The Far-Right in Contemporary Australia

By Mario Peucker and Debra Smith

This book is the first to elaborate on radical and extreme right movements in contemporary Australia. It brings together leading scholars to present cutting edge research on various facets and manifestations of Australia’s diverse far-right, which has gained unprecedented public presence and visibility since the mid-2010s. 
The thematic breadth of the chapters in this volume reflects the complexity of the far-right in Australia, ranging from the attitudes of far-right populist party voters and the role of far-right groups in anti-mosque protests, to online messaging and rhetoric of radical and extreme right-wing movements. The contributions are theoretically grounded and come from a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, sociology, politics, and urban studies, exploring issue of far-right activism on the micro and macro level, with both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jul 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9789811383519

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2019

Mario Peucker and Debra Smith (eds.)The Far-Right in Contemporary Australiahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8351-9_1

1. Far-Right Movements in Contemporary Australia: An Introduction

Mario Peucker¹   and Debra Smith¹  

(1)

Institute for Sustainable Industries and Liveable Cities, Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Mario Peucker (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Debra Smith

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

The introduction gives a short overview of the various far-right groups and actions in Australia over the past decades, arguing that far-right movements have not been as visible in Australia as they have been in Europe and North America. The contemporary era, however, has witnessed a rising moral panic around the place of Islam in Australia, which has created a fertile environment for the emergence of new far-right groups. The resurgence of an emboldened far-right in Australia has been a development that has taken communities and policymakers by surprise. Australian scholarship was also ill-prepared, with research on the Australian far-right remaining conceptually and empirically underdeveloped. This introduction outlines how the individual chapters seek to address these academic knowledge gaps and contribute to making sense of the far-right in Australia.

The recent rise and sustained popularity of right-wing populist parties and various far-right groups and movements in many countries around the globe has become a major political and societal concern, as well as a central topic of heated debates and controversies. Ethno-centric nationalism, in all its different shapes and forms, seems to have experienced another revival across what we commonly refer to as the Western democratic world and beyond. Not least due to the globalised flow of—‘fake’ or actual—news, the current wave of ethno-nationalism has also reached Australia with previously unknown force. This is evidenced by the emergence and public presence of a range of new anti-Islam movements and self-declared ‘patriot’ groups in the mid-2010s, and, in the formal political arena, by the 2016 electoral success of the populist One Nation party, which won four seats in the Australian Senate with a political campaign heavily focussed on anti-Islam and anti-immigration themes.

Australia had experienced radical and extremist right-wing movements and violence prior to the rise of this twenty-first-century version of exclusionary nationalism (Smith and Zammit forthcoming; Fleming and Mondon 2018), but the scale of far-right activism has been—and still is—more marginal than in North America and many Western European countries (James 2005; Fleming and Mondon 2018). Nevertheless, in recent years, far-right groups have gained a level of public visibility and media presence that is unprecedented in Australia. This has led many journalists and public commentators to talk about the rise of the far-right. Such an assessment has been increasingly shared by policymakers and law enforcement agencies, including the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), which has repeatedly warned against the growing threat that far-right groups may pose for public safety, especially by promoting communal violence (ASIO 2016). How real these threats are became tangible when the police arrested a right-wing activist with personal connections to several of these emerging right-wing groups in 2016, charging him for allegedly plotting potentially deadly attacks on several left-wing locations in Melbourne. It is noteworthy that this was the first time that federal anti-terrorism laws were used against a right-wing political actor in Australia.

The rapid emergence of far-right activism in Australia took policymakers by surprise. But they were not the only ones: the Australian research landscape was also ill-prepared to provide evidence-based insights into the nature of these socio-political movements, their agendas, networks and activism. This stands in stark contrast to the scholarship in Europe and North America, where right-wing extremism and radicalism (and recently also populism) has been a prolific and well-established research area for decades (Mudde 2000, 2017). A systematic literature review, which we co-authored in 2016, covering the years 2011–2015, concluded that

the institutionalisation and expression of racist, anti-Muslim and nationalist-exclusivist attitudes by right-wing extremist political parties or movements … have remained markedly under-researched in the Australian context, despite mounting evidence of the growth of right-wing exclusivist political groups in Australia. (Grossman et al. 2016: 27)

In 2017, we updated this 2011–2015 literature review to identify more recent developments. We found that, while these research themes remain empirically underexplored in Australia, there has been a ‘notable increase in academic attention paid to domestic far-right movements – although a lot more empirical groundwork appears to be necessary to explore Australia’s highly fragmented far-right’ (Peucker et al. 2017: 4). Against this backdrop, we decided to bring together a number of academics who have carried out empirical research on the far-right in Australia and attempt to take stock of the recently emerging scholarship on far-right movements and activism, both online and offline. This book is the outcome of this endeavour.

