CHAPTER 16

How can we fight the far right?

Evan Smith

Since 2015, the threat of the far right in Australia has grown, as both a political phenomenon and as a proponent of violence.¹ In April 2021, two members of the National Socialist Network (NSN) in South Australia were arrested for terrorism offences, while the next month, the NSN’s leader, Thomas Sewell, was arrested for alleged armed robbery in Victoria.² In 2020, an 18-year-old in New South Wales was charged with terrorism-related offences.³ Alongside these arrests, the extreme right accelerationist group Sonnenkrieg Division was the first proscribed right-wing extremist group in Australia since new legislation was brought in after 9/11.⁴ At the same time, the Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) stated that security services had been increasingly attuned to right-wing extremism, with ‘ideological extremism’ now comprising 40 per cent of ASIO’s counter-terrorism caseload.⁵ As well as these responses from the police and security services, investigative journalists in Australia and the United States have documented the networks of the extreme far right in Australia and its links to overseas groups.⁶

In electoral politics, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party had four senators elected in 2016. One of those senators, Malcolm Roberts, was ruled ineligible to sit in parliament the following year, before being re-elected in 2019. In addition, former Labor leader Mark Latham became a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council in 2019 for One Nation. Other (now former) federal politicians, such as George Christensen, Craig Kelly and Fraser Anning, also sought to exploit the space to the right of the Liberal/National Party and courted support from the far right.

Between the electoral sphere and the extremist element, the far right has also attempted to gain a presence on the streets. Since 2015, a range of far-right groups has emerged in Australia, principally in protest against Islam. These groups are inspired by similar movements in Europe, such as the English Defence League, Germany’s PEGIDA and Generation Identity, which started in France and has spread across most of Western Europe. A combination of in-fighting among those involved in these groups, arrests for various offences and counter-protests against them, led a number of people to move into more clandestine forms of far-right organising. But others have been galvanised by the anti-lockdown protests during the COVID-19 pandemic and, as journalists and activists have shown, far-right personalities have been prominent in the anti-lockdown movement across Australia.⁷ This was the case in the anti-lockdown demonstrations in Melbourne in September 2021 and in the ‘Canberra Convoy’ in February 2022.⁸

There has been much deliberation about how to respond to the far-right threat in Australia. Labor’s Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, Kristina Keneally, has recently called for greater action by the state in dealing with the far right, including proscription, increased funding for counter-extremist programs and actions to counter far-right extremism on social media.⁹ She also stated that we ‘need our national leaders to be consistent in naming and condemning right-wing extremist views’.¹⁰

Keneally’s urge for Canberra to crack down on right-wing extremism comes after equivocation from the Coalition government over the issue. There has been a propensity for government members, such as the Defence (and former Home Affairs) Minister Peter Dutton and (former) Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, to speak about far-right political violence only in the context of also mentioning Islamic and ‘left-wing’ terrorism.¹¹ In the aftermath of the far-right storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, the former Australian Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, drew a comparison between this and the Black Lives Matter rallies across the world the previous year, characterising both as ‘unfortunate events’.¹²

The call for greater state intervention to address the challenge posed by the far right, particularly extreme right political violence, is problematic. First, the tools that the state can use against extreme right-wing groups likely to be involved in political violence, such as proscription and prosecution for terrorist-related offences, are ones that have been predominantly forged during the ‘War on Terror’ against jihadist groups. They may not be as effective against right-wing extremism.¹³ Secondly, calls for a government crackdown seek to address the most violent forms of right-wing politics in Australia. They do not address the other forms the far-right threat takes in Australia, such as political parties, street campaigns and the use of social media to spread their messages. Historically, the state’s approach to far-right activism on the streets has been to treat it as a public order issue, but this has often involved heavy policing of counter-protests against far-right marches and public gatherings.¹⁴ Thirdly, the far and extreme right in all their forms are driven by many of the same racist and settler colonialist ideas that underpin the institutions of the state and mainstream Australian politics. This can be seen in the widespread endorsement of the restrictive border control system and the racial discrimination and violence experienced by minorities in this country.¹⁵ A broader fight against racism in all its forms is needed for combating the far right, otherwise it allows the mainstream to portray racism as ‘other’, rather than something embedded within Australian society more generally.

