The far-right group is gone, but the danger isn’t — Australia has just turned an organised hate group into hundreds of abandoned "lone" actors. Tom Tanuki reports.
THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST NETWORK (NSN) is dead, disbanded just days before the passage of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate & Extremism Bill into law.
Former group leader Tom Sewell’s message to NSN members intending to see each other again is this:
If you want to meet up with ten of your mates and go to the pub together and you just so happen to all be former NSN members, and the police raid your house and you’ve still got flags and memorabilia and your wristband and your patches and your stickers …well, they’re going to make a case in court that these are all NSN members, NSN never disbanded, they just said that they did, they’re all still meeting up, they’ve all still got their uniforms at home.
Sewell is trying to tell his men and boys that their movement is really, truly done, after seeing what happened to many former National Action members in the UK following a similar proscription process.
Having documented the rise of the NSN since their inception in 2020, one major difference I encounter now is that I didn’t dig for the above Sewell comment. I randomly came across it in a headline news.com.au piece from Frank Chung, News Corp’s worst specimen.
Frank is one of many bottom-feeding journalists, usually employed by either News Corp or Daily Mail Australia, who have learned over the past five years to publicly diarise, in exchange for clicks, what the NSN ate for dinner last night.
Frank watched a Sewell interview with white supremacist channel Red Ice for the above quote. In 2020, the idea of the words Red Ice featuring on news.com.au was laughable. But in the never-ending quest to find something clickable to submit for a wage, many journalists have realised that NSN is a tabloid’s dream.
NSN always functioned best as a parasitic entity, riding an Australian mainstream media host to turn headlines into teenage recruitment opportunities. If it wasn’t the banner stunts, another headline-grabber Sewell would roll out was ominous threats. They’d allude to how many people they’ll hang when they get into power, or Sewell would threaten journalists about what would happen if he wasn’t allowed to keep his neo-Nazi group, or, say, his children.
In 2020, when asked by Sydney Morning Herald’s Patrick Begley about his relationship with Christchurch killer Brenton Tarrant, he replied:
The difference between my organisation, myself and [Tarrant], is simply that we believe, certainly at this stage, that there is a peaceful solution for us to create the society we want to live in. We want a peaceful alternative, we want to be treated with respect, we want to be left alone. If we are not given that opportunity, well, time will tell. I'm not going to give you any explicit threat but it's pretty f--king obvious what's going to happen.
Forced by the hand of the Australian state apparatus, we’ve very abruptly arrived at the dead end of Sewell’s "peaceful alternative" road.
ASIO head Mike Burgess has always said that the most realistic threat they encounter comes from "lone actors" — usually young men radicalised online with no connection to any group. And now, with the passage of prohibited hate group legislation into law, former NSN members all very suddenly fit the description of Burgess’s "lone actors".
The movement which radicalised and onboarded them has come to a sudden halt. I’m reminded of Tarrant, who watched the dismantlement of his patriot movement in 2017 before turning to other plans.
In the NSN, members received the exact same radical neo-Nazi political education that Tarrant gave himself.
What happens to them now?
There were consistent calls over the past several years to fund community-led and peer support initiatives for people leaving groups like the NSN, or for families trying to get them out. These calls were made by anti-fascists, experts specialising in radicalisation, and the families of current or former group members.
For those families, who would sometimes reach out to me, pleading to be connected to support networks, nothing effective really existed in Australia to meet their needs in trying to extricate their loved ones from the cult. Sometimes they’d receive offers of police-led deradicalisation programs if their loved ones had already been convicted of an offence.
Sometimes ex-NSN members were connected to those services without any convictions, but they’d describe the exchanges as useless; box-ticking by cold, unfamiliar public servants who didn’t really understand how to build rapport or engage these young men.
As the NSN grew in numbers, so did the amount of desperate families needing help. And the Australian government has developed or funded none of what was really needed.
So now the families of these hundreds of sudden "lone actors" can expect to be abandoned.
What happens now, then?
I’ve now conveyed my sense that the risk of far-right violence has not been extinguished with the passage into law of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate & Extremism Bill. Quite the opposite. I hope no one is hurt in the coming years. But I’m not confident.
This legislation did not become law in order to ease our concerns. It’s absolutely not for us (us meaning anyone who may expect to be targeted in real life by militant hate groups).
The sudden rash appearances of "national discrimination" across Australian hate crime legislation suggests who it’s for. Zionist lobbyists, perhaps, like the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, whose policy recommendations were lifted in full by the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, and in turn enshrined in these laws by Albanese.
Or perhaps the laws are for state police forces, on an apparent mission to criminalise and extinguish public protest across the country.
Or perhaps the laws are for our bipartisan political leaders, Labor and Liberal, who have both taken such a beating from various activist movements over the past several years that it’s in all of their interests to shut all of us up.
I don’t know. But I know they’re not laws made for the rest of us.
Nobody I know worries about the re-emergence of the NSN. The consensus I detect, slippery slopes aside, appears to be: “fuck them”.
They were racist parasites who existed to provoke an overwhelming state response. They got one. Good job. Bye.
Now everyone’s left to worry about how these laws will be used to stifle genuine activist effort and free speech.
I’m worried about that too. But I’m also painfully aware of all these "lone actors" in their hundreds, and their families, abandoned by the state.
Many of them are deluded kids. They’re often neurodivergent, usually very isolated, and were regularly manipulated by experienced groomers into their cult. I have no sympathy for their politics, of course. But I know first-hand that they’re going to need a lot of help. Help, I don’t think they’re going to receive.
Again: what happens now?
Well, Mike Burgess says he’ll be "watching" ex-NSN members.
Like ASIO "watched" the Bondi killers, I suppose? Great. I feel so secure with all these laws, cops, bans and spies we’ve got nowadays.
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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