The Living Bridge and the People Who Cross It

Inside Marvel Stadium on the evening of 9 July 2026, about 30,000 people turned the home ground of Australian rules football into something between a political rally and a vast family reunion. Tricolours moved across the stands. Narendra Modi told the crowd that Indians abroad are like sugar dissolving in milk, making it sweeter, and the roar that came back carried the pride of a community that has spent two decades becoming one of the largest in the country. Beside him on stage, Anthony Albanese reached for the phrase both governments now favour. He called the diaspora a living bridge between India and Australia.

The night was warm, and for the community at its centre it was genuinely moving. It also left a quieter question hanging, one a growing number of Indian-Australians have begun to ask aloud. A bridge carries traffic both ways, and it belongs to the people who cross it every day. Community organisers and commentators worry that the diaspora gets celebrated as a bridge on summit nights and treated as a convenient backdrop the rest of the time. Courted for votes when an election is near. Invoked for trade optics when a leader visits. And, on occasion, viewed through a security lens that can cast suspicion over ordinary families.

A community that has outgrown the symbolism

Modi’s visit ran from 8 to 10 July 2026, built around the annual leaders’ summit with Albanese in Melbourne. The summit is a marker of how fast the relationship has moved. In 2020 the two countries lifted ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, a framework that now covers trade, defence, education, clean energy and mobility. The diaspora has grown at a similar pace. The 2021 census counted 673,352 people born in India, and close to 988,270 once Australian-born children and others of Indian heritage were added in. Then came a sharper number. Figures the Australian Bureau of Statistics released on 29 April 2026 put India-born residents at 971,020 as at June 2025, about 3.5 per cent of the population. That narrowly passed the 970,950 born in England, making Indians the single largest overseas-born group in Australia for the first time. The political attention makes more sense in that light. A community this size counts in marginal seats, and a community this skilled counts in the economy.

The trade figures behind the photographs

Trade drives most of the summit choreography. The centrepiece is the Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement, known as ECTA, which entered into force on 29 December 2022. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade says more than 85 per cent of Australian goods exports by value to India became tariff free under the deal, a share that rose to 90 per cent from 1 January 2026. On the other side, 96 per cent of imports from India entered tariff free, moving to 100 per cent across the same period. Two-way trade in goods and services was reported at around 48.9 billion Australian dollars, or about 32.6 billion United States dollars, during the visit. The trend underneath is less tidy. Merchandise trade has softened, easing to roughly 21 billion United States dollars in 2025 to 2026 from a peak near 25.9 billion in 2022 to 2023.

The bigger prize is the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement, or CECA, which would carry ECTA into services, investment and government procurement. Negotiators have finished eleven rounds, the most recent in New Delhi in August 2025, and in Melbourne both leaders promised to move faster. Modi said the two sides had decided to act quickly on an agreement that would be balanced, ambitious and a win-win for both countries. For the diaspora the stakes are practical. They sit in professional recognition and visas, and in how freely qualifications and capital move between the two economies, the everyday plumbing a bridge is meant to carry.

Defence and education

Under the crowd scenes sits a denser layer of cooperation. The second Australia-India 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue met in New Delhi on 20 November 2023. It brought Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles together with their counterparts Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Rajnath Singh. Their joint statement logged progress on air-to-air refuelling and reciprocal logistics support, and a widening schedule of exercises that includes Malabar, Pitch Black 2024 and Talisman Sabre 2025. On 9 July 2026 the two prime ministers signed a Joint Declaration on Defence and Security Cooperation, with a commitment to consult on Indo-Pacific developments and to build a maritime security roadmap.

Education is the pillar closest to the community. Deakin University opened a campus in Gujarat’s GIFT City, the first foreign university to run a branch campus in India. It was inaugurated in January 2024 and started teaching in July 2024, with a Master of Business Analytics and a Master of Cybersecurity on offer. High Commissioner Philip Green called it a milestone for the education relationship. The University of Wollongong opened its own GIFT City campus soon after. A Migration and Mobility Partnership Arrangement, agreed in 2023, was meant to ease the movement of students, graduates and skilled workers, the very group that has driven so much of the diaspora’s growth.

Courted at the ballot box

No one hides the community’s value at the ballot box now. A 2022 analysis for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, by Caroline Duckworth, Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav, looked at Indo-Australian voters and found both major parties working hard for their favour. Scott Morrison shared photographs of himself cooking Indian food. Albanese visited Hindu temples. The survey found about 43 per cent of Indo-Australians leaning towards Labor, though no party could claim the community as its own. The votes are concentrated where they can decide a contest, in western Sydney seats such as Parramatta and across Melbourne’s outer west. Community mastheads have watched the same movement. Indian Link ran a detailed reader survey during the 2025 federal election to track how the Indian-origin vote was shifting. The complaint heard most often inside the community is about timing rather than attention. The courtship arrives in the weeks before a poll and thins out once the votes are counted.

The foreign-interference question

A more delicate thread runs beside the celebration. In his 2021 Annual Threat Assessment, the Director-General of ASIO, Mike Burgess, described disrupting a nest of spies that had cultivated sources and sought classified material. He did not name the country. Later reporting linked the case to India, and officials were reported expelled from Australia around 2020. When it resurfaced, the response from Indian-Australians was muted, and the worry many voiced was about spillover. The entrepreneur Sriraman Annaswamy told Indian Link it was important that such cases be compartmentalised so there was no blow back on the wider Indian community, particularly people of Indian origin in senior or strategic government roles. Andrew Charlton, the federal Member for Parramatta and one of the community’s most prominent representatives, pointed out that the matter dated back several years and that relations had strengthened since. The concern underneath is not hard to see. Foreign interference is a real security issue for any government. Framing that treats an entire community as a possible channel for it can wear away the trust a genuine bridge needs.

What a two-way bridge would require

The bridge image works because it is largely true. Money sent home, students, start-ups, cricket, temples and trade all move across it. What the Melbourne night leaves behind is a question about upkeep. Is the bridge infrastructure, maintained and used all year, or scenery, lit up for a visiting leader and dimmed afterwards? A two-way bridge would mean asking community organisations about the policies that shape their lives, from visa settings to aged care to international education, and not only inviting them to cultural nights. It would mean chasing specific security threats without putting a whole community under blanket suspicion. The last part matters most. The roughly one million people who trace their story to India are Australian citizens and residents first, with interests of their own and no brief to act for anyone else. Modi’s sugar-in-milk image was apt in a way he may not have intended. Once it dissolves, sugar cannot be spooned back out for display. The diaspora is already part of the Australian mixture. The task for both governments is to treat it that way between the summits, and not only under the stadium lights.

Images in this article are AI-generated illustrations.