I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. When a group of neo Nazis recently took to the streets of Melbourne, the state's premier said that Nazis don't belong in Australia. But while that might be a good sentiment, is it actually true today? Are and a writer and Quikey contributor so less little on Australia's white nationalist past, and in how failing to reckon with it, We've set
the stage for the movement to grow. It's Wednesday, August twenty seven, so it's lest I thought we could begin by talking about the marches in Melbourne earlier this month.
Tell me about what we saw on the streets.
What we saw is an organized group of people assembled at a ridiculous time of the day. So I think of is it about, you know, midnight one o'clock where they decide to take to the streets.
Revelers enjoying a night out in Melbourne have been left stunned after a large group of masked men marched through the CBD.
They were there, they are in numbers, They were a threatening group. They were still yelling stuff like Australia for the white man, which you know, I don't even have the words to describe that sort of sentiment.
Around one hundred people dressed in all black stormed down Burke Street Mall while police kept a watchful eye.
And we also saw, you know, a bunch of police actually enable them to walk through without much of a problem. The reports were stating that the only person who ended up taking some sort of action to oppose them at that hour of the morning was a homeless man and he ended up being assaulted by the march attendees.
All of the masked except for leader, well known neo Nazi Thomas.
So there was a number of them. There was a sizeable group, and they were marching for quite a while through the city without any problem.
Well let's talk a little bit more about the response from police, from politicians, from media.
Well, firstly, I just found it extraordinary, and the police responses were very much that they couldn't do anything, that their hands were tied.
Powers, police could do little but follow the white supremacists, that there was nothing.
They could do to stop this group.
Police powerless following the crowd through the heart of the city.
The fact that police were there and couldn't do anything about it.
That just makes things so much worse.
And as somebody who had been at the march for Palace Stone only a few days earlier, we got so opposed by police that they actually shut down a bridge with the Public Order Response Team and the amount of police and the ordinary police in order to stop a group of peaceful protesters from being on a bridge. They can mobilize forces and be so aggressive against peace protesters, what was their problem doing anything to stop a significantly
smaller group of Nazis. It was very very select But more than that, it was hand ringing from the police about how they were powerless to do anything, and then the government responding about how you know, Nazis have no place in society and they were going to give police more powers to do something.
The premier condemning the group Nazis don't belong in this country and they know it. That's why they hide behind masks in the dark, not afraid of these goons. But we will not tolerate them either.
So it was like a call and response, if you like. And what that actually means is that there's going to be tough for controls on any sort of protest.
And that sort of statement this idea that this sort of thing has no place in Australia. You hear words like that often from politicians after something like this happens, and it sounds good and you'd want it to be true, but is it.
It's not true at all. Australia very much has been set up by ideas of racism and white supremacy. This country was established on the legal fiction of Terranualius and then you know, for decades this country had the White Australia Policy, where there was actual barriers put in place for non white migration, and this fed a lot of the national character. Still see remnants of the Wide Australia
policy today. So the Constitution still contains the right to exclude people from being able to vote based on race. It still contains a race power, so the right to make laws against certain races of people, and it still contains the right to exclude jewel citizens from entering federal Parliament, which is the one that people don't talk about. But that jewel citizen ban was actually to stop Indian and Chinese and other migrants of color from ever being eligible
to sit in parliament. Because the Australian Parliament was built up to be filled by British subjects who had become Australian citizens, not people of color who had migrated, you know, during the Gold Rushers and all that. So with that history comes a long, long history of white supremacy and the ability for fascist to gain grown.
So how does all of this this history, how does it create the conditions that we see today when we have marches like the one that we just saw in Melbourne.
Well, people aren't aware of the Constitution and it's racial things that exist to this day. And the more that ignorance is allowed to flourish and the less aware the people are, the more space that we give for these groups to latch onto the disenfranchised and grow their movement.
Coming up, who's really behind the march For Australia. The Victorian government is proposing changes to protest laws. They say it's an attempt to crack down on neo Nazi activity. They want a ban on face coverings and certain symbols.
Premier de siner Allen announced an overhaul of existing anti protest laws late last year after a series of violent attacks on places of worship for the Jewish and Muslim communities.
What impact do you think that that will have well.