People making policy decisions need to be aware that the far right can be more effectively fought if the wider issue of racism in society is also addressed. It requires the mobilisation of different sections of society to confront the racism of the mainstream political parties (such as the bipartisan support for strict border controls), the institutions of the state (such as the police or the welfare system) and the racial discrimination experienced in ‘everyday life’, such as in the workplace or on the streets. A lesson for policymakers from past episodes is that when there are efforts to combat racism on a broader scale, popular movements against fascism and the far right can have more of an impact. In Australia, anti-fascist activism has had more success when it has mobilised people from various sections of society, such as the trade unions, community groups, students and the left, and has combined this with campaigns for Aboriginal rights, against apartheid, against police racism and for refugee rights.

Anti-fascism here and abroad in the 1930s

In the 1930s, Australians felt the threat of fascism and war both domestically and internationally. In early 1931, a right-wing paramilitary group known as the New Guard formed to protect Australia from communism, militant trade unionism and Jack Lang’s Labor government in New South Wales.¹⁶ According to historian Keith Amos, by the end of the year, it was estimated that membership of the New Guard had reached at least 50 000, with around 36 000 in the greater Sydney area.¹⁷

In response to the rise of the New Guard, there was both organised and unorganised opposition. Both the Australian Labor party and the Communist party of Australia had their members form workers’ defence groups. The Australian Labor Army (ALA), formed from the NSW Labor Party and the Workers Defence Corp (WDC), was established by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), with support from the NSW Labor Council.¹⁸ The WDC had originally been created to protect striking workers in 1929 and was revived in 1931 to combat the New Guard.¹⁹ While these groups did mobilise on occasion to protect public meetings and confront the right-wing agitators, historian Andrew Moore argues that, in general, ‘the paramilitary response of the labour militias to the New Guard was truncated’.²⁰ At the same time, there were also street fights between the New Guard and communists, particularly as the New Guard targeted meetings of the communist-aligned Unemployed Workers Movement (UWM) – although Moore also contends that these pitched battles were not as frequent as previous historians had stated.²¹

While left-wing opposition to the New Guard may have been tempered, it is nonetheless significant, because it was tied to other campaigns that reached into the community. The New Guard was seen as a symptom of capitalism in crisis during the Great Depression. The communists, as well as left-leaning sections of the labour movement, linked the fight against the right-wing paramilitary group to actions defending trade union activity and the unemployed. Starting in 1930, the UWM was highly active throughout the Depression years, claiming 68 000 members in the eastern states by 1934.²² Targeted by the New Guard for its activism in support of the unemployed (such as anti-eviction actions), the UWM became intrinsically connected to the defence of the working class against embryonic fascism in Australia.²³ As activist historian Alex North wrote in Jacobin in 2020, the ‘UWM may have lacked wealthy sponsors and the support of field marshals – but it could call on the power of organized labor, employed and unemployed, as well as deep community support’.²⁴

The threat of the New Guard dissipated after the dismissal of Jack Lang as NSW premier in May 1932. The changing situation overseas, however (including the rise of Nazi Germany, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and Italian colonialism in Africa), saw the mobilisation of the left, primarily the Communist party, against fascism. The prospect of another world war loomed. In 1933, the CPA was instrumental in setting up the Movement Against War and Fascism (originally the Council Against War), which saw militarism and fascism as twin threats to the world, ‘waging war against the working class at the same time that it prepared for war abroad’.²⁵ Fighting both militarism and fascism also meant fighting colonialism and imperialism. This included solidarity with Ethiopians during the Italian–Abyssinian War in 1935, support for Indian independence from Britain and campaigning for Aboriginal rights in Australia.²⁶ Historian Padraic Gibson has shown that the Communist party and its fellow travellers in the labour movement argued that the struggle against fascism and militarism abroad could not be conducted without simultaneously fighting racism in Australia. This primarily meant combating the discrimination and violence experienced by Indigenous people.²⁷

At the same time, fascism was being confronted in Australia’s Italian communities. The Fascist government in Italy had placed significant emphasis on building support for the Mussolini regime among the Italian diaspora around the world, including in Australia. Anti-fascist activists among the Italian communities in Melbourne and Sydney agitated against this, publishing several anti-fascist journals and organising anti-fascist clubs within these communities.²⁸ But it was in North Queensland where Italian anti-fascists made their presence felt most emphatically.

