Indians are set to overtake British-born Australians to become the country’s biggest diaspora and are making their way to the corridors of power.
On a typical Saturday afternoon in western Sydney’s Harris Park, crowds of people listening to Bollywood music gather outside the restaurants that have transformed this old residential area into the Little India precinct. But on this Saturday in early February, people are queuing around the block to a different beat, as dhol drummers celebrate the arrival of a shiny new facet of Australia’s rising diaspora.
The more-than-one-million-strong Australian diaspora of people drawn from Punjab all the way to Fiji is on a roll. Indians are now the largest foreign-born population group apart from British people. While Indian student numbers still lag those from China, they have been growing much faster. Indian permanent migrants overtook Chinese in 2018 and hit almost 100,000 last year.
Daniel Mookhey is padding around his office in saffron-coloured socks when I meet Australia’s most powerful politician with an Indian background, prompting the idea this might be some cultural practice. He explains he has simply left his shoes at the gym, but the image still frames the NSW Treasurer. He’s an archetypal modern Labor politician – a nerdy, sharp communicator, with a picture of a US Democrat hero on the wall – in this case Martin Luther King jnr.
This partly reflects how the community mostly came seeking economic opportunity rather than fleeing persecution. “The Australian diaspora is up for grabs,” he says. “But I think our side of politics is doing a better job than we have in the past.” His new headquarters will place Sharma in an interesting contest for the affections of Indian voters. An equally ambitious new Labor MP, Andrew Charlton, was parachuted into the seat of Parramatta over potential Indian candidates at the last federal election.
Investment banker Swati Dave, who also chairs the federal government’s new Centre for Australia-India Relations, has a pragmatic view of how the diaspora will fit into Australian public life. “Indians are used to both bureaucracy and democracy. So, there are some people who might think it’s a little easier here,” she says.
Bhatia arrived as a 25-year-old engineering and management graduate in 1998 with no connections and started out looking for a job in call centres before working his way through several businesses including KPMG, Wesfarmers and QBE en route to taking the Link top job four years ago. Melbourne lawyer Molina Asthana has worked in both the private and public sectors since arriving 20 years ago and was the first Indian-born vice-president of the Law Institute of Victoria. But her embrace of institutional life ranges across multiple boards from the Australasian Centre for Human Rights and Health to Gymnastics Victoria. “I came with a belief that I was not Australian, so I had to do much more to be part of Australian way of life to succeed,” she says.
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