Begone, extremists on both sides, we don’t want you here
If last weekend’s anti-immigration “March For Australia” wasn’t bad enough, we then witnessed the Chinese Communist Party marking the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end with a military parade that’s sparked comparisons to Hitler’s 1937 Nuremberg Rally and an ominously harmonious gathering of the world’s most prominent authoritarian leaders and, well, Dan Andrews, the latter snapped within spitting distance of Kim Jong-un to the presumed vindication of detractors who called the former Victorian premier “Dictator Dan”.
So while tyranny is on the march abroad, at home the vibe is reminiscent of Weimar. Or is that too strong?
The anti-immigration March for Australia, which featured neo-Nazis at the helm, rendered me doubly unwelcome in my hometown’s CBD. As the song has it, there were clowns to the left of me, the “Free Palestine” movement that would dismantle the Jewish state, and jokers to the right, Thomas Sewell and co that would evict Jews from Australia. For the latter, not even right-wing journalist/provocateur Avi Yemini passes as Australian so he copped a beating, too.
It’s likely no coincidence that the mob rule was ugliest in Melbourne. Not 10 years ago the city was all the rage for its “world-class” hipsterism – coffee, graffiti art, sport, food – deemed in the same league as (contemporary) Berlin. Then along came Covid and the punishing, singular lockdowns that drove too many people online and down what the Prime Minister this week referred to as “rabbit holes”. Conspiracy theories – often about Dan Andrews. The “sovereign citizens” movement, still terrifyingly potent as the shooting of two police officers near the Victorian town of Porepunkah attests. Lunacies of all kinds.
In the years since, and especially since the October 7 massacre and Gaza war, Melbourne has developed a reputation for “world class” violent anti-Semitism. And neo-Nazis, by definition skilled at exploiting social discord, pop up as frequently as urban foxes, whether on the steps of parliament or at “Pride” events, or under police escort down Bourke Street. The state is certainly living up to the government’s mantra of diversity and inclusion: fascists of all shades are welcome. On Sunday, about 30 neo-Nazis allegedly descended on an Indigenous protest camp with metal pipes and poles in a vicious assault that appeared to target women. The following morning, Sewell ambushed Premier Jacinta Allan’s press conference.
At this point I’ll resist lecturing the Victorian government on how these close encounters with neo-Nazis might help it distinguish real fascists from ordinary people out-of-step with their radical social policies. For instance, the middle-aged lesbians and other women who gathered on the steps of parliament at the 2023 Women Speak rally to protest the erosion of sex-based rights aren’t actually Nazis, even if Andrews himself conflated them with the black-clad, goose-stepping gatecrashers.
If the authorities want to be treated with respect they might consider never again deploying “Nazi” as a cheap, political smear.
This isn’t me going down a rabbit hole: our leaders’ refusal to be honest brokers, their shutting down hard-but-necessary debates, sows resentment that creates fertile ground for extremists.
The hardest of hard-but-necessary debates – harder, even, than debates about puberty blockers or drag queen story time – is that of Australia’s immigration intake. Not just the size of the intake and its actual or perceived impact on house prices and infrastructure, but the type of migrants we’re letting in and whether their values are compatible with our own.
And here we come to the sorry truth that in Labor’s schema, some extremists are more equal than others. Where Labor leaders rightly condemn neo-Nazis for racism, they launder the anti-Israel rallies as “peaceful protest”. At best they send mixed messages. You don’t have to be a Zionist to see the preferential treatment and double-standards at work.
“There is no place for any type of hate in Australia,” said Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke ahead of the anti-immigration rallies. “There is no place for people who seek to divide and undermine our social cohesion.”
In fact, such people commandeer the CBD most weekends, marching with foreign flags and every so often flags of terror organisations. One marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge bearing a placard of the Supreme Leader of Iran, a state alleged to have directly orchestrated and bankrolled anti-Semitic terror in Australian cities. (Meanwhile, Bob Carr and co insist it’s the uniquely powerful and nefarious “Israel lobby” that peddles foreign influence at the expense of the national interest.)
Anti-Semitism simmers beneath the surface of the “Free Palestine” movement, boiling over with disturbing frequency. Placards featuring the Star of David as a swastika; chants of “Death to the IDF”; the targeting of Jewish philanthropists and businesses, such as the Israeli restaurant Miznon, and even Starbucks or Myer; the atrocious intimidation of academics and MPs, provocations in heavily Jewish suburbs such as the Gaza flotilla solidarity rally slated for Bondi Beach on Father’s Day.
Extremism begets extremism: allow imported Middle Eastern fascism to run rampant and the likes of Sewell will respond with a call to what some clever person this week dubbed “white intifada”.
Sometimes I wonder who advises our leaders, and what media they consume or don’t consume. Because you would have to exist in a progressive bubble not to realise how febrile a climate leaders create when they brand everyone concerned about mass-immigration, including its potential to undermine social cohesion, as a threat to social cohesion. Does Tony Burke want Australia to end up like Europe or the UK, roiling with sectarian tensions that cannot be named lest the police come knocking over an errant tweet?
The Prime Minister at least road-tested a centrist line when he said he had no doubt there would have been “good people” attending the anti-immigration march.
Fascinating Trumpian echo in the reference to “good people” but the sentiment is right and I’ll go one further and concede there are good people marching on both sides. Good people attended the anti-immigration march just as good people attend the weekly anti-Israel marches in sheer frustration at the horror and suffering in Gaza.
But just as Anthony Albanese advised good people concerned about the negative impacts of immigration – some themselves migrants – to “have a look at who you were with on Sunday”, he should advise the good people marching under the banner of the “resistance by any means necessary” crowd to look at who they march with every Sunday.
And would it be laughably naive of me to suggest all these good people start marching together – fill the Sydney Harbour Bridge with a “March for Humanity”, a fair-dinkum version? One that urges genuine peace abroad and at home, and reclaims the Australian flag from the neo-Nazis who sully it and the hard-leftists who burn it.
We need to banish the extremists from the metaphorical and literal village square; send them back to the fringes from where they came.
Julie Szego is a Melbourne-based freelance writer.
Is the Liberal Party finished? Don’t bet the rent on it yet
As a self-aware neurotic, I’ve learned to control my instinct for seeing calamity around every corner. But it’s hard not to totally freak out at the sight of uniformed neo-Nazis commandeering the streets, seizing the megaphone, bashing up minorities, and tearing at an already frayed social fabric.