Reclaim Australia rally (2019)
Colonel Eric Campbell standing on a stage in New South Wales on December 17, 1931.
Courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald
FRE
Before moving further, it is important to explore the terms Far Right (FR) and far-right extremism (FRE). There are differences between how groups express their FR and FRE credentials both temporally and spatially whether it be during the 1930s or in 2019, but FR and FRE refer to the same ideology with extremists prepared to use violence. This ideology supports capitalism but maintains suspicions towards who and what kinds of organizations or institutions are in control of financial capital, with more extreme versions (especially during the 1930s) subscribing to Jewish control conspiracies.
Work on FR and FRE movements is complicated by the fact that experts have difficulty pinning down succinct definitions of terms such as fascism, which is multifarious and has evolving temporal and national characteristics (Linz 1976, 3–21; Eatwell 1992, 161–163). Copsey (2018, 105–122) and others have noted the difficulty in distinguishing the FR from fascism because of challenges identifying and defining constituent elements of far-right and fascist groups. This chapter highlights characteristics common to fascism, the FR, and FRE: intense nationalism and/or racism; an existential fear that one’s racial, ethnic, or national superiority and primacy is under threat from inferior ethnic, national, or racial groups; hostility to other out-groups; and antisemitism (Hainsworth 1992, 1–28). Of course, these forms of racism can be direct, indirect, covert, and overt. Racism can be dominative (direct and oppressive) or aversive (exclusion/cold-shouldering) and subject to different stimuli (Cole 2016, 2).
An Australian instantiation of Cole’s explanation of “hybrid racism” (2016, 17–18) encompasses a “white tragedy” narrative that draws on a diverse array of threats including Muslim Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian refugees as well as Muslim and Christian Black African refugees. In the 1930s, this hybridist racism included an objection to European Jewish refugees as a supplement to a long-standing White Australia policy objection to any non-white migration whatsoever.
Disturbingly, the racist memes and tropes associated with 1930s era FRE have been invoked in contemporary Australia. For example, Senator Fraser Anning of the Conservative National Party provocatively drew upon the vocabulary of Nazi-era terminology in his use of the antisemitic term “final solution” in his 2018 maiden speech to the Australian Parliament demanding an end to Muslim immigration. Likewise, Anning’s provocation against Muslim Australians included a campaign launch held for one of his candidates at the site of a notorious 2005 Sydney race riot during which an Anning supporter violently attacked journalists covering the event (Dole and Nguyen 2019). Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that a recent study on religious communities in Australia and Great Britain showed that Muslims suffer the highest levels of vilification: some delineated links between the results of the study and current FR activism (Hanifie 2019).
The unprecedented terrorist actions by Australian FR extremist Brenton Tarrant are a case in point. Tarrant’s murder of fifty Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019 ignited debates about how Australia had managed to incubate such a violent extremist. To a nation that has felt comfortable in believing itself immune to the insidious creep of far-right white extremism occurring elsewhere in the world, the attack by an Australian was both horrifying and shocking. On the other hand, the far right has a long history of racist and sometimes violent activism inside of Australia. Today, it is not only an expanded group of racial others (such as Asian immigrants) who draw the ire of FR groups: even their own members (including an Australian Prime Minister) when believed to pose a threat or to be serving as an informant have been targeted for attack and in some cases killed (Harris-Hogan 2017, 4; Moss 1991, 137–147).
To help explain how Australia managed to incubate a Brenton Tarrant, this chapter examines the provenance and manifestations of FRE in Australia and notes the sundry ways it has been a constant since European settlement and the dispossession of Australia’s Indigenous owners. To begin, I draw comparisons between fascism and right-wing ideology of the 1930s to the late 1990s onwards, noting that FRE has its roots in the country’s early history. For example, Australian FRE has always found a certain succour and sentimental attachment to the White Australia policy that maintained a white, Anglo-Celtic only immigration policy until 1973. It was no coincidence that during the 1930s, the British Union of Fascists viewed Australia as fertile ground and a potential site of the perfect “white nation” that could become a British-focused white empire (Smith 2017, 392–393).
