The DNA of Aborigines and Indians: Parwinder Kaur's Genetic Gambit in Australia's Immigration Wars, By Brian Simpson and Paul Walker

In the damp and musky halls of Western Australia's Parliament, on a crisp September evening in 2025, Indian-origin Labor MP Parwinder Kaur unleashed a speech that ricocheted across the globe like a digital boomerang. Delivered amid a surge of anti-immigration protests, fuelled by housing crunches, job anxieties, and echoes of global nativism, Kaur, a Punjabi-born scientist who migrated to Australia in 2007 and was sworn into office, didn't just defend migrants. She wielded ancient DNA like a scalpel, slicing through the "who's more Australian?" debate with a claim that some Aboriginal Australians carry up to 11% "ancient Indian" ancestry from migrations 4,000 years ago. "Our genes are integrated into the very first peoples of this nation," she declared, urging an end to nativist squabbles and spotlighting migrants' economic muscle: 8.6 million Aussies born overseas, nearly half of STEM jobs in immigrant hands, and a projected 40% GDP boost by 2050 from continued inflows. It was a pro-immigration mic drop, viral on YouTube (over 500K views in days) and X, where it sparked 20,000+ engagements. Praise poured in from diaspora circles, @TheDCIndia hailed it as a "viral takedown" of bigotry, but backlash erupted like bushfire. Critics, from X firebrand Drew Pavlou to outlets like The Noticer, accused her of flipping the script to claim Indians are "more Australian" than white Europeans, a "catastrophic" blow to social cohesion. But we here unearth a delicious irony: Kaur's invocation of "ancient Indian" roots unwittingly echoes the very migratory waves that reshaped India itself through white Aryan inflows. Her paean to deep-time belonging, meant to bridge divides, instead unmasks a universal truth: No one's "pure," we're all mixed in migration's long march. Let's dissect this genetic grenade, thread by ancient thread.

The Speech: A Genetic Jujitsu Against Nativism

Kaur's address, on September 9, 2025, in the WA Legislative Council, wasn't her maiden voyage, her inauguralalready nodded to Sikh resilience, but this one landed amid raw nerves. Australia's immigration debate was boiling: Protests in Melbourne and Sydney decried "mass migration" as a housing thief, with One Nation's Pauline Hanson railing against "uncontrolled" arrivals. Kaur, a molecular biologist with a PhD in plant genetics, pivoted from empathy to evidence. "It was not long ago that I gave my inaugural speech... but today, I stand here to address the recent anti-migration protests," she began, per the Hansard transcript. Then, the hook: Citing a 2013 Harvard study by David Reich et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she revealed gene flow from India to Aboriginal Australia around 141 generations (4,000 years) ago, with some Indigenous genomes showing 4–11% South Asian markers, likely from ancient seafarers trading dingo-like dogs and tools. "Long before Europeans set foot on this land, migration from India... integrated our genes into the very first peoples," she intoned, her voice steady over the chamber's murmurs.

It wasn't just ancestry porn; it was policy judo. Kaur flipped nativist "soil over blood" rhetoric: Why gatekeep "Australianness" when migrants supercharge the engine? Eight-point-six million Aussies, 29% of the population, born abroad, per ABS 2021 data (updated to 2023 at 30%). Migrants? Forty-seven percent of the STEM workforce, from Indian coders in Sydney's tech hubs to Chinese engineers in Perth's mines. And the kicker: Treasury models project migration adding A$2.5 trillion to GDP by 2050, 40% uplift, via labour shortages filled and innovation sparked. "Who is more Australian? How do we define that?" she challenged. "The evidence is clear: We are all part of this nation's story." X lit up with approbation, @SBSPunjabi's clip racked 10K likes, diaspora users cheering "Finally, science slays the trolls." But the viral wave crested into controversy.

Backlash: From Viral Hit to Harmony Hazard

Kaur's words didn't just echo; they exploded. YouTube views hit 1M+ within a week, but X's semantic storm, scanning 20 posts, tilted toward ire: 60% negative, per our tally, with phrases like "damage to social fabric" dominating. Drew Pavlou, the activist exiled from UQ over China critiques, dropped a 1.6K-like thread: "She appears to be saying Indian Australians are more Australian than European Australians... catastrophic for inter-communal harmony." The Noticer amplified: "Sikh immigrant... claims Indians are 'more Australian' than White people," their clip netting 773 likes and 346 replies, many decrying it as "reverse racism." @aus_pill twisted the knife with 1.1K likes: "Australia is a White European construct... if anything, Parwinder argued she is 'less Australian'."

Articles piled on: MSN and Times of India noted the flak — "This woman only migrated in 2007... suggesting Indians are more Australian than Whites." The Indian Sun framed it as a "row on who is 'more Australian,'" with critics accusing her of "distorting history" to score points. Even supporters like @Karenjane92210 quipped darkly: "Welcome to Country just got longer—honour Aboriginal and Indian ancestors." Kaur's intent? Bridge-building via biology. The fallout? A reminder that DNA, like dynamite, demands careful handling, especially when it pokes at white fragility in a nation still grappling with its white dispossession.

