One Nation has shown no sign of dropping Stuart Bonds, its NSW upper house candidate, from the ticket for the 2027 New South Wales state election, despite censure motions in both houses of the NSW parliament and condemnation from the premier. Bonds spoke against "mass" migration in a Facebook video at a Sydney anti-immigration rally on Sunday, where a man dressed like a medieval knight watched on. With the Coalition consistently polling behind One Nation, Bonds is expected to clear the 4.5% upper house quota at the March poll.

What Bonds said

At the rally, Bonds told supporters:

He also said: "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," adding: "That's the socialist plan, is to destroy and bring down and tear down the fabric of your civilisation."

His remarks were seen as an apparent allusion to the "great replacement theory", a far-right conspiracy theory that white westerners are being "replaced" by non-white immigrants.

On a podcast released Monday with rally organiser the Australian Lobby Group, Bonds did not challenge host Scott Challen's assertion that Labor governments were building "ethnic voting blocks" with Middle Eastern and subcontinent people to entrench power. He responded: "Mate, and that's why we're going to get rid of all of the multicultural grants, right?"

In an ABC Upper Hunter interview on Wednesday, Bonds cited ABS data showing the overseas-born proportion of Australians rose from 10% in 1945 to 32% in 2025. He did not mention that the proportion was at its highest – 32.4% – in 1891, the first year of available data. He said the Australian birthrate was beneath the 2.1 required to replace the population, asking: "Where are these people going to come from?"

Parliament and premiers respond

NSW Premier Chris Minns called Bonds' rally comments "frankly outrageous and racist". The government passed motions in both houses of parliament censuring Bonds, who is not yet a member.

NSW treasurer Daniel Mookhey, whose parents immigrated from India in the 1970s, told the ABC the comments were not grounded in reality. In his reading, Bonds was alleging "a deliberate conspiracy to use migrants to replace" native-born Australians for political reasons.

Deputy premier Prue Car, who has Indian heritage and whose electorate of Londonderry is one of the seats One Nation targets, criticised Bonds in question time on Tuesday. "Who's he [Bonds] talking about when he talks about this?" she asked, saying "he's talking about families like mine, and families that I represent."

Four days after Labor, opposition leader Kellie Sloane said Bonds' language was "clearly divisive".

Sloane's careful position

Sloane did not rule out a confidence and supply arrangement with One Nation after the March state election, saying: "We will not form a coalition with One Nation, [but] we'll work with anyone post-election if we're in a minority government." The Australian Financial Review reported many of her MPs privately expect the party to go into a Coalition with One Nation.

The contrast is stark within the party itself: the One Nation Victorian branch this week disendorsed a lower-house candidate over an old social media post describing Hitler as the GOAT (greatest of all time).

NSW One Nation leader Mike Newman, asked on Tuesday if he agreed with Bonds' comments, defended his candidate. "What Stuart Bonds is a patriotic Aussie. He's a coalminer. He has very, very strong views," Newman said. "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 electoral maths

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

Green said the remarks would be used by Labor in all those multi-ethnic seats in Sydney, where One Nation said it plans to target seats on the rural fringes of the city.

In the lower house, preference flows are not guaranteed at the March election because NSW uses optional preferential voting. Bonds is a former coalminer who has made his base in the Hunter. Redbridge director Kos Samaras said the comments may alienate moderate Liberal voters in Sydney but "you might be able to get away with it in certain parts of NSW", suggesting One Nation could "clean the deck" in the regions, including Labor-held Hunter seats and "pretty much anything else the coalition hasn't got bolted down to the ground".

Asked whether his comments might jeopardise a Coalition preference deal, Bonds told the ABC: "If the Coalition have a problem with facts, the same as the Labor party, then maybe it will," adding: "But I'm not here to impress the Coalition."