This introductory chapter seeks to contextualise the research space in Australia. After a snapshot overview on the twentieth-century history of the far-right in Australia, we discuss how scholarly attention to the far-right has started to emerge in contemporary Australia in response to domestic societal and political developments. This will set the stage for the individual chapters in this book and their empirical and theoretical-conceptual contributions to researching various dimensions of highly diverse, fragmented but also partially connected far-right movements, and their online and offline activism in Australia.

Historically, Australia has largely been spared from a popular extreme-right presence that has been an ongoing characteristic of the European and North American political landscape (James 2005). This is not to say that far-right extremism has been entirely absent in Australia. Several far-right groups have emerged (and disappeared) since Australia’s federation in 1901, and they often looked to international contexts for inspiration, taking their cues in particular from Britain and the United States, rather than from continental Europe (Smith and Zammit forthcoming). George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and the British National Labour Party served as inspiration for the National Socialist Party of Australia in the 1960s and the National Front of Australia in the 1970s to early 1980s (Henderson 2002; Harcourt 1972; Smith 2015). Some idiosyncratic Christian Identity groups with small followings emerged, and a few skinhead gangs aligned themselves with neo-Nazism (Bessant 1995; Henderson 2002: 219). Some Australians also tried to create a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan (Rutland and Caplan 1998; Henderson 2002).

While various marginal and fragmented neo-Nazi groups had links to movements in the United States and the United Kingdom, they were generally lacklustre in their attempts to undertake organised political activism. The League of Rights was the most politically organised and substantial extreme-right organisation to emerge in Australia in the post-World War II era. From the 1960s, it drew on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and promoted White Christian culture as superior, warning against dangers of non-White immigration (James 2005). Several Australian neo-Nazis started their political activism within the League of Rights (Greason 1997: 189–199). In the 1970s, however, the Australian National Alliance and its 1980s successor National Action emerged from the Australian far-right political landscape espousing a more revolutionary ideology and with increasing criminal activity and violence (Smith and Zammit forthcoming).

In the wake of a dismantled White Australia policy, the Australian Nationalist Movement, a group with its roots in National Action, emerged and undertook a campaign of firebombing, burglaries and assaults aimed at Asian immigrants. The leader of the Australian Nationalist Movement was Jack Van Tongeren, an ex-Vietnam veteran who did not let his mixed Javanese and Australian heritage stop him from adopting blatant neo-Nazi ideology. He formed the breakaway group to be more explicitly neo-Nazi than National Action (James 2005). Van Tongeren was eventually convicted in the 1990s for multiple crimes related to his extreme-right activities.

In the 1996 federal election, Pauline Hanson was elected to the Australian Parliament as an independent. Within 12 months, she established Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party with a platform opposing Asian Immigration and with an explicit hostility towards Aboriginal Australians. Hanson lost her seat in the House of Representatives in the 1998 election, and the party was embroiled in infighting and decline in influence before re-emerging in the 2016 federal election (see Chap. 3 in this book). Hanson has come to symbolise the mainstreaming of the contemporary far-right in Australia, effectively contributing to the idea that it is socially acceptable to publicly malign entire groups of people.

There has been some academic interest in far-right groups and their attractiveness in the past, but research attention has been very limited and short-lived, not resulting in any coherent and substantial scholarship. It remained conceptually and empirically underdeveloped, scattered and unsystematic. In the aftermaths of Pauline Hanson’s first electoral success in 1996, for example, it was primarily political science scholars who analysed the mobilisation success and political traction of One Nation (e.g. Jackman 1998; Gibson et al. 2002). However, as Hanson’s political party failed to maintain political momentum, so did the Australian scholarship on the far-right.

Research on various manifestations of racism (e.g. Dunn and Nelson 2011; Nelson 2015; Dunn et al. 2009; Jakubowicz et al. 2017) and racist violence (e.g. Dunn et al. 2011; Mason 2012), and nationalism (e.g. Hage 2003; Fozdar et al. 2015; Fozdar and Low 2015), continued to expand. This was, at least to some extent, driven by events like the racially motivated violent attacks on international students and others in 2009 and 2010 or the Cronulla riots in December 2005, when Anglo-Australian youth clashed with young people of mainly Middle Eastern background in an attempt to ‘reclaim their beach’ and, by extension, make claims of what they considered to be their Anglo-White entitlements.

