Ganilau was a guest speaker at the Lautoka conference of the Fiji Labour Party, with which his own party subsequently formed a coalition to contest the general election scheduled for 2006, on 30 July 2005. Calling for changes in the attitudes of indigenous Fijians to allow everyone born in Fiji to be classified as "Fijian," he said that the country could not afford to remain fragmented and polarised on racial lines, and that racially based measures enacted by the present government were shortening the fuse on a time bomb. ""Government seems unaware that the more race-based measures it tries to put in place the faster that time bomb burns to detonation point,"" Ganilau said. He said that until Fiji Islanders got out of their ethnic boxes and embraced multiculturalism, Fiji's future as a nation would not be secure. He expressed disbelief that after a century and a quarter of sharing the land, the level of cultural interaction between the major racial groups was so low.