During the interwar period, especially in the areas where sugar cane was grown, North Queensland was known as the ‘Red North’, due to the militant trade union movement and the influence of the CPA.²⁹ Within the North Queensland Italian community, particularly around Innisfail and Ingham, there were a number of communists and anarchists who interacted with the Communist party in order to combat fascism.³⁰ In the early to mid-1930s, there were several instances of Italian anti-fascists physically intimidating fascists who came to the region. Over the next few years, anti-fascists also mobilised in solidarity with Republican Spain and the burgeoning anti-war movement.³¹ Like the Communist Party’s fight against the New Guard in the early 1930s and subsequent campaigns against militarism and fascism, the Italian anti-fascists linked their local anti-fascism to events happening abroad and embedded their anti-fascist activities within other struggles, such as trade union actions concerning workplace issues.

Anti-fascism in the ‘decade of dissent’

In the first decades after the Second World War, the far right in Australia was marginalised and mentioned infrequently in the media – and only then as a tabloid spectacle. Its anti-Semitism was monitored by the Jewish community, as well as by the Communist party and the Returned Services League.³² As left-wing radicalism grew during the 1960s, the far right attempted to intervene, seeking to publicly confront the movements against the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa in particular. The National Socialist Party of Australia (NSPA) mobilised its small membership, holding counter-demonstrations and physically intimidating anti-war and anti-apartheid protesters. The party also caused property damage to Jewish and left-wing shops. Police were forced to intervene on occasion to prevent violent altercations between left-wing protesters and the far right.

By the early 1970s, the leadership of the NSPA was primarily located in Canberra and Melbourne, with the national organiser and national secretary of the party being the husband-and-wife team of Cass and Katrina Young. Residing in Melbourne, the Youngs sought to enhance the profile of the party by running in the 1970 Senate election. They gained just 0.13 per cent of the vote.³³ But Melbourne was also a significant hub of radicalism in the early 1970s. The city hosted the first national Vietnam Moratorium March in May 1970, and student protest movements developed on several university campuses, including Monash and La Trobe.³⁴

Between 1971 and 1972, there were several protests against the National Socialists in Australia, bringing together various Marxists from the anti-war movement and militants within the Jewish community. David Harcourt and Philip Mendes give the example of the crowd of socialist and Jewish activists who coalesced on the bank of the Yarra River in January 1971 to protest against a planned NSPA march; when the neo-Nazis did not show, some of the activists descended on the NSPA headquarters in North Carlton, only to be prevented from entering the property by police.³⁵ Skirmishes between neo-Nazis and various movements on the left occurred over the next year and a half. NSPA members attempted to disrupt events and demonstrations, such as an address by Gough Whitlam in Sydney in March 1971 and the Vietnam Moratorium March in June of the same year.³⁶ These confrontations culminated in conflict at the NSPA’s annual congress in Melbourne in June 1972, with an anti-Nazi demonstration held in the City Square and around 100 protesters later going to the Young’s house. Unlike the protest action surrounding the NSPA headquarters nearly 18 months earlier, the police were seemingly not present to stop the house being vandalised.³⁷

The protest action at the NSPA’s annual congress in 1972 was taken by two unlikely allies, the Maoist Worker Student Alliance (WSA) and the Radical Zionist Alliance (RZA), a student group established to combat anti-Zionism within the new left in Australia.³⁸ While the two groups had diametrically opposed views of the Israel-Palestine conflict, both opposed the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and the National Socialist Party of Australia. In a reflection on the history of the Australian Jewish Left, David Zyngier, a member of the RZA, explained to journalist Mika Benesh how the two groups came together for this anti-fascist action:

This was less about antisemitism and more about anti-fascism. That’s my strong gut feeling about it. The view was, Nazis are fascists and fascists need to be defeated. While from a Jewish perspective of course we were concerned about the antisemitism, and I’m not trying to say that this wasn’t an issue for the non-Jewish left, but this was seen as part of the broader struggle against imperialism and fascism.³⁹

For those opposing the far right in the early 1970s, opposition to fascism and anti-Semitism was often combined with opposition to US imperialism in Vietnam and apartheid in South Africa. In the case of the WSA and the RZA, these different groups mobilised together against neo-Nazism when other issues, particularly the Israel–Palestine conflict, kept them very separate and in conflict with each other.

Taking the far right more seriously

The NSPA faded away over the next few years and was succeeded by two competing strands of the extreme right. On one side was the National Front of Australia (NFA), which was linked to the National Front in Britain and endorsed the creation of a white Commonwealth. On the other side were the ‘radical nationalists’, who began as National Resistance in 1977 and through several different mutations, eventually became National Action (NA) in 1982. The NFA gained considerable media attention when it was launched in 1978, but soon faded away.⁴⁰ But National Action (and its Western Australian breakaway group, the Australian Nationalist Movement (ANM)) became a much more concerning threat, as it was involved in campaigns of racial violence and harassment throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.

