'March for Australia' losing numbers and strength

Australia’s far-right marches have gone from working-class rage to white nationalist delusion. Tom Tanuki reports.

THE SECOND MARCH for Australia had around 85 per cent less attendees than the first. I’m not interested in undervaluing my opponent’s ability to draw a crowd, and I’ll be the first to agree that many people underestimated the crowd sizes from the first round. They were huge.

Give me a margin of error because I didn’t have aerial footage from each rally, so let’s say the October marches dropped in size from around 80-90 per cent. That’s an enormous decline for an official follow-up to an event that had been widely recognised as the launch of the largest anti-immigration rallies in Australia’s history.

After the second March for Australia, all the eyes were on the counter-protest in Melbourne after a VicPol press conference where VicPol’s Commander Wayne Cheesman theatrically dumped out a box full of rocks and emoted about how badly behaved the left were.

I won’t use this space to debate the chorus of far-right folk insisting I and my ilk be declared as proscribed terrorists because of Cheesman’s rock collection.

Why we show up when fascists march

Right-wing marches are little more than angry parades, but they are effective recruitment systems designed to attract interest for growth.

(I shared my own concerns about those rocks, for what it’s worth. I also had concerns about the overwhelming brutality of VicPol, concerns echoed by the Melbourne Activist Legal Service. See my video for those remarks.)

I have devoted the bulk of my time to assessing the Marches themselves, instead. That’s because I felt that by avoiding doing this, we all did the March organisers a big favour.

One of the benefits that they’re afforded by the public ignoring the march in favour of Cheesman’s rocks, particularly after all the mainstream attention the first round enjoyed, is we don’t get to discuss significant developments in the tenor of the march this time round.

The other benefit is that nobody is thinking about exactly why they’ve shrunk so much.

I think the first, most obvious reason, is the dominating National Socialist Network (NSN) presence at 31 August marches, which scared crowds away from attending on 19 October.

Their brutal violence at Camp Sovereignty did much of that work.

But we also ran a successful information campaign exposing coordinated neo-Nazi management stacking, media and crowd manipulation strategies used to either capture the Marches or, at least, lend the impression to the media’s cameras that they’d been captured despite their size. I did that with my written and video work, The Age did some excellent work, and many activists contributed too.

On the left we’re always told we “call everyone a neo-Nazi”. (I’ve always taken umbrage with that as an anti-fascist; I know what a neo-Nazi is and I use it as a description, not an insult.) But the evidence of neo-Nazi infiltration and capture of the March was too clear even for the right’s brain-rot culture warriors. National and state organisers let NSN take the mic, marshal the rallies, lead the marches, conduct the chants, kick non-white people out of the marches and more.

I received several messages in private from 31 August attendees sharing their sense of having been misled. Mark Aldridge, the Adelaide organiser of the 31 August march, wound up attending the 19 October counter rally.

We got the message over the line, for once, and it contributed significantly to the reduction in crowd size.

I discovered another reason for the march’s reduced size when reviewing the footage. The 19 October showed that the march organisers and speakers have more or less abandoned the rising working-class frustrations that were successfully tapped, and directed towards immigration, by the first marches.

Documentarian whatsdoinmedia gave a voice to these perspectives by interviewing people in the crowd at the first march. Scobie discovered people overwhelmed by rental payments they simply couldn’t keep up with, cost-of-living frustrations and so on.

It may have been the case that several of the speakers they were listening to were trying to speak to them about the merits of the White Australia Policy, but simpler working-class struggles had led many of them to attend.

This time, however, most of the speeches stood out to me as being marked by a desire to appeal to nostalgia for the White Australia Policy, a desire to ‘protect’ the (white) ‘founding stock’ of the nation, and appeals to white ethnonationalism.

That’s all national organisers Bec Walker and Jesse Stewart focused on in their speeches at Sydney’s March.

Melbourne’s lead organiser Matt Trihey, a neo-Nazi, spent his entire speech ostensibly complaining about white genocide and the Great Replacement, all neo-Nazi conspiracy theories.

In Canberra, Reclaim-era talking head Shermon Burgess, now a Nazi, took the mic. (He’s also been a flag-cape patriot, and a Viking, and a Muslim. But now he’s a Nazi again.)

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Perth organiser Bailey Bergroth did the same in his speech, invoking the common neo-Nazi “blood and soil” phrase at the end.

Lachlan Dade, a former Libertarian Party candidate, having shifted completely by the second march to making hammy attempts to appeal to white supremacists, also tried to mention “blood and soil”. But he accidentally misphrased it as “blood and bone”, a type of fertiliser. Oops! Try again, Lachlan!

This time, it stood out to me more on the rare occasion that someone did attempt to speak to genuine working-class concerns.

One speaker in Adelaide, for example, spoke about his wife having a stroke and his difficulty in securing DSP payments for her. I sensed his frustration and felt for him. The crowd was silent.

Then he said, “meanwhile, immigrants come here and […] they get all these handouts.” The crowd cheered at that part.

I gathered that for the 15 per cent who remained for the second march, it became okay to focus mainly on white supremacist matters, detached from any real working-class matters. ‘Demographic replacement’, as they call it (or rather, again, the neo-Nazi Great Replacement theory). The inherent criminal tendencies in non-white races, diluting the purity of white Australia.

The crowd lapped it up. The other 85 per cent, who were in large part motivated by a misdirected desire to express their frustrations about working-class matters, did not show up.

The third march is planned for 26 January, and I wouldn’t dare to predict after the success of the first round how they’ll do. There’s a lot of rage and despair among struggling working-class people; organised racists, guided by our ruling class, are having a field day misdirecting this rage towards immigrants and Indigenous people. So we on the left need to be strategic, and be ready.

But for now, it seems the march has already abandoned its own purported concerns in favour of ideology and various paranoias typical to the organised racist.

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.