'Demographically replaced' remarks draw fierce criticism, but One Nation shows no sign of dumping candidate Stuart Bonds

In New South Wales, Australia, criticism has erupted over anti-immigration remarks by Stuart Bonds, the One Nation party's upper house candidate, but the party has shown no sign of removing him from its ticket. The former coalminer told an anti-immigration rally in Sydney on Sunday that Australians were being 'demographically replaced' inside their own nation. A Facebook video of the speech has emerged, in which a man dressed like a medieval knight can be seen standing nearby as Bonds speaks.

In that speech, Bonds spoke against 'mass' migration. 'Make no mistake, we are being demographically replaced inside our own nation,' he said. He added: 'If we don't support Australian mothers having Australian children, we [are] going to pay for other cultures' children to be brought up in our lands.'

Bonds's remarks have been seen as an allusion to the 'great replacement theory', a far-right conspiracy theory that claims white westerners are being actively replaced by non-white immigrants. Bonds continued in the speech: 'That's the socialist plan, is to destroy and bring down and tear down the fabric of your civilisation.'

Despite the wave of criticism that followed, One Nation has given no indication that it will take Bonds off the ticket for the coming New South Wales state election. The party did, however, dump one candidate this week: its Victorian branch disendorsed a lower-house candidate over an old social media post describing Hitler as the GOAT, an acronym for the greatest of all time.

The rally was not a one-off. On a podcast released on Monday with the rally's organiser, the Australian Lobby Group, Bonds appeared to double down on the remarks. He did not challenge host Scott Challen's assertion that Labor governments were building 'ethnic voting blocks with Middle Eastern and subcontinent people ... to stack the numbers to entrench power for themselves', instead responding: 'Mate, and that's why we're going to get rid of all of the multicultural grants, right?'

On Wednesday, in an interview with ABC Upper Hunter, Bonds responded to questions about his comments by citing Australian Bureau of Statistics data showing that the proportion of Australians born overseas has trended upward since the end of the second world war, from 10% in 1945 to 32% in 2025. He did not mention that the proportion of Australians born overseas was at its highest — 32.4% — in 1891, the first year of available data. Bonds said the Australian birthrate was beneath the 2.1 required to replace the population. 'I would just like to know what people assume is going to happen,' he said. 'Where are these people going to come from?' he said.

NSW Labor pounced on the rally comments immediately. The state's premier, Chris Minns, called them 'frankly outrageous and racist'. The government passed motions in both houses censuring Bonds, who is not yet a member of parliament.

The Coalition followed four days later. On Wednesday afternoon, the opposition leader, Kellie Sloane, said Bonds's language was 'clearly divisive'. But she did not rule out a confidence and supply arrangement with One Nation after the March state election. 'We will not form a coalition with One Nation, [but] we'll work with anyone post-election if we're in a minority government,' she told reporters.

The Australian Financial Review has reported that many of Sloane's MPs privately expect the party to go into a coalition with One Nation. With the Coalition consistently polling behind One Nation, that makes Bonds not a fringe candidate, but a potentially influential figure, the report noted.

Antony Green, the ABC's former election analyst, said the remarks played straight into Labor's hands. 'This will certainly be something the Labor party uses in all those multi-ethnic seats in Sydney,' he said — seats like those on the rural fringes of Sydney, which One Nation has said it plans to target.

The deputy premier, Prue Car, who has Indian heritage and whose electorate of Londonderry is one of the seats in question, gave an impassioned critique of Bonds's comments in question time on Tuesday. 'Who's he [Bonds] talking about when he talks about this?' she said. 'I tell you who he's talking about — he's talking about families like mine, and families that I represent.'

Kos Samaras, a former Labor strategist who is now a director of the polling group Redbridge, said that while the comments likely won't play well in Sydney seats — including alienating moderate Liberal voters worried about the party going into coalition with One Nation — 'you might be able to get away with it in certain parts of NSW'. Bonds, a former coalminer, has made his base in the Hunter. Samaras said One Nation could 'clean the deck' in the regions, including Labor-held seats in the Hunter, and 'pretty much anything else the coalition hasn't got bolted down to the ground'.

The NSW One Nation leader, Mike Newman, did not respond directly when asked if he agreed with Bonds's comments or if he would rein in his first-placed upper house candidate. Newman, who in September said he 'made a mistake' when he told a Sydney rally he wanted to stop abortions, said on Tuesday: 'What I will say is that what Stuart Bonds is a patriotic Aussie. He's a coalminer. He has very, very strong views.' Newman, who previously rejected claims that One Nation was racist, said on Tuesday: 'What we want to do is ... protect Australian values, and that is the fundamental thing that Stuart Bonds is pushing for. It's about assimilation.'

The NSW treasurer, Daniel Mookhey, whose parents immigrated to Australia from India in the 1970s, told the ABC that Bonds's comments were not grounded in reality. 'I think he's saying that there is a deliberate conspiracy to use migrants to replace the way he puts it, native-born Australians for political reasons,' Mookhey said.

The quota for election to the upper house is 4.5%, making Bonds all but guaranteed to be elected, with One Nation polling in the high 20s and low 30s in recent months. Green expects the party to pick up four or five seats in the upper house. So far it has only named three candidates: Newman, Bonds and Jeff Bacon, a firearms manufacturer who is second on the upper house ticket.

Unlike Victoria, NSW has optional preferential voting, which means when that state goes to the polls in March, lower house preference flows aren't guaranteed. Bonds has downplayed whether he may have jeopardised a future preference deal with the Coalition. 'If the Coalition have a problem with facts, the same as the Labor party, then maybe it will,' he told the ABC. 'But I'm not here to impress the Coalition.'