Political condemnation of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network who attempted to rally three times in Sydney at the weekend was appropriate.
But other elements of the New South Wales government’s response – with the premier, Chris Minns, proposing new laws after the NSN’s rally was pre-empted by police using their existing, arguably overbroad powers of arrest – may not make for a lasting solution.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, rightly said he was “horrified by those images” of NSN members clad in black balaclavas swarming a train at Artarmon on 26 January. He said the men’s politics had “no role in Australia”.
Minns used the adjective “pathetic” in describing the behaviour. He went further, saying police had the power to identify those “attempting to menace people in an anonymous way” and warning them that “in front of your family, your friends, your employers, your co-workers, you’ll be exposed as a massive racist”.
The robust rejection of the NSN’s ideology and activities is heartening, as was the National party leader David Littleproud’s urging of governments to follow through on prosecuting such groups.
Australia’s political system may in this sense be more resilient to overt far-right extremism than that of the US. There, ever since Donald Trump’s claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the murderous protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, too many Republicans have soft-pedalled on extremists, including those who are now among the GOP’s elected officials.
So far so good. But Minns was on less sure ground, perhaps, in proposing to review state law “to make sure that overt Nazi gestures and symbols are outlawed in New South Wales … [to] make sure that the people of New South Wales are safe and we protect the tenets of our multicultural, harmonious community”.
Similar laws exist at a federal level. It might send a clearer message to extremists and the public if authorities made use of them.
As Littleproud told Nine’s Weekend Today: “There’s already anti-incitement laws that are in place and neither state or federal government have actually tested them in a court of law.”
What’s more, NSN plans had been repeatedly thwarted under existing state law, with police using their broad powers to make warrantless searches and arrests under the Law Enforcement Act.
That act has long been criticised for reducing police accountability. The fact that police told the NSN leader, Thomas Sewell, that they were acting due in part to his “ideological links” should give us pause in an era when the climate crisis will continue to draw its own protests.
To be sure, a worse response would have been to allow the extremists to act with impunity. We’ve seen in the US how extremist groups who occasionally have been coddled by police – and in some cases encouraged or assisted by officers in their ranks – become bigger, bolder and more violent.
Sewell is an unrepentant neo-Nazi who was convicted of affray and recklessly causing injury after a March 2021 attack on a Channel Nine security guard. He and his affiliates, including NSN members, have been involved in demonstrations, many of them violent, over many years.
Australia Day is a favourite target: in a 2021 excursion to Lake Bellfield in Victoria, the newly constituted NSN shouted white power slogans and took group photos with an unfurled Australian flag. On that trip they also rallied in the town of Halls Gap, where their antisemitic slogans and air of menace led locals to call police to break up the event.
So Sewell and the NSN, whose utterly toxic ideology has been beyond the pale in Australia, have form. NSW police and their political masters had an ample basis for concluding that any successful demonstration by the group would constitute a threat to public safety.
And the NSN gain a lot by simply demonstrating to members and potential recruits that it is possible to stage rallies, shout slogans and assert their toxic beliefs.
In the long run, though, police-led responses can only deal with urgent and imminent threats, and can only be relied on as long as the authorities see them in that light.
A longer-term solution would require a broader perspective than was evident in Minns’ assertion that NSN members were “importing hate into New South Wales”.
NSN ideology can hardly be considered an import when its membership includes New South Welshmen, along with others from around the country.
A more durable response might require us to recognise that it is no accident that Sewell and his followers have repeatedly rallied on Australia Day.
For years now, many have asked whether Australia’s national day should fall on the moment when the legal dispossession of its Indigenous inhabitants began, before a century in which those same peoples were slaughtered in massacres, robbed by violence and herded into enclaves.
Others have asked whether we still want the same flag that was chosen in 1901, just months before our parliament in one of its first acts enshrined the values of white supremacy and white exclusivity by virtually abolishing non-white immigration.
Rightwing culture war gambits – like the attacks on Woolworths over its decision to cut its losses and cease sales of flag-themed tat before the holiday – hysterically push back on these questions and effectively assert that there is nothing in Australia’s history that warrants an apology or even critical reflection.
One wonders if this kind of denialism has played into the country’s incapacity to digest that a one-time Sewell associate, reared in Australia during the escalating nationalism and culture wars of the early 2000s, is now serving a life sentence in New Zealand for a murderous, racist terrorist attack.
What it does do is open up space for NSN members to reassert their version of white Australian identity.
• Jason Wilson is an investigative journalist based in Portland, Oregon
