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 ofââfakeâ or actualânews, 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 âpatriotâ 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 beenâand still isâmore 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 2011â2015, 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 2011â2015 literature review to identify more recent developments. We found that, while these research themes remain empirically underexplored in Australia, there has been a ânotable increase in academic attention paid to domestic far-right movements â although a lot more empirical groundwork appears to be necessary to explore Australiaâs highly fragmented far-rightâ (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 Australiaâs 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 Rockwellâs 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: 189â199). In the 1970s, however, the Australian National Alliance and its 1980s successor Nation...
