Of race, religion and politics

The Age – March 10, 2013 – John Elder

With its anti-Islam, anti-multicultural stance, Danny Nalliah’s Rise Up Australia Party has been compared to One Nation. But will its policies win seats in the Senate?

National president of Rise Up Australia, Danny Nalliah, left, and below speaking at the election campaign launch in Hallam.

The most interesting thing about Pastor Danny Nalliah isn’t that he reportedly raises people from the dead, or that Jesus talks to him in dreams, or even that he wants every school to be issued with a wooden spoon for the smacking of naughty bottoms – it’s that his moral authority as a politician comes from the colour of his skin.

He both affirmed and joked about it recently at the Victorian launch of his Rise Up Australia Party. During his speech, Nalliah told a story of being interviewed by an SBS journalist who asked if the party, which is stridently anti-Islamic and calls for an end to multiculturalism, was just another Pauline Hanson white-Australia affair.

”Of course,” said Nalliah, whose voice has an unfortunate tendency to become high-pitched when speech-making, ”he couldn’t see me because I was on the telephone. The fact is, he didn’t realise he was born in the day and I was born at night. I said … the man you’re talking to is a black fellow.”

The congregation laughed and clapped, and was then made part of the joke. When the hooting died down, Nalliah continued: ”I said this is not a white Australia Party. More than a third of our members are of non-Anglo-Saxon origin.”

True enough. Among the 100 or so people gathered in Nalliah’s church hall at Hallam – he heads both the fledgling party and the Catch the Fire Ministry – was a healthy sprinkling of black and Asian faces. Nalliah says there are 30 ethnic groups among his followers. ”We have Fijians, Samoans, Arabs, Africans, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis … so many, and they all feel the same way,” he said.

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