Today’s FR focus on Muslims and asylum seekers eerily echo 1930s era Australian antisemitism and objection to European Jewish refugees. Other likenesses appear in contemporary FR fear of threats to the white race and the resurgence of eugenicist explanations of race that mirror the 1930s (Saini 2019, 25–53). There are also commonalities in linguistic tropes, flexibility in FR targets of vilification, and similarities between conspiracy theories (such as the replacement theory). These commonalities service the FR commitment to a white Australia. Contemporary FR fears that white Australia is under attack and our national identity is under threat are underpinned by the argument that the only authentic Australian identity is one characterized as white and English speaking, which is essentially the same as that expressed during the 1930s (Wilson 2018).
A racist fixation thus runs as strongly today as it did during the 1930s: just as FR extremists sought to combat any dilution of the White Australia policy in the 1930s, their ideological successors have pushed this idea as recently as the 2019 federal election. I argue that while the far right was possibly better organized and more united at the height of the New Guard during the early 1930s, contemporary accommodations of FR parties have harmed the domestic harmony of Australia by empowering polarizing political actors who advance extremist bigotry.
Terra Nullius and White Australia: Precedents to 1930s and New Millennium FR Activism
Australia’s FR antecedents begin with European settlement in Australia and in the attitudes of European imperialist endeavours. Australia was not an uninhabited continent before British settlement in 1788, but the impact of the doctrine of terra nullius meant that the land rights of the Indigenous inhabitants was not recognized until relatively recently in the Mabo land title decision of the High Court of Australia resulting in the Commonwealth Native Title Act of 1993 (AIATSIS 2019). Prior to the 1930s, Australia’s colonial pre-Federation past, as well as its post-1901 Federation history, featured a long catalogue of racism, barbarity, and massacre visited upon the Indigenous population, including the near extinction of Indigenous inhabitants of Tasmania. Lesser known are Australia’s own version of slavery known as “black birding,” which subjected thousands of Pacific Islanders to laboring on Far North Queensland plantations, and pogroms against Chinese miners during the Gold Rush years of the 1800s. These racisms were expressed on an international stage when Australians fought on the side of the Confederacy in the US Civil War, supported American colonialism in the Philippines, and expressed broad support for British colonialism (Smyth 2015).
The FR continues to exhibit such visceral racism in part because the right-wing “White Australia” policy ended only in 1973, well within living memory of many older Australians. White Australia was a foundational policy of the new federal union of Australia in 1901 and was a fundamental principle of national life (Meaney 1995, 174–177). All political parties spoke of White Australia in terms of keeping out non-white persons, spoke disparagingly of the “pollution,” “racial contamination,” and fear of the Asian “Yellow Peril” (a theme later taken up by the One Nation leader Pauline Hanson in 1996) and being overwhelmed by “inferior races” (Meaney 1995, 172–173). Cochrane’s (2018) work on the White Australia policy and the First World War explores Australia’s determination to be the southern oceanic outpost of the white races. Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes farewelling Australian troops epitomizes the primacy of race to early twentieth-century Australians in his statement, “I bid you go and fight for White Australia in France.” Hughes’ words reflect a racially derived security impetus behind an awakening of Asia as an increasing source of anxiety to Australians.
Immediately after the First World War, an early ex-soldier’s fascist movement known as the White Army emerged (Bessant 1995, 94). By the 1930s, the FR was operating in several forms from local Australian organizations to those with direct support from Germany and Italy (Perkins 1991, 113–119). An interesting individual figure of mid-twentieth-century FR history was Alexander Mills, an Odinist whose fascism included occult elements of German Nazism. Mills believed Australia needed to be purged of its debased Jesus-Christianity which he considered a form of “Jew-Worship” (Henderson 2005, 75). The Australia First Movement advanced an extremist ideology to sustain the White Australia policy and was alleged in 1941 to have planned assassinations and other disruptions for which several of its members were interned (Kalgoorlie Miner 1944).
After the Second World War, FR groups added various versions of anticommunism and conspiracy theory to ideals developed in the 1930s. Some took up established FR staples such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The FR League of Rights adopted a strategy of “elite penetration” attempting to secure roles of influence in mainstream political parties. This strategy remains in play today; for example, in 2018, the FR Lads Society was initially successful in infiltrating the Nationals, a conservative Australian Political Party. A media investigation discovered that they were holding alt-right discussions containing coded references to Hitler and Jewish conspiracy theories and seeking to implement hard-line immigration policies (Mann 2018). Another FR group, Klub Nation, attempted to infiltrate and seize control of the Humanist Society of the Australian State of New South Wales, but was thwarted when their activities were brought to the attention of Society leaders. Mid-twentieth-century FRE groups such as the neo-Nazi Australian Nationalist Socialist Party briefly survived until raids resulted in the arrest of members for possession of weapons and explosives.
