Bonds makes Adam Hyde its new face after he told immigration marchers to "just die"

Bonds, one of Australia's most recognisable household brands, has unveiled Peking Duk frontman Adam Hyde, who also performs solo as Keli Holiday, as its newest ambassador, and shoppers are not letting the brand forget what he said about the Australians who turned out to protest immigration.

The 25-year milestone campaign, billed by Bonds as "25 years of an icon ft. Frontman, Adam Hyde", was meant to be a celebration. Instead the comments filled within hours with customers pledging to boycott the label, pointing straight at the tirade Hyde filmed last year.

Abbie Chatfield's "adult man" who only had swearing to offer

For anyone who has managed to miss her, Abbie Chatfield is a former Bachelor contestant who turned a villain edit into a media career, winning I'm A Celebrity and building a podcast and social following in the hundreds of thousands. She has since become one of the loudest progressive voices in Australian celebrity, and increasingly an activist one, wading into politics at every opportunity. Hyde is her partner.

Chatfield set the video up by introducing him to camera as "an adult man who will speak to you." What the country then got was a stream of swearing, name calling and a death wish aimed at strangers. If that clears the bar for an adult man, the word has lost all meaning, and a dictionary might be a useful place for her to start.

Hyde told the marchers to "just die," said they "belong in jail, or worse," and called them "bigots," "scum" and "a stain on this country" who "belong on the bottom of everybody's shoe." He aimed that at everyone who showed up, not at any one group.

"This is not our land": the argument that eats itself

Strip Hyde's uninformed lecture down and the logic is simple. Unless you are Aboriginal, you are an immigrant. Anyone who came afterwards, even if they were born here, has no real claim to the country because they are not descended from the people who were here first. On that reasoning the protesters had no right to speak, and that was his entire point.

Run it to its conclusion and it falls apart, whichever way you see the world.

Take the Christian view, which holds that every person on earth descends from the same first family. Adam and Eve, one origin, one line that branches out into all of us. On that account no group can claim a deeper root than any other, because we all trace back to exactly the same place.

Take no religion at all, and the science says much the same thing. Every human alive descends from ancestors who walked out of Africa, so on a long enough timeline we are all Africans who moved. The continents we now carve into nations were once a single landmass, and the borders Hyde is so certain about are a very recent human invention drawn over ground that predates all of us by millions of years.

Either way you land in the same spot. "First here" does not end with one tidy group of owners and everyone else as trespassers. Pushed far enough it dissolves, because everybody came from somewhere, and everybody ultimately came from the same somewhere.

And if you genuinely want to get technical, there is only one traditional owner of this land, and that is nature herself. Without her there is no soil, no water, no air and nobody living anywhere, not the protesters, not Hyde, and not a single soul he claims to speak for. Every person who has ever stood on this continent has done so as her guest, on her terms, for a few short decades before handing it back. Set against that, the fight over who arrived a few thousand years ahead of whom is just tenants bickering over a house that none of them built.

The point Adam Hyde skipped: a country runs on social cohesion

Strip away the uninformed outrage and the abuse he hurled at strangers, and there is a serious question Hyde never went near. He told the crowd it "doesn't take a genius" to see the country is not theirs. He is right about one thing there. The playground point about who got here first is easy. The part that actually takes a genius, or at least a moment's quiet thought, is the bit he skipped entirely: how you keep a nation this size and this mixed holding together. Take note Abbie and Adam.

That is exactly where the system is straining. Net permanent and long-term arrivals hit a record 480,520 in 2025, the highest on record, landing on a housing market with rental vacancies at around 0.7% and rents up more than 30% since 2021. Young Australians are locked out of buying, renters are squeezed every quarter, and hospitals, schools and roads are carrying numbers they were never built for.

Australians who raise those concerns, about housing, about infrastructure, about whether communities can integrate newcomers at this speed, are not bigots for doing so. They are reacting to figures the government itself blew past, with net migration running tens of thousands above its own budget forecast. Telling those people to "die" is the response of someone who has no answer to the question.

Abbie Chatfield's own year of damage control

The Bonds backlash did not come from nowhere. Hyde's partner spent much of this year cleaning up her own messes, including a video in which she asked American "incels" "when are you going to do it?" while making a handgun gesture, widely understood as referring to US President Donald Trump. She apologised in May 2026, calling it "a very bad joke" in "extremely poor taste." Around the same time Hyde was refused re-entry to the United States at the Canadian border, cancelling his North American tour.

Turned away at the US border after the Trump video

When Hyde tried to re-enter the United States in May 2026 to finish his North American tour as Keli Holiday, he was stopped at the Canadian border and refused entry, with US authorities citing "national security concerns" and giving no further explanation. The tour was cut short, his New York show was scrapped, and he flew home to Australia.

It doesn't take a ''genius'' to work out what happened. The refusal landed just as Chatfield's handgun-gesture video about President Trump was tearing back across American social media. She swore the two were unrelated and said Hyde "hadn't even seen" the clip, but the line from a partner miming violence at the president to a border knock-back on national-security grounds weeks later draws itself.

The Wiggles ecstasy video Bonds is choosing to overlook

For a brand sold in family homes, Hyde's recent track record is awkward. In November 2025 a clip surfaced of Blue Wiggle Anthony Field, in full costume, dancing with Hyde to his new song about ecstasy. The Wiggles disowned it, stressing they "do not support or condone the use of drugs in any form," and a leading child psychologist called it "disturbing" and "potentially dangerous." It was pulled, but only after more than 92,000 views.

Why the Bonds boycott is gathering pace

Not everyone weighing in wants Bonds punished. Content creator Calista, posting as @thecalistacut, captured the more measured objection in a widely shared video filmed, as it happened, next to a giant Bonds sign. "I don't believe in cancel culture, so I'm not here to cancel Bonds," she said. "I'm not asking you to drop Keli Holiday. I'm asking you to be consistent, because consistency is what integrity actually looks like."

Her point was even-handedness. Bonds, she argued, is "a brand for ALL Australians, left, right, centre," worn by "the tradie in Toowoomba and the inner-city renter in Fitzroy" alike. "You didn't have to make underwear political," she said. "But you did. And now you only represent half the country." If the label is willing to platform a left-wing figure and make it "a whole moment," she asked, would it give "the same energy to a figure on the right?"

That is the question now sitting on Bonds' desk. A brand that spent 25 years selling to every Australian has tied its anniversary to one of the most divisive figures of the year, and the people asking it simply to be consistent are not the fringe. They are its customers.