The academic work on racism and nationalism, however, has largely ignored more institutionalised expressions of racist or other exclusionary nationalist attitudes within social movements or groups.¹ This omission may be attributed to a general lack of public visibility of extreme far-right groups (e.g. Blood & Honour Australia; Combat 18; Southern Cross Hammerskins) and extreme right-wing parties, such as the Australia First Party (founded in 1996). These fringe groups have generally operated without attracting much public attention. While the outspoken anti-Islam Q-Society (founded in 2010) and the right-wing ultra-conservative Rise Up Australia party (founded in 2011) got considerable media exposure, they did not become the subject of significant research interest. Right-wing movements and activism remained an academic blind spot in Australia.

In the first half of the 2010s, a series of domestic and overseas developments occurred that further intensified the already existing moral panic (Morgan and Poynting 2013) around the place of Islam and Muslim communities in Australia. This created a fertile ground for the emergence of new far-right groups. The War on Terror rhetoric and the heightened securitisation of Muslim communities (Humphrey 2013) continued with an increasing focus on the alleged domestic threat within Australia. Within the context of the rise of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and its global call for attacks, the 2014 Lindt Café siege and a series of other terrorist plots and violent attacks in Australia and overseas further aggravated a climate of moral panic and increased its resonance well beyond the societal fringes. The notion of Islam as a potential threat to the physical safety of Australians continued to spread among substantial segments of society (UNSA 2015). In addition, and indirectly related to these perceptions of threats, claims of alleged cultural incompatibility with the Australian ‘way of life’ gained increasing popularity, further instigated by divisive public statements of political leaders. Then Prime Minister Tony Abbott, for example, publicly claimed that Islam was in need of reform and questioned the genuineness of Islamic community leaders’ condemnations of terrorism. The skewed and often sensationalist public portrayal of singular incidents within the Muslim community, such as the violent escalation of a Sydney street rally of young Muslims against an explicitly anti-Islam movie in 2012, added further fuel to the fire, painting an image seemingly resonating with Huntington’s (1993) discredited Clash of Civilisation arguments.

This socio-political context of moral panic, securitisation and heightened anti-Muslim discourses was the catalyst for the formation of a number of new far-right groups, such as the Patriot Defence League Australia (2013/2014), Aussie Angels Against Sharia (2014), Stop the Mosque (2014), Reclaim Australia (2014/2015) or the political party Australian Liberty Alliance (ALA, 2015), to name a few. These newly emerging groups were quite different to the old-style fascist or neo-Nazi groups that have been in fringe existence in Australia for decades. Notwithstanding differences in terms of the structures of the new far-right groups—from political party to loose networks—and differences in strategic goals, what they all have in common is their explicit anti-Islam agenda.

The emergence and rise of these and other far-right groups coincided with, and was in many cases directly connected to, a local conflict around a mosque application in the regional town of Bendigo in Victoria (Jakubowicz et al. 2017: 127–133; Rudner 2017; see also Chap. 8 in this book). Subsequently, the anti-mosque protests in Bendigo turned into something much more than a local conflict over a building application: it became a crucial crystallisation and mobilisation point for far-right groups, both local and interstate, and their online and offline activism. The Bendigo Mosque protests ultimately marked a breakthrough for new far-right movements in contemporary Australia. These movements have since become more diverse, complex and fragmented with new nationalist groups emerging, such as United Patriots Front, True Blue Crew, and the Dingoes and Soldiers of Odin (Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 in this book). These groups have been complemented by, and overlap with, openly White supremacist, fascist groups such as Antipodean Resistance and Nationalist Alternative Australia.

While newly founded far-right political micro parties, such as the ALA or Rise Up Australia, remained electorally unsuccessful, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party celebrated its political comeback in 2016 (see Chap. 3 in this book). Replacing its anti-Asian rhetoric from the 1990s with an anti-Islam agenda, the party won four Senate seats in the 2016 federal elections. Hanson’s Fed Up election campaign combined populist anti-establishment messages with strong anti-Islam themes. Most prominently, Hanson called for a formal inquiry into whether Islam is a religion or a political ideology, a stop to Muslim immigration, a moratorium on building new mosques and video surveillance in existing mosques and Islamic schools. Needless to say, One Nation instantly became the political darling of many of the above-mentioned far-right anti-Islam groups, with some of them explicitly endorsing One Nation’s political agenda on their social media platforms.²

How did academics in Australia respond to this changing socio-political environment and the rise of far-right groups in the mid-2010s? In contrast to Europe and North America, where the recent success of right-wing populist or radical movements and parties quickly resulted in a further proliferation and recalibration of an already well-established research tradition on the radical or extreme right, the Australian research community was arguably ill-prepared. With hardly any country-specific conceptual-theoretical work or methodological experience to draw upon, Australian scholars faced uncharted territory.

