“Playing the race card” for short-term political gain will erode Australia’s social fabric and damage the country, the former federal Liberal leader John Hewson has said, ahead of a speech by the outgoing race discrimination commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, on Monday night.

Soutphommasane will argue that the biggest threats to racial harmony “come from within our parliaments and from sections of our media”.

He said on Monday that Australia faced a “triple threat” of rising racist sentiment: “politicians playing race politics, sections of media trying to monetise racism, and continued efforts to undermine our institutional stance against racial discrimination”.

Hewson, along with the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, will speak with Soutphommasane following his address in Sydney.

Hewson told the Guardian there had always been elements within Australian politics willing to “play the race card” for a perceived political advantage, and those elements had been emboldened by rising anti-immigration sentiments across the world. Hewson cited the example of Donald Trump exploiting xenophobia in the US the rise of hardline anti-immigration parties in Europe.

“Playing short-term politics with an issue that is so fundamental to our long-term national interest is damaging and dangerous,” he said. “People use it to score political points or to consolidate positions in particular seats, but at what costs in terms of our national coherence? It’s very shortsighted stuff in my view – it should be called out whenever and wherever it occurs.”

Hewson said race was often discussed under the veneer of policy discussion about immigration policy, “a sort of ‘nudge nudge-wink-wink-’, I say ‘immigration’ but you know I’m really talking about ‘race’”.

Hewson said Australia’s multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious polity was its “greatest asset” and must be carefully preserved, rather than divided for political gain.

“It’s divisive, it eats away at the basic social fabric of our community, which is something that must be carefully managed.”

The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, said the role of race discrimination commissioner sometimes required confronting the difficult realities of modern Australia – something that Soutphommasane had consistently done, he said.

“As race discrimination commissioner, he has recognised it is his job to occasionally tell uncomfortable truths,” he said. “It is not easy but it is necessary.”

But the citizenship and multicultural affairs minister, Alan Tudge, has criticised Soutphommasane’s speech, saying he was avoiding discussion of genuine concerns around integration of migrants into Australia.

“It is the easiest thing in the book to yell ‘racism’ but much harder to respectfully and honestly discuss the emerging challenges in our nation,” Tudge told the Australian. “If we cannot discuss the issues sensibly, how will ever address them?”

Tudge said Australia had been “tremendously successful” as a multicultural nation but that “the lessons from Europe is that we should discuss and address the issues as they emerge, and not leave it until the challenges are almost intractable”.

The issue of racial divisions being exploited within the Australian media has come to a head in recent weeks with massive free publicity granted to rightwing anti-Islam extremist Lauren Southern, and a News Corp column arguing a “tidal wave” of migrants was swamping Australia, and that new arrivals were forming enclaves and “changing our culture”.



On Sunday night, Sky News invited Blair Cottrell, a far right figure who has previously advocated hanging pictures of Adolf Hitler in classrooms, distributing copies of Mein Kampf to schoolchildren and who has a string of criminal convictions for arson, burglary and racial vilification, on air for a one-on-one interview with the former Northern Territory chief minister Adam Giles.

Sky subsequently said the interview should not have gone to air. It has removed it from its social media, but segments of the interview are still available online.

“It was wrong to have Blair Cottrell on Sky News Australia,” news director Greg Byrnes tweeted. “His views do not reflect ours. The interview has been removed from repeat timeslots and online platforms.”

Soutphommasane said the Cottrell interview was an example of Australian media indulging extremist views.