When we're all in COVID lockdown. There was a massive Black Lives Matter rally and technically by wearing face masks at that time, we were both breaking and adhering to the law. And by that I mean that there was the COVID restrictions that are in place that required everyone to be wearing masks everywhere, so you know, for health reasons, we were adhering to the law, but also we were breaking the law because the government was stating at that
time that wearing face masks at protests was illegal. But face masks at rallies are also used as a tool to protect protesters from things like paper spray. When police decide to be incredibly liberal with pepper spray on protesters and talk about banning symbols, who decides what is a symbol of protest, what is a symbol of hate and hate speech and what's objectionable.
The legislation we have in the Parliament to make hate speech a crime, where it should be to ban face master stamp out extremist behavior a protests where there's an opportunity to do more, and I will always grab that opportunity.
And at any given time those definitions can be redefined, and protest is a part of a healthy democracy and needs to exist. The right to assembly is in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The more that process is legislated against, the less able people are to exercise that democratic right.
So what do you think a good response would be then, to neo Nazis, to rising fascism.
I think a real good response for be honesty. I'm very, very huge on the truth telling agenda, and the more that we talk about Australia's history, and the more aware the people are about the Australia's history, the less likely they are to reinforce false narratives and therefore the less
likely they are to give power to Nazi groups. So neo Nazi ideals will get more and more marginalized and shifted to the side, to the point of where they are objectionable by a vast majority of the public, not where a vast majority of the public will sit there and go, you know, on this front, they kind of have a point and start to join them. And that honesty needs to extend to how the media and how the politicians do respond to neo Nazi groups and neo Nazi ideals.
Can we talk a little bit about that, about the media and the way that you think these issues should be covered, because you know, it's obviously the interest of these groups to get media reports about what they're doing. It gives them publicity, but you know, ignoring them entirely is obviously awesome a problem. So what do you think the right conversation is to be having about what is a growing white nationalism threat?
Yeah, Like, for me, this is a really live question because some people do argue that the more media coverage they get, the more they're able to build their momentum. So you know, if they gain the publicity, more people notice that they're gathering, more people take an interest and seek them out, and therefore they can grow their movement
and there is merit in that. But for me, I sort of see and perhaps I'm approaching this as somebody who is Indigenous and a woman, but you know, if you try and pretend that they don't exist, then you are kind of contributing in a way to this great Australian silence and array that I'm very very much opposed to. So I do feel that they need coverage, and I do feel that there needs to be honesty in that coverage.
I think that perhaps the media needs to get better at framing the fact that these are objectionable, you know, far eye actors who threaten our society.
And this weekend Celesti, there are marchers planned in every capital city. They're being builders the March for Australia, and the people claiming to organize these say that they are ordinary Australians who are worried about migration. But the slogans do have something in common with the protests that we've just talked about when Nazis say things like Australia for the white men. So how should we interpret this?
Yeah, there's been a lot of dialogue with regards to who's actually organizing it, and the organizers themselves have been taking up space in social media spheres refuse claims that the marches are being organized by neo Nazis. But the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of anti fascist researchers out there who spend a lot of time drilling down into the telegram groups and exposing
them and seeing what it is that they're doing. So a lot of the key figures who have been behind these march are neo Nazi figures that this country is already quite aware of. They're using some calling and rallying chants about you know, this great country and all that sort of stuff in order to bring people into the fold who might feel threatened by the invasion, a process that happen every year now or by the Palestine protests.
People from the mainstream who do feel a little bit disenfranchised by the way they see Australia going to them all or except society are probably latching on and thinking this is a way to express themselves without doing the research as to what they're actually affiliating themselves in. But it is very deliberate to pick up on these people within white Australia who are disenfranchised and bring them into
the fault by using a degree of subterfuge. And in my opinion, that's what the March for Australia is, a broader manifestation of wellthless, thank you so much for your time today, no worries, thank you for having me.
Also in the news today, Iran's ambassador to Australia has been expelled and we'll have seven days to leave the country, along with three other Iranian officials. It follows Asio announcing it has intelligence that Iran directed at least two major anti Semitic attacks in Australia in twenty twenty four, Lewis's Continental Kitchen in Sydney on October twenty and the Addas
Israel Synagogue in Melbourne on December sixth. AZEO says the attacks were directed by Iran with the aim of messing with social cohesion in Australia, but the Iranian embassy was not involved in the attacks, nor any Iranian diplomats in Australia. And two police officers are dead after a shooting at a rural property in Poora Punka in northeast Victoria. The police were attending the property, about three hundred kilometers northeast of Melbourne to serve a warrant. I'm Ruby Jones. This
is seven am. Thanks for listening.