The first significant academic contribution to explore the new far-right landscape in contemporary Australia was published in 2016 by Geoff Dean and his research team at Griffith University. Drawing on continental European scholarship (Ignazi 1992; Guibernau 2010), Dean et al. (2016: 123) propose a basic differentiation between old-school extreme right-wing groups which pursue ‘traditional neo-Nazi, fascist ideologies’ (e.g. Southern Cross Hammerskins, Blood & Honour) and new radical right groups, focussed more on ‘nationalism, anti-immigration, and the protection of western values’, such as, according to Dean et al., Reclaim Australia, ALA and the United Patriots Front. This two-fold typology resembles but does not entirely dovetail with a differentiation between ‘White supremacist and neo-Nazi forms of far-right’ and ‘anti-Muslim groups’, suggested by Stevie Voogt (2017: 40) in the Australian context.³

Dean et al.’s (2016: 123) study, based on an online data analysis, maps the ‘ideological space’ of several new and old-style far-right groups in Australia against six pre-defined ‘key narrative discourses’, identified through an ‘extensive review of political science and policy-related literature’ on the new radical right in Europe. These six core themes, which Dean et al. (2016: 125) describe as ‘the fundamental elements of RWE [right-wing extremism] discourse’, are as follows:

Anti-immigrant, often in conjunction with Islamophobic narratives; ‘antipathy’ in particular towards those immigrants or refugees who ‘are deemed to pose a cultural threat to western values and national identity and culture’ (Dean et al. 2016: 123).

Anti-establishmentand anti-elitism, directed at ‘established mainstream political parties and their policies’ (Dean et al. 2016: 124).

Protection ofwesternvalues and culture ‘by defending a nation’s citizens from vulnerability and marginalisation’ (e.g. priority access to social welfare).

Commitment to democratic reform and acceptance of the principles of liberal democracies, but favouring ‘a radical regeneration of the democratic system’ (e.g. calls for direct democracy to reflect the real people’s will).

Return to ‘traditional values’ (in opposition to multiculturalism) in order to ‘maintain the integrity of their national identity as a western-style, liberal democracy’.

Strong state and law and order, claiming to be the ‘champions of order and the only ones (i.e. alternative government) capable of restoring an empowered […] state to preserve their national identity’ (Dean et al. 2016: 124).

Dean et al.’s study gives a snapshot of some of the core narratives and strategies of the groups. Importantly, the authors emphasise that the far-right in Australia ‘is not a homogeneous movement’ (2016: 139), highlighting the diversity and multifaceted nature of Australia’s far-right movements and stark differences between ‘new’ and ‘old’ far-right groups. While, for example, old-style neo-Nazi right-wing extremist groups openly express racial superiority and anti-Semitic tropes, groups from the New Radical Right tend to distance themselves from blatant expressions of biological racism and argue along cultural and religious lines of incompatibility or assimilation—an argument aligned strongly with what Barker (1981) called New Racism.

Dean et al. (2016: 139) concluded that ‘several very different groups [are] positioned on an ideological spectrum of extremism from conservative anti-immigration, anti-Islam groups to far-right neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, generally racist, White supremacy groups’. Emphasising this diversity and complexity was possibly the most significant contribution of this study to the scholarship on the Australian far-right landscape. However, deductively analysing the selected groups’ narratives based on a thematic classification system that originated from a European context risks underestimating the country-specific nature of the far-right in Australia. The deductive analysis approach does not extend to unveiling Australian-specific themes and narratives in the messaging of far-right groups. International scholarship has highlighted the need to take into account the unique socio-political circumstances in each national context. Perry and Scrivens (2016: 821), two academic experts on extremism in Canada, for example, point out that ‘an apt characterization of right-wing extremist (RWE) movements in the United States […] may not be as useful in the Canadian context’.