Groups such as National Action and the Australian Nationalist Movement were active during the 1980s up until 2004 when, after a series of fire bombings of Asian restaurants, its leader Jack Van Tongeren was arrested. Van Tongeren had served a prison sentence during the early 1990s for similar offences, while other group members were imprisoned for the murder of one of their own believed to have been an informant. More than associations for like-minded racists to trade conspiracy theories, these groups actively persecuted immigrants, homosexuals, and members of the left, whom they believed put white culture in peril. The group led by Van Tongeren and others such as an Australian variant of the British FR group Combat 18, committed drive-by shootings and coordinated firebombing campaigns against Asian businesses (Harris-Hogan 2017, 3–5).
After the 9/11 attacks in the United States, FR responses to a perceived existential threat to white culture resulted in the emergence of additional FRE entities. Participants cited a civilizational threat from Islam and were loosely sympathetic to Huntington’s (1996) clash of civilizations thesis. The Australian Defense League, Right-Wing Resistance, and Reclaim Australia each spawned more extremist splinter groups such as the True-Blue Crew and the United Patriots Front. Senator Anning, a former Pauline Hanson’s One Nation member, was condemned by the Jewish community for attending their events during which swastikas and racist speeches and placards were present (Abramovich 2019). The mutable nature of these groupings has been reflected in frequent identity changes; for instance, when the United Patriots Front disbanded in 2017, possibly due to pressure brought to bear by court action against some members, it re-emerged in the even more extremist Lads Society.
FR platforms of hatred are flexible with today’s white supremacist Antipodean Resistance perpetuating a platform similar to 1930s era FR vilification of left-wing groups, Jews, and homosexuals. In 2010, three individuals claiming affinity with the virulently neo-Nazi group Combat 18 were convicted for attacking a Mosque in Perth. In 2016, FRE Phillip Galea was arrested in Melbourne and charged with terrorism in association with a conspiracy to attack left-wing targets, including the Melbourne Anarchist Club, the Resistance Centre in the City, and the Carlton Trades Hall (Campion 2019, 11).
Perhaps the most widely known Australian FR group is Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. Hanson, like many right-wing figures, considers herself to be the voice of the everyday Australian. She presents herself as the mouthpiece willing to speak unpalatable truths, as unafraid of political correctness, and standing up against the elites for the common “Aussie Battler.”3 Hanson has successfully portrayed herself as the “anti-politician” while keeping firmly within the FR form of racial nationalism (Fleming and Mondon 2018, 650–667). Hanson’s nativist parochialism bears a striking similarity to that Eric Campbell of the 1930s New Guard although Butler emphasized his alleged non-partisan interest in the common, decent Australian who had fought for Australia during the First World War and who was at risk of being disenfranchised by a state government verging on communism, while Hanson presents herself as protecting the white “Aussie Battler” against the tyrannies of big government, globalization, migration, and the seeming indifference of the two main political parties.
After garnering 23% of the primary vote in her home state of Queensland in 1996, Hanson’s maiden Parliamentary speech voiced an unequivocal objection to Asian immigration to Australia, a position not missed in Asia where her popularity was thought by some to be the harbinger of a new White Australia policy” (MacLeod 2006, 161). Hanson was not the first to view Australia’s multiculturalism in negative terms, but as she was elected on a platform overtly critical of Indigenous affairs and multiculturalism, she effectively returned xenophobia to the public discourse (Jamrozik 2004). Two decades after having focused on Australia being in danger of “being swamped by Asians,” she based her 2016 critique on Muslims, Islam, and asylum-seekers while keeping Indigenous Australians in her sights. Hanson’s theatrics and venom towards Islam have been unbounded. She wore a full burqa into Parliament, allegedly to highlight the security risk the garment posed, railed against Halal certification, and bizarrely wanted to have the Holy Quran edited. She infamously initiated the racist hashtag #Pray4MuslimBan after the March 2017 terrorist attack in London was supported by an inoculation analogy that carries shocking similarities to the worst Nazi-era pronouncements by Goebbels and Hitler in their use of a disease analogy to villainize Jews: “We have a disease, we vaccinate ourselves against it” … “Islam is a disease” … We need to vaccinate ourselves against that” (Remeikis 2017).