Verifying the Science: Ancient Mariners or Mythic Link?

Kaur's DNA dagger draws from solid steel: The 2013 Reich study analyzed 344 Aboriginal genomes, uncovering a "ghost" admixture event ~4,230 years ago, with 4–11% affinity to South Asian (specifically, Andamanese-like) populations, likely Austronesian or Dravidian sailors plying the Indian Ocean. No "invasion," but gene flow via trade or drift, predating European contact by millennia. It's a sliver, most Aboriginal DNA (89–96%) traces to a singular East Asian wave 50,000 years ago, but potent symbolism: Migration's not modern malaise; it's humanity's eternal burden. Kaur, as a geneticist, knows the caveats: Admixture doesn't confer "rights," and "Indian" here means ancient South Asian, not Punjab 2025. Yet in her framing, it's a poetic retort to "go back to where you came from" — if "where" loops back to Australia's dawn, who's the outsider?

Her economic salvo holds water too: ABS confirms 8.6M overseas-born (30% of 26M total), with migrants overrepresented in STEM (47%, per 2023 Skills Priority List). Treasury's Intergenerational Report (2023) projects migration averting a 1.5% GDP drag from aging, ballooning the economy by 40% via 235K annual net inflows, though critics carp at housing strains (rents up 15% YoY). Pro-immigration? Undeniably. But as X's @NoticerNews (1K likes) sneered, it risks "erasing" European contributions, the railways, federation, the very parliamentary perch Kaur occupies.

The Aryan Echo: Undermining Origins with Deeper Migrations

Here's where Kaur's speech, for all its forward thrust, circles back to bite its own tail, and unwittingly bolsters the very migratory relativism it deploys. By invoking "ancient Indian" ties to Aboriginal roots, she spotlights gene flow as belonging's bedrock. But rewind India's own tape: The subcontinent's story is a palimpsest of influxes, none more mythologised than the white Aryan migration, now etched in DNA, which can still be seen in the lighter phenotypes of many Indians today.

The theory, once "invasion," now "migration," posits white Indo-European speakers from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (Yamnaya culture) "migrating" into northwest India ~2000–1500 BCE, fusing with locals to birth Vedic Sanskrit and caste-like hierarchies. Genetic proof? A 2019 Science paper by Narasimhan et al. sequenced 523 ancient South Asians, revealing Steppe ancestry in modern Indians: 10–20% in northern groups (ANI, Ancestral North Indian), tapering south (ASI, Ancestral South Indian). Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a, Steppe hallmark, clocks 17.5% in Indian males, spiking in Brahmins (up to 72%). No wholesale replacement, India's a trinary brew: 50K-year-old Out-of-Africa base, Iranian farmer influx ~8K years ago, then Steppe elites ~3.5K years back, per Reich's 2018 synthesis. Vedic texts hint at it: Light-skinned "Arya" clashing with dashed "Dasa." This racial division was fused into the caste system which tried and failed to preserve the Aryan heritage. Don't blame us; it's history.

The irony for Kaur? Her "ancient Indian" progenitors, those 4,000-year-old mariners, likely carried "white" genes as well! Just as Kaur uses pre-European gene flows to claim deep Australian roots, Aryan evidence flattens Indian nativism, Hindutva's "Out-of-India" theory crumbles under Cell's 2023 bones from Sinauli (no Steppe, but local continuity). Her speech, pro-immigration beacon, thus undermines absolutist "indigeneity": If all Aussies (and Indians) are layered migrants, "more Australian" dissolves into absurdity. As @Pam_Palmater warns in an older thread (226 likes), blood quantum's a colonial trap, DNA proves mixture, not monopoly.

Tying the Knot: Migration's Eternal Loop

Parwinder Kaur's speech is a triumph of intent, pro-immigration firepowergrounded in her Sikh ethos of sarbat da bhala (welfare for all). It spotlights migrants as Australia's sinew, from STEM labs to legislative benches. Yet the backlash reveals a raw nerve: In a nation born of British boots on Indigenous soil, invoking DNA to "out-Australian" whites risks rekindling the very tribalism it seeks to quell. It implicitly undermines the racial story of Aborigines as the "pure" inhabitants of this country, as their origin is not 60,000 years, and they are a "mixed" population from the very beginning." On the genetic evidence see:

J. Allen and J. F. O'Connell, "Recent DNA Studies Question a 65 Kya Arrival of Humans in Sahul," Archaeology in Oceania, vol. 60, 2025, pp, 187-190.

And the Aryan mirror? A profound undercut to her pro-immigration pleading. If "ancient Indian" belonging traces to migrants who themselves absorbed Steppe nomads, Kaur's argument loops into universality: We're all arrivals, layering stories on shared dirt, undermining her position! The real question comes down to cultural heritage and the establishment of the country as an entity in modernity, which is clearly that of British heritage and traditions, not Indian, or Aboriginal.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/10/india-cannot-rescue-australia-from-itself/