Prior to the 1980s, far-right activists in Australia were often dismissed as cranks and were predominantly a low priority for the authorities (with attention paid more to the potential clashes between the far right and the far left). But during the years of Labor government under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, the government, the police and security services took the threat of the far-right agitators more seriously, as instigators of political violence and disseminators of racist propaganda. ASIO assessed ‘the threat of violence from NA and ANM to be low’ before 1988, despite ‘the firebombing of a vehicle owned by an anti-apartheid campaigner and damage to the home of the then Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Mr Hurford’.⁴¹ But between 1988 and 1991, the Australian government and ASIO realised the far right’s capability for extreme violence. Several NA and ANM members in New South Wales and Western Australia were subsequently jailed for acts of violence.⁴²

One reason for the increased recognition of the far-right threat by government was that numerous organisations, such as anti-racist, church and migrant groups highlighted the racism that ethnic minorities in Australia faced from the far right, as well as the intimidation of anti-racist campaigners.⁴³ The Hawke and Keating governments promoted multiculturalism and non-racism at the official level, creating an environment where popular opposition to the far right could be vocalised and mobilised. But it should be acknowledged that despite this government commitment to multiculturalism, racism still existed within Australian society, including within institutions of the state. As the anthropologist Ghassan Hage has written, in the Hawke–Keating years, there seemed to exist two perceptions of ‘race relations’ in Australia: ‘Multiculturalism is working well and belongs to one (mainstream) reality, and racist violence is occurring in another (marginal) reality. Multiculturalism is in one valley and racist violence in another … And the two are not supposed to be related in any way.’⁴⁴

Several scholars have pointed to varieties of anti-fascism, such as militant, liberal or moderate and state or legal anti-fascism.⁴⁵ While militant and liberal anti-fascism are often grassroots initiatives against fascism, state or legal anti-fascism is the way in which the police, government and security services have targeted fascism or the extreme right. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the latter approach gained ground in response to the threat of NA and the ANM. Alongside increased policing of these groups, another response by the state was an inquiry into racial violence by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. The inquiry’s 1991 report identified the far right as a particular problem, stating:

15. The activities of extremist groups, which have become more violent in recent years, constitute a small but significant part of the problem of racist violence in Australia.

16. The activities of extremist groups, some of which have resulted in prosecutions, show a close connection between racist propaganda and racist violence.

17. In assessing the extent of organised racist violence, it is important to acknowledge the role of long standing racist organisations which do not perpetrate violence themselves, but nevertheless provide the impetus for others. These organisations essentially incite and maintain prejudice.⁴⁶

The report recommended a number of legal reforms to stop racist violence, intimidation and harassment. Crucially, it also recommended other reforms take place within government agencies to counter racial discrimination and to encourage fairer reporting in the media. How far any of these recommendations were implemented is arguable. For example, one of the recommendations was legislation against racial vilification and harassment, amending the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. The Keating government eventually passed the Racial Hatred Act in 1995, but after wrangling in the Senate, the legislation only provided civil provisions, rather than criminal sanctions.⁴⁷

There were also campaigns against the far right from below, which brought together both militant and moderate activists against National Action. Historian Vashti Jane Fox has discussed the history of anti-fascism in Melbourne against NA and showed how groups such as Community Action Against Racism (CAAR) and Brunswick Against the Nazis (BAN) mobilised support from ‘broader unions and community groups’ against planned street activities by National Action.⁴⁸ When National Action attempted to conduct a White Pride march in Brunswick in 1994, BAN gained support from several groups, with Fox writing:

Endorsements flowed in from the Authority and Services branch of the Australian Services Union, members of the Public Sector Union at the Brunswick CES, Martin Kingham, State Secretary of the CFMEU, and John Cummins, State Secretary of the BLF. The Chinese Student Community, the Kurdish Association of Victoria and the Australian Jewish Union of Students all threw their support behind the action, as well as the Student Unions of RMIT, La Trobe and VUT (Footscray).⁴⁹

This anti-fascist mobilisation helped discourage National Action from organising in public. It demonstrated that there was widespread popular opposition to the far right, which could unite activists from a variety of community and political groups.

