Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has criticised her Liberal colleague Alex Hawke for “cowardly and inappropriate” conduct against her staff while accusing “agenda-driven” media for taking her comments against the Indian community out of context.
It followed Sussan Ley’s appearance on ABC’s Insiders on Sunday, where the opposition leader vowed Price’s comments on Indian migration would not “not be repeated” but side-stepped offering an apology on the senator’s behalf.
In a social media post on Sunday, Price accused Hawke, who was immigration minister in the Morrison government, of berating her staff on Wednesday shortly after she had appeared on the ABC to claim Labor was bringing Indian migrants into Australia to boost its electoral chances.
Price alleged Hawke told her staff that she “may end up like another female member of the Coalition” if the Northern Territory senator did not comply with his requests. It is unclear what the requests were.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
The Guardian understands the unnamed woman is Jane Hume, whose allegations about Chinese “spies” volunteering for Labor sparked backlash in the lead-up to the May election.
“If people want to talk about a so-called ‘woman problem’ in the Liberal party, then it’s this: We don’t stand up for women when they are mistreated by our own colleagues,” Price said.
Price also turned her attention to reporting of the story.
“I’ve also been disappointed by some media reporting which has been agenda-driven and wrenched my comments from context,” she said.
“I’ve had members of the Indian community reach out to me in solidarity.”
In a statement on Sunday, Hawke said he had “accepted” Price’s explanation of “how her comments have been misinterpreted and subsequently weaponised by Labor”.
Hawke said he spoke with Price after she appeared on the ABC. “When we spoke, later that evening, I advised Jacinta that what she had been told was not correct and I rang both to speak with her and to get some media or video from her for distribution. That was all I rang about,” he told the Guardian on Sunday.
Earlier, appearing on ABC’s Insiders, Ley would not be drawn on whether she had counselled Price directly over the immigration furore, or if the senator would apologise directly for the comments.
“The comments were wrong. They shouldn’t have been made. They were corrected. They were corrected, and Jacinta is undertaking her own engagement with the Indian Australian community,” Ley said.
Price, a firebrand Country Liberal party senator who defected from the Nationals party room to the Liberals after the 2025 election, quickly walked back the claims she made on Wednesday, releasing a statement conceding it was a mistake to suggest Australia had anything other than a non-discriminatory migration policy.
However she insisted she had nothing to apologise for in an interview on Thursday, suggesting the ABC interviewer had raised the line of questioning.
In a Saturday interview with Indian Australian news site The Australia Today, Price again refused to apologise, but agreed it had been a “misstep”.
“Where I wrongly misstepped in terms of the comments that I made, I made sure that I corrected, clarified those comments more broadly. As I said, there was nothing I suppose that was disparaging toward the Indian community,” she said.
The senator’s comments came days after anti-immigration marches around the country ignited social tensions, with far-right and extremist groups, including neo-Nazis, joining in on protests.
Price said while she did have concerns about “mass immigration more broadly”, she did not support more extremist ideas.
“I have absolutely no ill will toward Indian Australians in general,” she said.
“Those comments I corrected obviously immediately. Of course, when it comes to those marches that occurred, it is absolutely wrong for those to certainly put pressure or give our Indian community a hard time.
“It is not right. I suppose more clearly my concerns are around the issue of mass migration more broadly.”
She added her sons had Indian heritage, and that she has Indian friends.
Ley will visit Sydney’s Harris Park, also known as Little India, on Sunday evening, to engage further with the Indian Australian community.
Ley told ABC on Sunday migrants weren’t to blame for the Albanese government’s immigration “failure”.
She said Albanese needed to provide the full details of migration levels each year to prevent Australians losing confidence in the system.
“This is not a failure of migrants or migration. This is a failure of government policy to build the infrastructure, to build the services, to have the roads, to have the amenity in our cities,” she said.
Federal government figures show net overseas migration for the 12 months to 31 December 2024 was 341,000 people, down 37% from its peak of 538,000 in the 2022-23.
Ley’s office declined to comment on Price’s allegations about the phone call from Hawke.
