Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday asked right-wing opposition legislator to apologise following comments suggesting that an unsustainable number of Indians were emigrating to Australia.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Liberal Party senator, made the remarks as part of a nation-wide anti-immigrant protests which partly attributed rising living expenses in the country to Indians.
In a radio interview last week, Price implied that huge numbers of Indians had been permitted to emigrate to Australia to bankroll Albanese's center-left Labor Party.
"There is a concern with the Indian community - and only because there's been large numbers. And we can see that reflected in the way that the community votes for Labor at the same time," Price said.
Her comments incited anger from the Australian-Indian community and elicited demands for an apology, even from members of her own party."People in the Indian community are hurting," Albanese said in a statement to state broadcaster ABC on Tuesday.
"The comments are not true that the senator made and, of course, she should apologise for the hurt that has been caused, and her own colleagues are saying that."
Based on government figures, 845,800 Indians born in India resided in Australia in 2023, up from more than twice the figure of ten years ago. Hundreds of thousands of Australian-born citizens also trace some Indian ancestry.On Tuesday, the New South Wales state government held an emergency meeting with community organizations to discuss what it called growing anti-Australian-Indian sentiment.
"Today we stand together with the Australian-Indian community to say unambiguously that the sort of racist rhetoric and divisive false claims we have seen over the last couple of weeks have no place in our state or country," NSW Premier Chris Minns said.
India's Ministry of External Affairs last week wrote that it was communicating with Canberra on the rise in anti-Indian sentiment in response to the protests.Read also| India and Israel Ink Bilateral Investment Agreement to Strengthen Economic Relations
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