Escalating Neo-Nazis Demonstrations Rear Their Heads Again on 26 January 2025

Neo-Nazis of the National Socialist Network have continued their close-to-two-year-long practice of openly rallying as adherents of the Nazi doctrine on Australian streets.

This time it was in Yerta-Adelaide on 26 January 2025, in an obvious attempt to heighten tensions around the white Australian practice of celebrating the nation on the date that marks the British invasion of First Peoples’ territory.

Around 16 of the 30-odd black-clad NSN members were arrested by South Australian police, as they commenced marching on Karuna Country through the Adelaide Parklands and onto the city’s CBD on Sunday, calling out their usual racist chants such as the formidable “white man fight back”, along with “Australia for the white man”.

South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas condemned the white supremacist demonstration, especially as all but one of the participants had travelled from interstate to spread racist hate. The state’s police were seen actively heading off the ultranationalist demonstration before it came face-to-face with the local Survival Day 2025 rally, which was being held in the capital by Aboriginal people and their allies.

The all-male arrestees of 26 January consisted of a 16-year-old, eight men in their 20s, four men in their 30s, a 41-year-old male and two men in their 50s. SAPOL reported on Tuesday, 28 January, that these men had variously been charged with loitering, assault police, possess article of disguise, refuse name, along with the relatively new charge of displaying a Nazi symbol.

Also heard to be singing “Waltzing Matilda”, these boys in black parading through the city streets came on the back of stray neo-Nazis having marched through North Sydney last 26 January, threatening similar such divisiveness, even though the Invasion Day parade was taking place on the other side of Sydney Harbour.

And whilst Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese has condemned the openly Nazi demonstration, as one would expect, opposition leader Peter Dutton has done nothing of the sort, which the nation too expects of the Liberal MP.

Far-right rising

“What you are threatening to do to us, bothers me,” Survival Day organiser Natasha Wanganeen told the Nazi demonstrators via a Channel 7 camera on 26 January. “We are just living our lives. We are surviving in this country after 230-plus years of oppression in a broken system.”

“Leave us alone,” the Kaurna Narungga Ngarrindjeri Nyoongar woman added. “Go get some help.”

The National Socialist Network was established in 2020, as an umbrella organisation for the disparate neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups that have been of more prominence ever since Reclaim Australia hit the streets circa 2015.

Antifascist research group The White Rose Society has produced research outlining that the NSN is a a decentralised network of white supremacist active clubs located across the continent of so-called Australia, with these Anglo-Australian racists connecting online in this country and more broadly overseas.

Following NSN members having openly rallied before Victorian parliament in March and May 2023, independent researcher Andy Fleming, who goes by the pen name slackbastard, told Sydney Criminal Lawyers, that such “open espousal of Nazism… is a departure from recent past practice by neo-Nazis in Australia”.

The March 2023 episode before Parliament House in Melbourne saw NSN members supporting an antitransgender rally. Since that time, Nazis have too rallied in Meanjin-Brisbane and on Gadigal land in Sydney, as well as in Yerta-Adelaide. And these far-right protests have further targeted refugees, migrants, Jewish people and the rather dismal attempts to disrupt 26 January First Nations rallies.

ASIO director general Mike Burgess has been warning of the rise of the far-right since the pandemic, as he’s explained that the lockdowns led to a massive spike of white supremacist global online networking. And the top spy revealed in 2020, that 30 percent of ASIO’s terrorist caseload was then focused on white nationalists, with this since having risen to 50 percent.

On the same day that SA police were having to counter a neo-Nazi protest in their state’s capital, the local South Australian Murdoch press ran a report on an NSN ‘fight club’ in Adelaide, which is made up of white Australians, who’ve been making a lot of racist and misogynistic suggestions online, involving rape and violence, along with spruiking the “burning churches”.

White suprematist politicking

The term ‘ethnonationalist state’ refers to a country where a dominant ethnic group controls government and promotes its own culture, language, and religion. The term has been bandied about repeatedly in public discourse over the past 16 months.

The nation of Australia was founded in 1901 as something of an ethnostate, with the first pieces of legislation passed consisting of various measures collectively known as the White Australia Policy.

So, white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis have always formed a fringe element in Australian suburbia, with both sides of Australian politics having traditionally paid these elements little heed.

The NSN demonstrations on the steps of Parliament House in Naarm-Melbourne in March and May 2023, appeared to be Anglo-Australian Nazis suddenly emboldened to demonstrate on the local streets. However, 22 months later and it would appear that these white men are actually a symptom of a shift to the right that’s now pervading western politics globally.

These grassroots fascists are now encouraged by the return of the Trump administration, which has been championing divisive white supremacist politics over its one week in office, while similar policies are being placed on the table by the Liberal Nationals in response to a coming election, with one of the nation’s most notoriously racist politicians, Peter Dutton, its candidate for the next PM.

The unbridled violence of the Israeli-perpetrated genocide in the Gaza Strip has further encouraged white supremacist posturing, as the racism the apartheid state employs to dehumanise the Palestinian people it occupies, which then works to facilitate the large-scale mass slaughter of them, is the same sentiment that was on display in Adeliade on Sunday, and every time the NSN mobilise.

Footage of prominent NSN figure Blair Cottrell surfaced over the weekend, which features the white supremacist telling his fellow participants at a Patriotic Alternative (PA) conference in the UK last October that the only language that the First Peoples of this continent understand is violence, and he then suggests lynching them.

Ten years ago, when the likes of Cottrell, Reclaim Australia and the United Patriots Front began mobilising on the streets with the support of politicians, like One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, it appeared to be Anglo-Australian raging at the dying of their white supremacist ethnostate.

However, a decade later, this sentiment has morphed into Nazism and is now present right across all the nations of the AUKUS alliance.

And with a federal election looming, the Greens is the only party that if elected would likely address the matter of growing community racial divides, while the campaign rhetoric of the Liberal Nationals will certainly stoke the flames of this rising ‘white pride’, and federal Labor can be expected to avoid the issue at all costs for fear of losing any white nationalist voters it can currently depend upon.