Read full media statement in PDF attachment below:
STATEMENT FROM CEO OF ALLIES IN COLOUR
Melbourne, Australia – Aug 30, 2025 – The “March for Australia” protest planned for August 31 is not an anomaly. It is the predictable, venomous flower that blooms from the poisoned soil of decades of government policy that has treated culturally and racially marginalised (CARM) communities as problems to be managed, rather than people to be empowered.
For too long, the government’s approach to multiculturalism has been one of surveillance and social control, masquerading as “social cohesion.” This rhetoric, which asks how we can fit into their Australia, rather than how we build a new Australia together, has given license to the very hatred this march represents.
“These rallies are not happening in a vacuum. For decades, governments have treated multicultural communities as something to be surveilled and ‘managed’ under a social cohesion lens—rather than as Australians to be trusted with power, leadership and decision-making. When you reduce communities to a public-order problem, you license suspicion. And suspicion is the soil where anti-migration movements grow.”
Tharini Rouwette, CEO, Allies in Colour
It is a profound failure of leadership that creates a direct line from the halls of Parliament to the hate-filled signs on the street.
This march occurs in a context of wilful national amnesia. A country that cannot truly accept the ongoing genocide and suffering of its First Peoples, and make the substantive reparations that are owed, has no moral ground to stand on when judging who is worthy of belonging. The ongoing violence of incarceration, child removal, and preventable early deaths are the original sin that continues to taint Australia’s relationship with anyone deemed “other.”
The recent establishment of the Office of Multicultural Affairs within the Department of Home Affairs is a glaring example of this pathological mindset. This is not a promotion; it is a proclamation. It institutionalises the idea that multicultural communities are a matter of national security, border protection, and policing – an issue to be handled by the same department that manages our offshore detention camps.
Contrast this with the Office for Women, which rightly sits within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. This grants it an all-of-government purview, signalling that women’s issues are central to the nation’s economic, social, and political future. Why are the issues of millions of multicultural Australians not afforded the same status? Why are we relegated to the department of control and fear?
“Placing multicultural affairs under Home Affairs sends a signal of control and compliance, not partnership. Women’s policy sits at the heart of government; multicultural policy should too. If we’re serious, move multicultural affairs to PM&C with a whole-of-government mandate, and resource it to lead, not just monitor.”
Tharini Rouwette, CEO, Allies in Colour
The “March for Australia” protesters are merely the loudest, crudest exponents of a logic that already exists within our state architecture: that some lives are more valuable, more Australian, and more deserving of safety and power than others.
Allies in Colour calls for an immediate and fundamental rethink:
- Relocate the Office of Multicultural Affairs to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, granting it the cross-portfolio authority and prestige it deserves.
- End the rhetoric of “managing” multiculturalism and replace it with a framework of power-sharing, co-design, and structural inclusion.
- Adopt the Australian Human Rights Commission’s , “National Anti- Racism Framework”, which contains 63 recommendations for a whole of society approach to eliminating racism.
The answer to the “March for Australia” is not just condemnation. It is a complete dismantling of the policies that made it possible. We must choose between a future of genuine, powerful multiculturalism, or a continued slide into state-sanctioned division.
The time for choosing is now.
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