Anzac Day booing stunt an attempt to boost right-wing recruitment

Outrage sparked by the latest neo-Nazi stunt is all part of a political program to get signatures, writes Tom Tanuki.

THE MAINSTREAM RESPONSE to a neo-Nazi booing an Anzac Day dawn service last week has been exactly as the neo-Nazi hoped it would be.

Lots of naming of the neo-Nazi in question and little critical discussion of his intentions, with any and all of that drowned out by the chorus of "debate" over the merit of Welcomes to Country.

This has led many people to accuse the Australian mainstream of dancing to the tune of neo-Nazis, or allowing neo-Nazis to dominate the mainstream discourse.

This "debate" is a reductive, racist discourse, a pot that’s steadily been stirred since the Voice Referendum failed, but it was only given a shot in the arm by the stunt. It’s all a perfect example of tactical racism: Racism fomented for a political or power-brokering goal.

I want to talk about whose tactic this is, fundamentally, or who "owns" it – what everyone’s actual goal was — and whether, as a tactic, it’s working out for the scumbags behind it.

Let’s be clear about what happened, first, because the Australian mainstream media has not been capable of doing so with any clarity at all. They are too terrified of defamation, so they whittle most of their coverage of the Australian political fringe down to worthless inference and suggestion.

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Planned political theatre

The booing stunt was meticulously planned political theatre. Readers of this column will be intimately familiar with National Socialist Network (NSN) stunts, which are planned out on a calendar basis. The intention, as I have relayed many times before, is always to use the resultant mainstream media coverage to promote their group and attract new recruits. Accordingly, the National Socialist Network planned the Anzac Day dawn service stunt well in advance.

Jacob Hersant, NSN leader Tom Sewell and two others were at the Shrine of Remembrance for approximately two and a half hours on Thursday 24 April, the day before the service. They were filming, planning and scouting the location, pacing around the forecourt and the cenotaph directly in view of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), Victoria Police (VicPol) and Shrine management. So nobody at the Returned and Services League (RSL) or the Shrine could say they weren’t amply warned.

In fact, RSL Australia and Shrine management have been warned in advance of NSN group attendance at several of these events over the years. Last time, they held up their group’s flag outside the Shrine after the service for a photo opportunity. Nothing has ever been done about their presence.

NSN member Jimeone Roberts went to court a couple of days before the service to try and get his bail conditions changed to attend the dawn service at the Shrine. It was denied — they encouraged him to attend any other dawn service in Victoria if, as he said in his request, he worshipped his grandad’s service record so much. Roberts’ intention was obviously to participate in the stunt.

NSN members positioned themselves in different locations around the service to avoid being identified as a group. They did the same stunt at other dawn services too, in fact, to maximise the chance of it being covered. Another NSN member interrupted a WA dawn service to do the same thing. It just happened that the other one wasn’t filmed.

Anti-Indigenous campaigning

Hersant didn't only boo Uncle Mark Brown’s Welcome to Country. He also booed images of Indigenous soldiers and any time First Nations service was mentioned. The plan was to boo anything non-white and see what stuck. (When I say ‘stuck’, I mean, reached national media headlines.)

Unsurprisingly, what stuck was booing the thing that has been the direct target of constant, paid negative campaign advertising by lobby group Advance Australia since the Voice Referendum failed.

The Australian political Right, galvanised by the failure of the referendum, saw an opportunity to turn anti-Indigenous racism into renewed political capital. So they’ve been paying for bulk political ads on Facebook about Welcome to Country. "Don’t welcome me to my own country!" has been the refrain, launched into the soft brains of targeted audiences with Meta’s pay-for-play behaviour modification tools. And many hours of Sky After Dark.

To assume that the NSN specifically care a lot about Welcomes to Country, enough to undertake the stunt they did in earnest, is understandable but a bit naïve. Sure, they don’t like hearing them because they are racist white supremacists.

But they consider every cultural item in Australia that isn’t explicitly racist and white supremacist to be heresy.

