Exclusive: Shadow immigration minister promises a new tone when talking about migrants as Liberals work to rebuild support among multicultural communities
The federal opposition will adopt a more empathetic approach to migrants that seeks to emphasise people's positive contribution to Australia, says the new shadow immigration minister, Paul Scarr, drawing a line under the harsh anti-immigration rhetoric deployed under Peter Dutton.
Scarr, who is also shadow minister for multicultural affairs, told Guardian Australia it is a "profound tragedy" that Chinese, Indian and other diaspora communities have abandoned the Liberals at the past two elections, as in his view, their values should naturally align with the party's core principles.
His comments come as the pollster and former Labor strategist Kos Samaras says that to have any hope of winning those voters back, the Coalition would need to abandon an approach to multicultural Australia that acted "like we are still living in 1996".
"They have hard-baked a brand that they are not a political party that likes people who have come to the country over the past 15 or 20 years," Samaras says.
Immigration was one of the Coalition's main priorities under Dutton, who promised dramatic cuts to permanent migration and net overseas migration as he sought to directly link a post-pandemic influx of people to the housing supply and affordability crisis.
The future of those policies is up in the air as the Liberals, now led by Sussan Ley, review their entire agenda after the election defeat.
But one thing Scarr has immediately committed to is a new tone when talking about migrants, signalling a dramatic shift from the sort of inflammatory language associated with Dutton's immigration agenda.
At various points during the previous term, Dutton - who has a long history of comments attacking refugees and asylum seekers - called for a temporary ban on people from Gaza coming to Australia and floated the idea of a referendum on deporting dual citizens who committed serious crimes.
Without reflecting on his former leader, Scarr says empathy would drive his approach to the immigration debate.
"One of the things I am passionate about is getting the tone of discussion right - I think that is of critical importance," Scarr says. "And any discussion of immigration must proceed, in my view, on the basis of the contribution that's been made to this country by so many people who have come to this country as migrants.
"So [when] we talk about immigration, we talk about numbers in a macro sense, but we should never forget that we're actually talking about real people, real families who have different, varying experiences."
The Queensland senator traces his commitment to multiculturalism to his pre-politics career as a lawyer, working in Papua New Guinea and later for a mining company with interests in Laos, Chile, Myanmar and Thailand among other countries.
Scarr says he was aware of how hurtful "loose", "harsh" or "clumsy" comments from politicians could be for migrant communities, and put the onus on his colleagues to be "ever-mindful" of their language.
He says it is hard to rebuild bridges if there is a lack of trust or a disconnect between politicians and communities.
Multicultural communities were among voter groups to abandon the Coalition at the past two elections, with Chinese voters, for example, swinging heavily to Labor in seats such as Chisholm, Aston and Menzies in Melbourne and Bennelong and Reid in Sydney.
"It is a profound tragedy that we're currently in this situation where there is that disconnect," Scarr says.
"The values of so many members of the multicultural communities are absolutely aligned with the values of the Liberal party, in terms of reward for effort, in terms of individual freedoms - because in many cases people have fled countries where they're deprived those freedoms - and in terms of the importance of the family unit."
Scarr has no immediate explanation of why migrant communities had deserted the party but suggests the Coalition's political opponents had been able to successfully weaponise public statements to tarnish their image.
Labor seized on Jane Hume's "Chinese spies" claim in the dying days of the federal election campaign, circulating a video message featuring Penny Wong speaking in Mandarin to voters on the social media app WeChat.
Yun Jiang, at the University of Technology Sydney Australia-China Relations Institute, says the Liberal party has traditionally "appealed" to many Chinese migrants who come on skills visas, set up small businesses in Australia and are socially conservative.
But she says it will be "difficult" for the Liberals to regain the support of the Chinese community, and that they will need to "tone down their language" on China.
"The Liberals' [2022 election] postmortem said they need to be more mindful of language, but clearly, at the end of the last election campaign ... they seemed to forget the lessons they had written down themselves," she says.
"They [the Coalition] would need to be much more careful about their language around the threat of China, and especially on Chinese [people] being portrayed as spies or nefarious actors influencing the Australian political landscape ... I think they also need to tone down the constant talk of war."
Samaras, who now works for research firm RedBridge, says it will take years for the Liberals to rebuild support among multicultural communities.
The task is electorally critical, given the party's diminished numbers in parliament as well as the rapid growth in the Chinese and Indian diasporas, particularly in the outer suburbs of Melbourne.
"When we speak to them [voters in focus groups] and they walk through their values, which are all about wealth accumulation, aspiration, small business - these people should be, culturally, Coalition voters," Samaras says. "But then we ask them why they are not, [and] their answer is pretty blunt: 'They don't like us'."
Scarr accepts the assessment.
"Every single day between now and election day, and in fact, every single day after I was elected, I do everything I can to change and recalibrate those perspectives," he says.