Three months later, Hanson penned an open letter to the Australian Prime Minister stating, “I call on you to look seriously at instituting a moratorium on immigration of Muslims to Australia …” (Walsh 2018). What factors have contributed to the rise of Hanson and other far-right entities in Australia and what connections, if any, do far-right groups today have to previous manifestations?
Historical and Contemporaneous Motivators of the Australian Far Right
During the 1930s, the Australian FR responded to the Great Depression as did right-leaning others in the Western world. The issue of race figured into these considerations, and just as today’s Australian FR is motivated by the rejection of Muslims and asylum seekers, the Australian FR of the 1930s was motivated by perceived threats to the White Australia policy and thus the FR rejected any non-white immigration that would spoil their “white idyll.” For instance, a proposed 1939 plan for 75,000 Jewish immigrants to settle the remote Kimberley wilderness of Western Australia after a visit by Lenin’s former Attorney General Dr. Isaac Stern, though supported by many, was met with furious objection from several antisemitic individuals and organizations (Lawrence 2014, 192–210).
One way to understand Australia’s right-wing rejection of immigration today as well as during the 1930s is through the lens of hybridist racism. Australian FR racism today is hybridist which fulminates against Muslims in general, as well as advancing an anti-Sudanese and anti-Black-African immigration stance. This is akin to the racism and bigotry of Australians directed at any non-British “white” immigrant who managed to get into Australia during the 1930s amidst similar fears of cultural disintegration.
White supremacist hybrid racism can address Islamic or Semitic peoples, be color coded or non-color coded, or encompass a combination of color-coded and non-color-coded racism. It may present as ambiguous or aim at anyone from Iranians to Black Sudanese to Jewish immigrants.
Despite the explicit unabashed racism expressed by One Nation since its anti-Asian agenda of the 1990s, in its hybrid racism and rejection of multiculturalism, the party remains attractive to the ruling Conservative Liberal-National Party coalition government. During the 2019 election campaign, the junior coalition partner led by the Deputy Prime Minister “overlooked” how One Nation vilified Australian Muslims, Black African Australians, and others in preferencing Hanson’s party at the ballot box. This was despite a high-profile exposé at the time showing One Nation lobbying the US-based National Rifle Association for funds to repeal Australia’s gun laws, with its representatives making candidly racist remarks on film (Clarke 2019).
Racism is coded into political discourse in what an American academic has labelled “strategic racism,” where voters are enticed by discourse using coded messages associated with racial stereotypes (Haney Lopez 2014). Following the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency, the US right began referring to him as the “Imam,” “the Antichrist,” and as being more African than American. Pauline Hanson and One Nation colleagues were filmed ostentatiously celebrating the end of the Obama Presidency and Trump’s election with champagne at the front of Australia’s Parliament House, with Hanson lauding Trump as a like-minded realist.
The language of “Strategic Racism” is also part of the Australian political landscape with the 2019 Australia election riven with an appalling litany of racist, Islamophobic, intolerant, misogynist, and misleading statements. For example, the right-wing Katter Australia Party candidate Brenton Bunyan likened Muslims entering Parliament to the rise of the Nazi Party, stating that citizens should “stand up for your rights otherwise Islamic people will get in Parliament,” and referenced Asians as “squinty eyes,” as well as making sexist online posts (Shepherd 2019).
Similarly, the ruling Liberal Party was forced to dump a Victorian state candidate over a conspiracy-laden anti-Muslim rant based on the idea that Muslims intend to overthrow the government and introduce Sharia law (ABC 2019). These kinds of statements made by members of an allegedly educated political class echo the equally illogical statements made by the FR in Australia during the 1930s when they conjured the threat of a communist takeover. The FR as well as the conservative Liberal-National Party government has continued to link race to national security, going so far as to suggest that providing medical treatment in Australia to asylum seekers housed in offshore detention is potentially exposing Australia to a flood of asylum seekers who are potential rapists, murderers, and drug traffickers (Remeikis 2019; Davidson 2019).
