Australia’s far-right wasn’t just marching on 31 August — the National Socialist Network hijacked rallies nationwide, using them as displays of intimidation. Tom Tanuki reports.
I HAVE SCOURED over video footage from all of the nationalist March for Australia rallies that were held nationwide on Sunday, 31 August.
What I found was a coordinated pattern of crowd and media manipulation by the National Socialist Network (NSN) that was conducted via stacking speakers at rallies and rally coordinators, cladding small cells of uniformed NSN members with a larger plain-clothes supporter base to promote surrounding crowd support, deploying supplied, scripted chants and leading marches.
I found that Sydney’s rally was the prime example of stacking the deck, with all of the abovenamed strategies deployed to full effect.
The original nationwide coordinator of the rallies, Bec Freedom, can be seen speaking to rally marshal and NSN member Oscar Tuckfield. (She helped appoint other NSN members to coordination roles on the day, too.) They helped arrange NSN members at the very frontline of the rally, where they held a banner about mass immigration and abused a woman holding an Aboriginal flag.
They marched, with racist chants promoting mass deportations – the same used by NSN members in both uniform and plain clothes across the country – heard on their megaphones. Then they stacked the speakers at the end, with three NSN members speaking alongside Thomas Sewell’s lawyer.
Speakers who rejected their white supremacist messaging were interrupted by racist chants from the NSN-heavy crowd stacked at the front, near the cameras. A suggestion by a Libertarian Party MP to pause immigration for five years was drowned out by NSN chants promoting mass deportation. It was, in the end, a national socialist-led rally.
This tactic was deployed to various degrees of success nationwide. In the enormous rally at Perth, NSN members got into conflict with One Nation’s Rod Caddies, who refused to speak on their megaphones and wanted the crowd to reject them. Some did, some didn’t; many didn’t hear or even understand what they were witnessing due to the speaker system issues Caddies were facing. Many cameras nonetheless captured an NSN contingent leading racist crowd-wide chants.
In Adelaide, the NSN contingent was pushed off the microphone, with the cord ripped out of a speaker system to prevent them from speaking. A fight ensued, broken up by the police. NSN members were abused and confronted.
Brisbane’s rally, as large as Perth’s, managed to fend off any would-be NSN speakers due to conflicts the state organiser had with the neo-Nazis. But a contingent led by Victorian NSN member Jacob Hersant still managed to manipulate the crowd around them, in the tight park amphitheatre environment they were wedged into for their rally. Their racist chants led to an Indian speaker being forced off the microphone. They dominated the march with the same scripted chants that NSN nationwide were supplied with.
Queensland MP Bob Katter had no idea who he was surrounded by in Townsville; he let NSN members hand him their rune-design microphone for his speech, which is somewhat similar in aesthetic to the gun Brenton Tarrant wielded. Another Katter Australian Party (KAP) MP, Nick Dametto, was warned by the crowd to expel NSN members, but didn’t do it. Later, he issued a statement saying they made him and the crowd feel "uneasy".
It’s true — they made crowds nationwide feel uneasy. But they were often too intimidating to stand up to, marching in formation and becoming immediately aggressive in response to hostile reactions.
Nowhere was this more true than in Melbourne, where Thomas Sewell’s NSN contingent doled out, in my view, the most political violence I’ve ever seen enacted by a group at a political rally in Australia.
Some of it is less well-known, such as the group of antifascists who tried to stop them from entering the CBD but were outnumbered by the neo-Nazis marching into the city.
But much of it was documented by countless cameras and has become almost uniformly reviled by the public in the wake of 31 August. Particularly the brutal attack on bystanders at cultural gathering place Camp Sovereignty, where NSN members attacked a small group of mostly women and elderly people, including with weapons.
It’s important to note that women experienced much of the NSN violence that I saw on the day. It’s in the nature of neo-Nazis to target groups that they see as more vulnerable. But we are all vulnerable given the nature of militant neo-Nazism when fascists are allowed to grow to this extent relatively unopposed.
I consider that this problem was, first and foremost, on that day, one for the right-wing, including the "civic nationalists" in attendance at those marches who ascribe to flag-waving but not, as they repeatedly attest, to racism or white supremacy.
Streamers and partisan media figures such as Avi Yemini and Rukshan Fernando insist that 7NEWS fell for neo-Nazi media and rally manipulation techniques, misapprehending that many of the old "patriots" who’d shown up weren’t there to support the NSN’s white supremacist agenda. They’re too busy propagandising.
This might be useful for their content mill, with an audience base that likes to be told again and again that it isn’t racist; it isn’t, however, going to solve the problem that led to Yemini and Fernando being violently ejected from their own rally by violent neo-Nazis who don’t want non-whites in the crowd. This is their problem to handle.
But it grows into a problem for all of us, in the end. It’s a problem for the victims of NSN violence on that day, again; many women, many elderly and many Indigenous. It’s a problem for the vulnerable communities that the NSN targets — as they grow bolder, they grow more likely to enact opportunist violence against their stated targets, as we saw at Camp Sovereignty.
And it’s a problem for the Left, who need to re-learn the integral importance of anti-fascism and showing up. So we will need more people next time.
Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, 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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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