The far-Right protests that have been seen across Europe and the United States of America have now made their way Down Under.
Across Australia’s capital cities, tens of thousands came out to march at an anti-immigrant demonstration on August 31. The nation-wide event called “March for Australia” demanded “an end to mass migration” and declared that “no foreign flags” would be permitted, according to the official website. Promotional material for the rallies targeted Australians with Indian backgrounds in particular.
The identity of the original organisers remains unknown, although several Australian neo-Nazi groups have stepped forward to take credit. The march is yet another addition to the spread of far-Right ideology across the globe which seeks to capitalise on concerns over immigration. In Melbourne, a group of roughly a hundred men, dressed in black and marching in a bloc, joined the anti-immigrant rally. Thomas Sewell, the leader of the National Socialist Network, the European-Australian Movement, and the founder of the Lads Society, addressed the crowd to screams and cheers of support.
Sewell has had a long history within the Australian neo-Nazi scene. In 2017, he had attempted to recruit Brenton Tarrant to Lads Society, which was originally founded by another former member of the American right-wing extremist group, Patriot Front. Tarrant later went on to commit the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 51 people dead. Tarrant had plans to target a third mosque before being apprehended by the police. He left behind a 74-page manifesto titled “The Great Replacement” — a conspiracy theory that has become commonplace among right-wing politicians and activists around the world and which posits that Whites are being systematically replaced by non-Whites.
According to reporting by The Guardian, migrants of Indian background were targeted in promotional material for the march in Australia. Anti-South Asian sentiments have
long simmered in Australia. In 2005, a series of race riots broke out in Sydney in the beachside suburb of Cronulla, where some 5,000 White Australians targeted young men of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’. The riots left 26 people injured.
This violence has deep roots in Australian society. Despite being established as a British penal colony in 1788 and with a strong history of immigration throughout its modern history, it has had a tradition of restricting immigration on racial grounds from its earliest days as a nation. Soon after Australia became a federation, the federal government passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. This marked the legal beginning of a set of racial policies called the “White Australia Policy”, which aimed to forbid people of non-European origins from immigrating to Australia.
The Act itself used a dictation test, which stipulated that any immigrant within the first year of arrival in Australia could be subjected to a 50-word dictation test in any European language. The test received widespread public ridicule when in 1934 a Jewish activist from Czechoslovakia named Egon Kirsch attempted to seek asylum in Australia and was instructed to complete the dictation in Scottish Gaelic. Kirsch was ultimately allowed to remain, but the test would not be put officially out of practice until it was replaced by the Migration Act of 1958. A complete end to the White Australia Policy wouldn’t come until 1973 when the last racial elements of Australia’s immigration laws were removed.
Since the end of the White Australia Policy, resentment towards Indians has deepened as South Asian migration to Australia has steadily increased. Indians now represent the largest overseas-born group in Australia, only narrowly behind immigrants from England.
Attacks on people with Indian heritage in Australia have seen a troubling rise. On August 20, two female Indian students were accosted while travelling on a train in Sydney. On July 19, the 23-year-old student, Charanpreet Singh, was assaulted in Adelaide in an attack that put him in the hospital. Less than 10 days later, 33-year-old Saurabh Anand was attacked with a machete by a group of teenagers while on his way home from a pharmacy outside of Melbourne. He managed to walk away with his life, and a nearly completely severed hand.
It would be dangerously naïve to treat these protests as fringe events or harmless expressions of nationalist pride. When asked about the rallies, the Shadow Attorney, General Julian Leeser, of the Centre-Right Liberal Party offered a weak defence of the protesters, saying, “There are people of goodwill who want to change policies in relation to this country,” before also warning protesters to merely be “careful of the company you keep”, with regards to neo-Nazis in attendance.
Australia’s story is one more in a long, growing list of nations around the world where the far-Right is rising. Politicians who indulge many of the underlying anxieties about immigration may portray themselves as a Centrist alternative to the far-Right but, ultimately, they only seem to confirm and strengthen extremists and push the discourse further in the direction of the far-Right. It’s an easily observable pattern, from Europe to the US to Australia.
The irony is that these movements style themselves as guardians of a singular national heritage, distinct and worthy of protection. Yet what they produce are rallies that look indistinguishable from one another, whether in Melbourne or Munich, Texas or Toulouse. The details may shift — different flags, different accents — but the substance is always the same: chants of ‘go home’, descriptions of immigrants as invaders, men marching, and fantasies of White homelands. It’s franchise grievance, as uniform and exportable as a Big Mac.
The sameness of this project betrays its lies. It is not about culture, nor sovereignty, and not even about national identity under siege. It is about White supremacy, more borderless than any nation on earth.
Carol Schaeffer is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany, and is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington D.C.