Targets of the Australian Far Right—Then and Now
FR groups in Australia advance a nostalgia for when white supremacy was the norm, singling out historic instances when this supremacy was contested. Included within the white tragedy nostalgia of the FR are references to the Ottoman Empire and their memorialization of defeats at the hands of the Ottoman Muslims, which act as powerful motivational myths about Muslim capabilities. Brenton Tarrant committing mass murder in the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque epitomized this white tragedy nostalgia in adorning the weapon he used with elements of a cherry-picked history. Of course, the selection of historical moments and myths is biased and converges with conspiracy theory fears such as replacement theory.4
The FRE has no interest in a reflective or balanced historical analysis and shies away from debates which may upset their fixated view of history. FRE like Tarrant ignores the death and destruction that was visited upon hapless Indigenous victims who were decimated by a white invasion of his own country, as well as so many other instances of European decimations of Indigenous populations, theft, and exploitation of their environments. Lack of reflection is exacerbated as the FR tends towards hyper-nationalism with an embrace of other beliefs from xenophobia, homophobia, holocaust denial, and conspiracy theories on everything from Muslims wanting to implement the Sharia in Australia, to the aforementioned white replacement theory. This dynamic bears a striking similarity to 1930s fear mongering by the New Guard on the alleged risk of a communist revolution, a perennially popular topic of discussion in their journal (The New Guard 1931). Today, fear mongering is deployed to incite anxiety no matter how fanciful and unproven the claim; for instance, Senator Anning’s racist claim that Black Sudanese crime gangs were rampant in the Australian State of Queensland was refuted by the Queensland State Police as completely inaccurate (Caldwell 2019).
… isolationism writ large, scripted for an audience of frightened and disenchanted Aussies5 pining for the safety of an uncomplicated yesteryear they remembered wistfully, where neighbours had easy-to-pronounce names and jobs were plentiful.
FR groups situate the threat to Australia within the other, defined as Muslims, Sudanese, and asylum seekers. Hatred and ignorance are directed towards these others whose culture, religion, and skin color are different from theirs, and who they view as posing threats to the privileges they believe are owed to them and to them alone. This was the same view carried by the FR in the 1930s towards the multitudes who lay to the north of Australia they believed to be inferior. Those who subscribe to these beliefs then and now are prisoners of a prejudice in which myths, stereotypes, double standards, and conspiracy fetishism are firmament. The FRE is unwilling to engage with those who question them and the more fanatic among them cannot come to terms with modern life. They believe the targets of their racism are not only the cause of their problems, but that they are or have the capacity to erode the white mono-culture they sentimentally long to recover.
For example, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson refuses to engage in arguments that contest her assumptions. Were she to accede to understanding the other, her entire electoral platform of hate would evaporate. Hanson cannot and will not be moved from her blind prejudices with her followers relying on her to express their indignation about a changing multicultural Australia. Hanson, a cypher of the racist resurgence, is uninterested in researching, gathering data, or analysis before speaking, relying instead on stoking powerful affective states such as fear and outrage.
The radicalized far-right extremist believes the solution to be in removing the other through Trump-like bans on certain nations entering Australia as espoused by Anning, One Nation, and other FR groups. The worst conspire, and at times carry out, egregious acts of violence, intimidation, and destruction such as the contemplated coup of the New South Wales State Government during the 1930s or later plans by members of Australia First to assassinate Australian political figures for the benefit of Axis powers during the Second World War.
Continuity and Expediency
Today, Australian political elites engage in expedient deals with FR political parties that allow representatives of racist, xenophobic groups to sit on the highest benches of government. Apart from the deleterious impact of bargaining away our egalitarianism for political expediency, our Asian neighbours are aware of the xenophobia, racism, and ill will emanating from these people. Australians no longer reside in the 1930s when the nations to our north were near universally part of some European or American colonial empire. Each irruption of One Nation, Anning, and other FR individuals and groups cast into doubt our standing as an egalitarian nation and remind others not only of our not so distant White Australia, but also of our flirtation with the far right during the 1930s when a well-organized militarized entity contemplated over-throwing an elected state government. Ignorant and dangerous commentaries emanating from FR representatives elected to government today show stunning ignorance with regard to those they vilify. Their comments, amplified by right-wing “shock-jocks” and other right-wing media, serve to legitimize and sanitize ever more explicit intolerant statements of unverified FR venom in which alleged threats from Islam, asylum seekers, and Black African immigrants act to metastasize fears and recruit the fearful into the ranks of the FR.
The Australian FR, despite limited success in the recent 2019 federal election, remains vocal and influential in Australian politics. Since the election, Hanson has negotiated and obtained concessions from the government for her agenda in return for her support in passing government legislation. In this reliance, the government has, despite protestations otherwise, linked itself inextricably to Hanson’s three-decade litany of xenophobia, racism, and the not-so-distant links to the White Australia policy and agenda of the Australian FR of the 1930s.