Despite its shortcomings, Dean et al.’s (2016) study remains one of the few significant empirically based scholarly publications to date that sheds light on far-right movements outside the electoral realm in Australia. Several other academics have shown interest in and published on far-right groups, but their work—as important and insightful as it has been—either presents a well-informed but rather essayistic overview on the far-right in Australia (e.g. Fleming and Mondon 2018) or is not based on systematic research specifically on far-right groups. Amelia Johns’s (2017) contribution ‘Flagging White Nationalism After Cronulla: From the Beach to the Net’, for example, contains a brief discussion of two far-right groups, Australian Defence League (focussing mainly on its leader, Ralph Cerminara) and Reclaim Australia. Johns’s analysis does, however, not seek to systematically explore the nature of these two groups, but rather uses them as case studies to illustrate the role that social media plays both in mainstreaming the messaging of ‘White nationalist online movements in Australia’ and in facilitating ‘internal contestations’ (Johns 2017: 358). Similarly, the impressive monograph on cyber racism by an interdisciplinary group of prominent Australian scholars (Jakubowicz et al. 2017) discusses the online activism of certain right-wing groups within the context of exploring various facets of ‘cyber racism and community resilience’, as the book is entitled. Empirical research specifically on the mobilisation and networks of far-right movements and groups, especially outside the electoral realm, however, remains extremely underdeveloped.⁴

The electoral success of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in 2016 (federal election) and 2017 (Queensland state elections) has recently attracted some empirical research interest. Two Queensland University scholars, Frank Mols and Jolanda Jetten (2018), for example, examined the political appeal of One Nation in the Queensland state elections in 2017. Their research demonstrates that ‘income is a poor predictor of One Nation support’. Mols and Jetten (2018) argue that their findings challenge widespread assumptions that populist parties like One Nation get their votes primarily from those who struggle financially (‘relative deprivation’) or, more broadly, the ‘losers of globalisation’. This is supported in some ways by Andrew Markus’s (2017) special analysis of his annual Scanlon Foundation 2017 Social Cohesion survey, in which he identified the views of One Nation supporters on a range of social, economic and political issues (see Chap. 3 in this book).

The Australian National University political scientist Charles Miller (2017) also conducted research on One Nation, focussing on its political strategy rather than on its electoral appeal with Australian voters. Miller examines ‘Australia’s anti-Islam right’ by analysing social media posts and comments on the Facebook page of One Nation and the single-issue group Boycott Halal. He found that One Nation pursues a typically populist agenda (Evans 2017; Greven 2016; Sheets et al. 2016; Lubbers and Coenders 2017), characterised by strong anti-establishment, and anti-immigration, nativist messaging—a finding that resonates in some ways with prevalent attitudes among One Nation supporters in Markus’s (2017) study. Miller (2017: 397) concludes that the ‘most important common thread in … anti-Muslim groups’ online discourse is the security threat from Muslim terrorism and the alleged political threat to Australian democracy from Sharia law’. This fear-peddling agenda is part of a strategy that promotes ‘anger at the political elite’ and rejects political correctness, which, according to these groups, silences concerns about Islam (Miller 2017: 398).

A myriad of questions around the online, and even more the offline, operation and activism of Australia’s highly amorphous and volatile far-right movements remain unanswered. We currently have insufficient empirical evidence to understand the intragroup dynamics (e.g. interaction or tensions between group leader and supporters; see also Chap. 7 in this book), personal and thematic connectivity between different groups, shifting narratives or their online strategies of mobilisation and recruitment or their offline activism in Australia. The US political scientist George Hawley recently published the book Making Sense of the Alt-Right (2017), describing alt-right groups in the United States as a highly fractured, anti-liberal, reactionary and racist movement that differs from previous right-wing movements in particularly in the way it uses social media (‘troll culture’). Hawley (2017: 8) explains that his book should help readers better ‘understand the history, tactics and possible futures of the Alt-Right’. It is our ambition with this edited book to contribute to something similar in Australia: making sense of the far-right in contemporary Australia. To achieve this goal, we invited scholars from a range of disciplines (and one practitioner) to present their latest empirical and theoretical work on far-right discourses and activism, both online and offline, in Australia.

Following this introduction, Chap. 2 by Pete Lentini sets the stage by providing an overview on the Australian far-right from an international comparative perspective.

The third chapter by Andrew Markus offers empirical insights into the values and attitudes of people who voted (or intended to vote) for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, which has often been described as a populist right-wing party. Based on representative survey data, Markus draws a nuanced picture of these voters’ attitudes, arguing that One Nation voters’ views are often not dissimilar to those held by Labor and Greens voters (e.g. on economic issues) or by Liberal/National voters (e.g. on national identification). However, what differentiates One Nation voters most clearly from others—and this might affect their choice at the ballot box—are their negative views of the political and legal system and their heightened sense of disempowerment and pessimism. By focussing on attitudes and values, Markus’s study complements previous research studies that have found that the electoral success