Inside the rise of Australia’s far right
Australia’s neo-Nazis have been posing with portraits of Hitler and swastikas and calling Jewish people ‘sewer rats’, as security experts warn of their continuing threat after October 7.
On April 20, members from Australia’s neo-Nazi network broke bread and shared drinks at a German pub in Victoria around a table decorated with framed photographs of Adolf Hitler.
The gathering marked the 135th anniversary of the Nazi leader’s birth.
Leader Thomas Sewell was with them, cutting a swastika cake.
Emerging figure Joel Davis – whose social media reach has skyrocketed since October 7, as has his anti-Semitism – stood next to him. Seated nearby were rising figures in the movement: Michael Nelson and Nathan Bull, both active National Socialist Network members, and Tim Lutze, who an extremism expert called a “key violent right-wing actor”.
“We will never let his sacrifice be in vain,” Sewell wrote of the event, made up of South Australia and Victoria members. “Hail, Hitler!”
On the same day, in Brisbane, members “bonded in mateship” and promised to “finish what (he) started”.
In NSW, members took part in an “active session” before posing with framed photographs of the Nazi leader.
“His spirit lives, burning in the hearts of those still loyal to him,” the photograph’s caption said.
In Tasmania, a group cut cakes with the European Australian Movement's emblem.
“Happy Birthday, Uncle H, may we carry the torch onwards,” the group said.
Since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, their influence, reach and following has grown concurrent with hardening anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Davis, whose anti-Semitic vitriol is the most extreme, has seen his followers increase by almost 1000 per cent since October 7. His Rumble page, where he hosts a podcast with extremist Blair Cottrell, shot from 297 followers in the weeks before October 7 to about 3300.
On X, where Davis is one of the few leading figures not to have had his account suspended, his followers have doubled from 11,000 in September to more than 25,000.
His Telegram channel, his and other figures’ arena of communication, has had a 3000-follower increase.
Experts said right-wing extremism had been on the rise and remained a threat, and came after Sewell led a neo-Nazi rally in Sydney on Australia Day.
The Counter Extremism Project warned key figures needed to be monitored more closely. ASIO cautioned of a rise in activity from right-wing extremists who wanted a “race war”, while the Home Affairs Department said it had seen increasing Nazi imagery.
In late May, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told a senate estimates hearing that neo-Nazis remained a “significant threat in the terrorism landscape”.
“They’re active, trying to recruit new members to the fold,” he said. “They’re white supremacist racists with an abhorrent view of the world. What they believe in defies logic to normal people.”
Members of Australia’s Jewish community are the targets.
“I’m against Israel because I’m against Jews, not because I’m pro-Palestine,” Davis told followers.
He added that the “fundamental problem with Jews” was that they were “destroying” Australia.
He also described Jewish people as “sewer rats”, said he “advocated for the mass proliferation of anti-Semitism”, and proclaimed his job was to teach people that “organised Jewry” was the enemy.
In another video, he warned: “If anyone is sensitive to criticism to anti-Semitism, tune out, because this is going to be as hard as it gets.”
Davis has emerged as one of the most popular voices among the neo-Nazi community, alongside more high-profile figures such as Sewell, Cottrell and Jacob Hersant, who made headlines in April with Sewell when Victorian prosecutors lost a bid to send the pair back to custody.
Davis’s podcast with Cottrell often includes Sewell as a guest and, across hours of footage, hatred of Jews, Holocaust denial and admiration for Hitler are prominent. “If Jews weren’t behaving (like they do), we probably wouldn’t be making any anti-Semitic comments,” Sewell said.
“Instead, we’d be like ‘there’s some funky people that wear stupid clothes and look ugly, and we don’t want anything to do with them’ – but we wouldn’t be such hardcore anti-Semites”.
In June, Davis said “racism was the most beautiful way to live” and white people needed to use Hitler’s Nuremberg rally speech to inspire themselves.
“(Hitler’s) so wholesome … a loving soul,” Davis said, adding that Jewish people needed the Holocaust as a “sacrifice” to perpetuate “Jewish victimology”.
