Posts falsely link anti-immigrant remarks to former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard

Official transcripts of speeches by Australia's former prime minister Julia Gillard contained no trace of her telling Muslim immigrants to "get out of Australia" if they wanted to live under Islamic sharia law, contradicting posts that claimed she made the remarks on September 19, 2012. The lengthy remarks falsely attributed to Gillard actually closely resembled a mix of quotes from another politician and from an opinion piece published years earlier in a US-based magazine.

"Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law were told on Wednesday to get out of Australia, as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head off potential terror attacks," reads part of a lengthy Facebook post shared on March 3, 2024.

It attributes the comments to Australia's former prime minister Julia Gillard, claiming she made them on September 19, 2012.

The post goes on to say Gillard said she supported spy agencies monitoring Australia's mosques, and quotes her as saying: "IMMIGRANTS, NOT AUSTRALIANS, MUST ADAPT.. Take It Or Leave It. I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture."

The same purported quotes also circulated elsewhere on Facebook here and here, as well as in a post on social media platform X, which was shared more than 1,600 times.

Comments on the posts suggested users believed Gillard had made the remarks.

"Oh, I would love to have a UK prime minister like Julia Gillard," read one comment. Another said: "Australia gets it right."

But the purported comments do not appear in official transcripts of Gillard's speeches from September 19, 2012, and there was no official record she made such remarks during her term as prime minister.

Gillard transcripts

An Australian government website that documents speeches made by Australia's prime ministers shows Gillard attended two events on September 19, 2012 (archived link).

The website shows Gillard met members of the NSW Independent and Catholic Schools Sector and spoke to the Australian Multicultural Council (archived links here and here).

The transcripts show Gillard did not say Muslims who want to live under sharia law should leave Australia at either of these events.

She discussed school funding with the NSW Independent and Catholic Schools Sector and migration with the Australian Multicultural Council.

"[Migration] is: an act of nation-building. And multiculturalism is how we make it work," Gillard said during her speech to the council.

She also condemned violent demonstrations that took place in Sydney days earlier against a film mocking Islam. She had earlier branded the film "repulsive".

AFP reported that six police officers and a number of protesters were injured during the demonstration, which was among several to be held worldwide in response to an amateur film produced in the United States that ridiculed the Prophet Mohammed.

Guilard told the council: "What we saw in Sydney on the weekend wasn't multiculturalism but extremism."

A separate search of the government website containing the collection of prime ministers' transcripts found one record of Gillard talking about sharia law during her term from 2010 to 2013 (archived link).

She told a journalist on July 20, 2011: "There's only one law in this country -- Australian law."

She was responding to a journalist's question about a "sharia law case in Sydney" -- a reference to an incident where a Muslim convert was whipped 40 times as punishment for drinking alcohol and taking drugs (archived link).

Origin of quotes

Moreover, Google searches of keywords used in the posts found that some of the remarks attributed to Gillard were similar to comments made by another politician and opinions written in a magazine article from 2001.

The line about Muslims who follow sharia law needing to leave Australia was similar to remarks made by former treasurer Peter Costello.

"If you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you," said Costello on the Lateline news and current affairs programme in March 2005 (archived link).

Several other lines from the false post appeared to have been lifted from an article published in the VietNow National Magazine, a US-based publication. A snapshot of the article from February 13, 2002 was archived by the Wayback Machine.

The article's wording has been adapted to be more relevant to Australians.

For example, the VietNow article reads: "I am tired of this nation worrying about whether or not we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on September 11th, we have experienced a surge of patriotism by the majority of Americans."

This has been adapted in the false post to say: "I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on Bali, we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Australians."

Variations of the post have appeared since at least 2006, with some attributing the remarks to other former prime ministers.

Several paragraphs from the false post appear in a submission to an Australian senate committee from February 2006 (archived links here and here).

The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper reported in March 2009 that the remarks had been falsely attributed to other former prime ministers, including Kevin Rudd and John Howard (archived link).

ABC News also reported in February 2011 that the remarks had been attributed online and by members of the conservative Tea Party in the United States to former prime minister Rudd (archived link).

Fact-checking website Snopes has also debunked this claim here (archived link).