The prominence of far-right extremist groups has seen Australia’s peak intelligence body, ASIO, address the growing rise of far-right extremism over the past year.
Over the weekend, , a group of 38 men associated with the Lads Society and the Antipodean Resistance under the umbrella of the National Socialist Network, met in the Grampians National Park loudly chanting white supremacist and neo-Nazi slogans like ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘white power’.
“[It’s] a bit of a wake-up call, we've got a serious problem. And that it's, it's getting steadily worse,” Professor Greg Barton, Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Globalisation and Citizenship at Deakin University, told The Feed.
ASIO revealed last year that 30 to 40 per cent of their resources were being directed to monitor and investigate right-wing extremism, which was a 10 to 15 per cent rise from 2016.
“While the extreme and violent right-wing has been in ASIO’s sights for many decades, we are dedicating additional resources to the evolving threat and it represents a growing proportion of our priority counter-terrorism caseload,” an ASIO spokesperson told The Feed.
Dr Kaz Ross, an independent researcher and specialist on far-right extremism, told The Feed, “So basically, what we saw in the Grampians on the weekend, is the fruition of an effort that Tom Sewell [leader of the Lads Society] has had going for at least 18 months.”
“This is the European Australian movement (EAM), he calls it and this is part of the larger movement called the National Socialist Network, which is the idea of joining up all the supremacist and ultra-nationalist groups in Australia.”
Tom Sewell was one of the founding members of the Lads Society and previously in the leadership group of the United Patriots Front. Prior to the Christchurch attack, Lads Society about possible membership with the group - something the shooter declined.
“This group that met in the Grampians, they say that they don't advocate violence. However, the leader [Tom Sewell] has also said in the past, that the only way forward for white supremacy is strength and violence,” Dr Ross said.
Combating far-right extremist groups
The conversation around how to combat right-wing extremist groups is a pressing one.
Canada has recently opted to declare the Proud Boys - a far-right group that took part in the Capitol Hill attack - .
Prof Barton believes if groups with similar ideology to the Proud Boys were declared terrorist entities, it could allow for better policing of them. He cites a program like a ‘hate register’ as an example.
“Then we'll start to get some reliable data on where the problems are, and where they're getting worse. At the moment, we're flying blind in terms of data, we really don't have incidents on hate crimes and hate incidents,” he said.
‘This event in the Grampians was a show of force’
According to an ASIO spokesperson, extreme right-wing groups are becoming increasingly ideological.
“This is potentially connected to the way international online forums and spaces are allowing right-wing extremists to make rapid and easy connections with their international counterparts,” an ASIO spokesperson said.
“Some of these spaces have created extremely toxic peer environments in which acts of violence based on extreme right-wing ideologies are encouraged, glorified and promoted.”
Dr Ross said in contrast to a number of white supremacy groups, Sewell’s group doesn't believe that the answer is to create a compound in the countryside and have lots of children in a traditional family.
Instead, she said, “He thinks it's important to remain in the cities and to build a mass base.”
“And this event in the Grampians was a show of force and was to say, ‘Look, this is how many we are, this is what we've done, this is what we're planning to do.’ And they will be using what they did on the weekend as propaganda material.”
The vision, Dr Ross said, is to create a network of white supremacist businesses that borrow from European-style far-right groups.
“You want a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter or builder, you've got this network to pull on. And other neo-Nazis in Australia have talked about the importance of a trade and for men to get a trade, and to be outside of any kind of workplace control,” she said.
She said this is a strategy to deal with a problem with how far-right groups recruit. Dr Ross said people who are employed and are engaged with these groups keep their identity secret to ensure they don’t lose their jobs.
“So one of the strategies in these groups is to say, we need to build our own businesses, where we are our own bosses,” she said.
There is also a vetting process, Dr Kaz Ross said - something a NSW teenager, who was , failed. The claimed they rejected his application to join their group prior to his arrest.
“They felt that he was not suitable for them, perhaps because he would be too obvious and a security risk for them. So they rejected his application,” she said.
'We don't have that same kind of understanding of how to report on extremists here in Australia'
A key debate, according to Dr Ross, is what kind of stories are written about far-right groups in the media. She said this has come up in research on extremism related to the Christchurch massacre.
"Many journalists would not use the name of the shooter, and would make sure that they gave no publicity or insight into where one could find the shooter's Manifesto or the videos of the shooting," she said.
"We don't have that same kind of understanding of how to report on extremists here in Australia."
There's been criticism about how much is reported about far-right extremist groups from naming the organisation and leaders to detailing the platforms they use, and whether it becomes free publicity.
"But on the other hand, if you don't show the photos of them doing flaming cross burnings in the Australian countryside or spreading the white supremacist ideology, how do people become aware of how serious this threat actually is," Dr Ross said.
However, Dr Ross said the language used by these far-right groups can be coded, and may not be clear to the average person. The number 51, for example, has been recently adopted on some YouTube and Twitter handles is a reference to the number of people who were killed in the Christchurch attack.
"But the risk is we actually end up broadcasting the message these guys have want most...So I think the way, one of the ways to address, that is to say, well, we need to understand what's going on and call it the incitement of hatred, call it racism," Prof Barton said.
Dr Ross believes we shouldn't take events in the Grampians lightly. She believes it was a propaganda mission to create content to recruit more people.
"What was totally shocking was their belief that no one was going to stop them, that they could walk around a town, they could terrorise people," she said.
"They have filmed themselves confronting police, they will use that as propaganda to say we're not scared of anything...to say, no one can stop us. We're very powerful. And that's the terrifying message that's come out of this Grampians event."