These are people who:

think that every movie ever made is Jewish propaganda to make white men stop having kids;
dress their girlfriends and wives up like Exclusive Brethren members — the ones that have fled and taken out court orders, that is;
believe in legalising marriage to teenage girls;
groom, manipulate and guilt isolated little boys into joining them on gaming platforms like Steam;
have reportedly had at least one member among their ranks take his own life; and
believe Australian white men owe an ancestral blood debt to Nazi Germany dictator Adolf Hitler for the sin of the Anzacs having fought Nazis in World War II (the men who went to the Anzac Day dawn service think that, yes).

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The push toward recruitment

For the NSN, a radical fringe cult, the Welcome to Country acknowledgement is the least of their many bizarre concerns.

What they are concerned about is recruiting more boys and, more importantly right now, obtaining 1,500 people willing to provide signatures and addresses so they can launch a political party which they plan to call the 'White Australia Party’.

To achieve maximum stunt reach, therefore, they simply copy whatever is the topic du jour among the Australian right-wing.

All of this is to say that I don’t think this is fundamentally a neo-Nazi discourse at all. This is lobby group Advance Australia’s discourse. It’s Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s discourse, Sky After Dark’s discourse and Coalition frontbencher Jacinta Price’s discourse.

Neo-Nazis are parasitising the tactical racism of the Australian Right for their own end, which I suppose is easy to do with a campaign that is fundamentally all about manipulating people.

When neo-Nazis do the extreme stunt that the political Right is too worried about self-preservation to pull off, they still rush in to collect the spoils. I was told that One Nation Party Leader Pauline Hanson was being interviewed by the ABC the other day about all this, situated as the voice of reason. This is how they shift the Overton window to let more racism in. Racism as a political tool.

By 2pm on Anzac Day, Advance Australia had launched a petition about scrapping Welcomes to Country. Rugby club Melbourne Storm cancelled a Welcome to Country set for the next day.

The neo-Nazis who led the stunt and the right-wing lobby groups who paid to astroturf it into existence have been largely set aside while we all "debate" a simple, traditional and dignified cultural tradition. A grand tradition of welcoming, in a nation whose colonising settlers brought none of their own.

There’s a dispute in anti-racist discourse about the term "tactical racism", because it’s not simply tactical, as some of the left acknowledge. It wouldn’t work without vast reserves of actual vestigial racist attitudes in the societies it is deployed in, after all. And of course, there’s nothing "tactical" about the effect that this has on my Indigenous brothers, sisters and comrades. I see that.

But if this racism is about white power – about dividing the people to subjugate some of them, invariably to benefit the few – then this is absolutely, plainly a tactic.

Whose tactic was it, then?

Again, I argue it was fundamentally the people who paid to astroturf it. Lobby group Advance Australia and its attendant media and political sounding boards. And Dutton, of course.

Did the NSN win by parasitising the "debate"? Sure. They got the attention they wanted from the media again. But what much of the media didn’t report is that they were actually booed and abused out of the service at the time. That’s no win, outside of their precarious mainstream media optics lens. That’s usually the reception they get when they stick around in public for a while.

One of the neo-Nazi’s greatest weaknesses is that he builds his entire identity around being strong. That’s why they won’t do any public stunts that go for longer than five minutes. They remain petrified that people will see what happens when they leave themselves exposed.

Regarding the political Australian Right who first fomented this "debate", my comrade and podcast co-host, Celeste Liddle, writing for Crikey, observed the following.

She wrote:

The real division being driven here comes from the inability to show respect for Indigenous people and lands, despite the Frontier Wars, the Indigenous veterans who fought in Australia’s wars, and the continued presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the defence forces.

This, along with politicians continuing to demonise our communities in order to score mainstream votes, instead of presenting actual policy platforms that may progress this country to a more respectful and inclusive future.

So, how has the tactical racism worked out for them, then? We’ll see today, when the ballots close.

I don’t think they’re about to be paid out the dividends they expected.

Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.