Combating Hansonism in the late 1990s

Extreme right organisations such as National Action and the Australian Nationalist Movement went into decline in the 1990s. This was partly because a number of NA and ANM members had been arrested and jailed, and partly a result of popular opposition on the streets and within mainstream political discourse. But a right-wing populist party led by Queensland politician Pauline Hanson made attempts to tap into a ‘backlash’ against Asian immigration and multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s, often couching its pitch in terms of economic hardship and the Australians ‘left behind’ by mainstream politics.⁵⁰ Hanson was originally a Liberal candidate for the seat of Oxley in the 1996 federal election. After being disendorsed for making racist comments about Indigenous people, she entered parliament as an independent. Hanson capitalised on the publicity generated by her xenophobic comments in parliament and in the media. She formed One Nation in 1997, which won 11 seats at the Queensland state elections in 1998, and obtained 8.4 per cent of the vote at the 1998 federal election.⁵¹

Hanson and One Nation were different from the fascist and extreme right parties, but there was (and remains) a concern about the blurring of the lines between the right-wing populism of One Nation and the extreme right.⁵² Some of the left-wing groups that were involved in anti-fascist actions against National Action argued that similar confrontational tactics, such as pickets and hectoring of public meetings, could be used against One Nation. For example, the Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative wrote in 1998:

we also need to directly confront Hanson and other racists whenever they appear. The rally in Perth where thousands pelted fruit at Hanson, the Geelong demonstration that prevented the Hansonites from holding their meeting, the Hobart protest at which Hanson was driven off – these have succeeded in putting the racists on the backfoot.⁵³

But the historian Sean Scalmer has argued that while these ‘[c]ontestational gatherings disrupted the public spectacle of Hansonism’, they also allowed Hanson to portray herself as the victim of an intolerant left and generated more media attention around these highly charged events.⁵⁴ For Scalmer, the more successful anti-Hanson actions came in the form of ‘autonomous, disruptive gatherings’, such as ‘marches, rallies, street theatre, and, in one case, the occupation of Prime Minister John Howard’s Sydney office’.⁵⁵ These types of protest often brought together a wider variety of people coming out against racism and in support of multiculturalism, including trade unions, school students, local politicians, community groups and church representatives, alongside a more ‘welcoming reception within the media’.⁵⁶ For Scalmer, this broad coalition helped voters around the country reject One Nation as a political force in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even the conservative right that orbited around the Liberal Party vocally opposed One Nation at this time, with future Prime Minister Tony Abbott calling Hanson and her party the ‘feral right’.⁵⁷ Arguably, however, Liberal opposition to Hansonism was largely about stemming any bleeding of voters from the Coalition to One Nation, rather than political conviction. As political scientist Rae Wear argued, John Howard ‘embrace[d] many of One Nation’s themes and elevate[d] the version of Anglo-Australian identity that Pauline Hanson and her party defended’. The Coalition under Howard also made ‘policy commitments consistent with One Nation’s demands’, such as the strict treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, the portrayal of Islam as a threat during the ‘War on Terror’ years and the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC).⁵⁸

Lessons from history: Collective action beats intolerance

The far right in Australia has often remained small and on the fringes of political life. But it has, on occasions, attempted to break through, either as an electoral or extra-parliamentary force – often involving violence, harassment and intimidation. In the present day, the presence of the extreme right, alongside the blurring of the lines between the far and mainstream right (both here in Australia and overseas), is a major cause for concern. The solution offered by politicians and sections of the media focuses on policing and legal measures, including increased monitoring of the far right by the security services, the banning of extreme right groups and stronger penalties for stirring up racial hatred (such as proposed laws to ban the swastika in Victoria and New South Wales).

However, focusing on state-based legal and policing solutions to the threat of far-right groups overlooks the political and social landscape from which they emerge. It isolates combating the far right from the wider struggles against racism in Australian society. At several points in Australian history, activists have cooperated to fight the far right, bringing together different sections of society and linking the battle against the far right to similar battles overseas. From the coalition of trade unionists, communists, unemployed workers and members of the ALP against the New Guard in the early 1930s, to the joining together of community groups, church leaders, local politicians, trade unions and school students against Pauline Hanson in the late 1990s, the fight against the far right has worked effectively when various sections of the population collectively challenged racism, fascism and white supremacy, in all their forms. For policymakers and the wider public, these examples from history can be the inspiration for similar fights against the far right today.