“He obviously criticised the Jews, but what he was able to do was to tap into something more real and that’s (our) task,” he said.
“We can’t copy and paste what they did, but (we can) look at that as a completely different kind of politics that could exist …”
Davis said he tried to get “friends and family” focused on Jewish conspiracy theories, because it would “bring them into the Nazi world”.
Extremism expert Josh Roose said Davis was an “abhorrent ideologue” who viewed himself as the new “intellectual vanguard” of the far right. “He spends a lot of time engaging internationally, he sees himself as the brains behind the movement,” the Deakin University professor said.
“He’s developed a huge following, but he’s also international, his numbers are consistent.
“For him to post so regularly, in such detail – it’s almost a full-time job – (there’s a) question as to how he is resourcing his life.”
Other theories the trio discussed included that: Jack the Ripper – an 1880s British serial killer who murdered prostitutes – was Jewish; tunnels found under a New York City synagogue were used for blood libel; and October 7 was a red-flag operation.
On October 8, Sewell said it would soon be Europe’s chance to “finally finish the job on the Jewish question” and later alleged Jewish women remained enthralled with Nazis. “Jewish women love the Nazi uniform, they’ve got fetishes for it,” he said.
In January, Davis said Nazi gas chambers “didn’t seem very German”. “Despite their masterful engineering, the Germans didn’t do a very good job with their gas chambers,” he said.
Cottrell told his co-hosts that having watched a documentary about dictator Pol Pot he’d become more confident the Holocaust was fake, calling it “mathematically impossible”.
“This (the Cambodian Killing Fields) is what a real extermination camp looks like,” he said.
“It puts Auschwitz to shame … All there were were some buildings that looked like shower cubicles, and you’re supposed to believe that millions of people were gassed there.”
Cottrell told The Australian he was not a member of any group and he stood by his comments, saying the “evidence just wasn’t there” and it was not illegal to have an opinion.
“Like any sensible Australian, the only thing that concerns me is my country and the direction it’s currently going in,” he said.
When approached about his comments, Sewell claimed that any possible new laws to censor free, or hate, speech “proved our point” that the government had “no respect for the founding stock of this nation”.
Deakin University extremism researcher Lydia Khalil said fertile post-war conditions imbued any extremist actor, but neo-Nazis were still grappling with how best to exploit October 7, given they are both anti-Semitic and Islamophobic. “Right-wing extremists latch on to important sociopolitical issues in an attempt to gain attention from a wider audience,” she said.
“Our social harmony has been challenged, and fringe elements and extremist actors benefit from a polarised environment.
“They’ll be attempting to do so (exploit the Israel-Hamas war), but it’s a complicated conflict for them to navigate.
“They’re Islamophobic and anti-Semitic, there’s less clarity on what side to support, it makes their narrative muddy.”
The growth of neo-Nazi elements will remain a headache for law-enforcement as its activities escalate.
In April, an Australian NSN member travelled to train with members of Finland’s Active Club.
“(Australian) ranks are expanding day by day … and no amount of politicians’ coercive measures of officialdom have succeeded in stopping their activities,” Active Club Finland said of the exchange.
The Counter Extremism Project has said the transnational active club network sought to “create a shadow or standby army” and its extremism researcher Joshua Fisher-Birch said the movement’s leaders had grown in popularity “within the borderless online world”.
Victoria Police are chasing Sewell for questioning for his involvement in an NSN December rally, but he has rebuffed attempts to engage in a formal interview. He has not been charged with any offence.
Dr Roose said the far right’s aim was to build a mass movement and were “not unlike Hizb ut-Tahrir in their cheerleading of violent extremism – but yet not fully participating in it”.
Dr Roose said the far right often had two layers: a part that had always hated Jewish people but a streak that appreciated Israel for being what they perceived to be an ethnostate.
“But there is a deep hatred of Jewish people both globally and domestically,” he said.
“However, you now see anti-Semitism going full circle between the far left and right.
“The conspiratorial elements of the far left can be seen in the same anti-Semitic tropes on the far right.
“While hating each other, we’ve seen a closing of the circle in contempt for Jewish people and anti-Semitism between the far left and right.”
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