The brazen and unprovoked alleged attack on a Channel 9 security guard this week has highlighted the “dangerous” and alarming rise of the far-right movement across Australia.
The speed at which neo-Nazi leader Thomas Sewell allegedly escalated to violence sent shivers down the spine of civil rights activists who have been monitoring the behaviour of these individuals over recent years.
Far-right groups – spurred on by the dream of an “Australian Hitler” – have dramatically increased their activities on Australian soil in recent years as new cells pop up.
The Grampians, the National Museum in Canberra, the Story Bridge in Brisbane, Swinburne University and the Brisbane Synagogue are some of the places where these groups have congregated to spread their message of hate, white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology.
A relatively new group to Australia – the National Socialist Network – claims to have an active footprint in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth and a number of regional cities.
The nation’s spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, says increasing numbers of young Australians – some just 14 years old – are being radicalised by both extreme right wing and Islamist groups.
ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told a parliamentary committee last year that right-wing extremists now represented between 30 and 40 per cent of the agency’s priority caseload.
Read the article by Jack Paynter in The Morning Bulletin.