One Nation candidate Stuart Bonds' replacement remarks draw criticism

Stuart Bonds, the first candidate on One Nation's New South Wales upper house ticket, has drawn criticism after telling an anti-immigration rally that Australians are being "demographically replaced inside our own nation". He made the remarks on Sunday at a rally in Sydney's CBD, which The Guardian reported was attended by several hundred people.

The upper house is the Legislative Council, the house of state parliament that sits alongside the Legislative Assembly. On current polling, Bonds is likely to win a seat at March's NSW state election.

In his protest speech, Bonds said that unless mass migration was curtailed, demographic replacement would be "impossible to reverse". He also said he did not accept that people like the Bondi shooters were as Australian as the people at the rally. Reports in the Sydney Morning Herald described the remarks as an allusion to the far-right "great replacement" conspiracy theory.

NSW Premier Chris Minns described the comments as "frankly outrageous and racist". He said the replacement theory Bonds espoused was a conspiracy theory that had been brought into Australia from the United States.

Giridharan Sivaraman, the race discrimination commissioner, said comments suggesting some Australians were superior to others sowed "division and hate". He said the idea that migrants can never truly be Australian ignores history and a shared future.

Among those seen at the rally were neo-Nazi Joel Davis and Lyle Shelton, national director of Family First.