute, and dehumanising claims about hygiene. The institute argued that hate speech is “the cause of, as well as the product of, discriminatory attitudes,” and traced how such content, spread across TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube, fed replacement-theory narratives that resurfaced in the rally flyers.

Documented incidents

Individual incidents have punctuated the year. In July 2025, the Shree Swaminarayan temple in Melbourne was defaced with red graffiti including the words “go home,” an act condemned by the Victorian Premier and reported by Business Standard and The Indian Sun. Around the same time, The Indian Sun and Gulf News reported that an Indian student in Adelaide, named as Charanpreet Singh, was assaulted by a group of men in what was treated as a suspected racist attack. Such cases remain a small fraction of daily life, but their symbolism travels far, both in Australia and back in India.

The response, and the perspective

Community organisations have tried to hold two things at once, naming the problem while refusing to inflate it. Vasan Srinivasan, president of the Federation of Indian Associations in Victoria, placed the moment in a longer arc of Australian migration, telling SBS that “Greeks went through it, Italians went through it, Vietnamese went through it, Chinese went through it. Now it’s our turn.” He was careful about proportion, adding that “it’s not the majority of Australians. It’s a very small section, but they are loud.”

Officialdom has echoed that measure. Hugh de Kretser, president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, used a National Press Club address on 29 April 2026 to say plainly that “these attacks on migrants must stop,” while insisting that “migration has made Australia stronger, socially and economically” and noting that more than 80 per cent of Australians support multiculturalism. The Commission has been pressing the government to implement its national anti-racism framework.

The honest picture, then, is neither reassuring nor alarmist. A rise in anti-migrant sentiment, and a sharp jump in the belief that immigration is too high, are real, documented and concentrated in a noisy minority, sharpened by political language and amplified online. At the same time, most Australians still back a diverse society, most day-to-day encounters remain unremarkable, and Indian Australians have become, by the numbers, part of the country’s mainstream. The task now is to stop the loud minority from setting the terms, so that people like Amar Singh, who have given the country a great deal, are not left to wonder whether the welcome still holds.