When more than 50 National Socialist Network supporters lined up outside New South Wales parliament last weekend, the image shocked the country.
Observers of the neo-Nazi group say the stunt was an example of a familiar tactic to bait the media, but the frequency of such events and the number of people involved now demand new responses.
Reactive lawmaking and off-the-cuff ideas won’t deal with the problem, says Levi West, a counter-terrorism expert and researcher at ANU.
“In the absence of a strategy – a whole government strategy – to respond, then we wind up with kind of piecemeal reaction that risks exacerbating the problem.”
Moving on from ‘reactionary law-making’
The “flash” demonstration in Sydney is consistent with a strategy outlined in a 112-page manual, seen by Guardian Australia and first reported by Crikey, that was leaked to the media in 2021, a year after the organisation launched.
Since then, anti-Nazi group the White Rose Society estimates the NSN has grown from dozens of active members to currently about 200.
It believes the Sydney stunt, in which 60 black-clad men stood for 20 minutes outside parliament, was a “show of force” after their leader, Thomas Sewell, was jailed and other senior members faced non-association orders. Sewell was released on bail on Thursday.
After the rally, the fallout over who knew what when, was swift. The police commissioner, Mal Lanyon, has said it was a communication error that led police to give the group immunity from being charged under the Summary Offences Act by approving a form 1 for the rally.
The premier, Chris Minns, has since vowed to give police more powers to break up hate stunts. The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, backed calls for tighter rules around face masks at protests, although the group – in a departure from the norm – weren’t wearing masks.
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Jordan McSwiney, a University of Canberra expert on the far right, says it’s time to move on from reactionary lawmaking. Like many other researchers of the far right, he is calling for a strategy that also encompasses a response to the social issues driving people to join, and funding for exit programs.
“While there is a place for banning gestures, slogans, it will literally do nothing to impede the organisation and growth of Nazi movements in Australia,” he says. “We can’t police our way out of fascism.”
‘A broader strategy’
There are also fears from civil liberty groups that further police powers will curtail the broader right to protest.
Tim Roberts, the president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, thinks police have been harsher in their efforts to break up leftwing protests as opposed to those on the right.
Jeremy King, a lawyer at Robinson Gill focusing on police misconduct, raises a similar issue in Victoria.
“It’s my experience that police take a far more vigorous approach to policing and crowd control when it comes to counter protests,” he says.
Both say police already have the tools they need to break up such stunts. Roberts points out that in NSW, police have the power to move someone on if they have reasonable grounds to believe a person is harassing or intimidating another person.
But the White Rose Society acknowledges that can be difficult.
“The Asio director, Mike Burgess, has described their antics as ‘awful but lawful’,” a White Rose spokesperson says. “However, as we have seen, a number of their stunts have included racist and homophobic language on banners and in speeches, which clearly crosses the line into hate speech or incitement. There appears to be an unwillingness to prosecute this.”
The spokesperson says prosecutions have occurred when members of the group have committed acts of violence, but with mixed outcomes.
“From our observations, knowledge of the group’s … ideology, tactics and even membership is patchy across police forces and legal professionals. We have repeatedly seen that courts have viewed personal factors such as having a partner and children as protective against future offending,” the spokesperson says.
“This misunderstands the role and importance of family in their political worldview. Having a family means they are more likely to offend, as doing stunts is seen as protecting their family’s future and therefore the ‘white race’.”
West says there is also a genuine dilemma when it comes to the policing of the stunts, which is inescapable.
“Every time you undertake counter-terrorism activity, arresting people, using surveillance on people, whatever it might be you feed into their own narratives that they use to recruit people,” he says.
“If everyone involved responds in a relatively calm, considered and strategic manner, rather than a reactive and escalatory manner, then that helps them mitigate it.
“Any police activity or law enforcement activity needs to be undertaken in the context of a broader strategy that includes a whole of government understanding and appreciation of what the threat and risk is.”
The role of the media
Some media outlets have responded to the issue by avoiding coverage of certain stunts, but West says the primacy of social media means the movement no longer needs legacy media to get their message out. Such was the case during a stunt outside a Melbourne shopping centre this year, during which a defamatory banner was unfurled. Legacy media ignored it, but it went viral on social platforms.
“The problem [is] the extreme right in Australia has now crossed the kind of tipping point whereby we now need to be very, very, very clear about what the problem and risk is … and very frank and very clear with the public about the fact that those guys who protested outside on Macquarie Street are neo-Nazis,” West says.
He says the reporting this week by media outlets exposing the identity of people at Saturday’s rally is a helpful response. One individual was revealed as an employee of Sydney Trains. He has since been stood down.
Still, McSwiney says there needs to be an effort by media to avoid legitimising the movement through media coverage.
“The time for a detailed media strategy was six years ago,” he says.
This should include rules like blurring out slogans and banners, as recommended by the White Rose Society.
Questions have been raised whether the form 1 that the group submitted ahead of Saturday’s rally was in itself a strategy to bait the media.
In parliament on Tuesday, Labor MLC and former barrister Stephen Lawrence questioned why the group submitted it, given they didn’t need immunity from the Summary Offences Act to stand on the footpath outside Parliament House – that is not an offence.
“My theory is just a working theory. I think these Nazis, these abhorrent individuals, they wanted a form 1 because they wanted [it] to be opposed and they wanted this to go to the supreme court,” he says.
“I’m sure they were very aware that almost every significant form 1 that’s gone to the supreme court has generated a huge amount of publicity.”
