White Supremacist Active Clubs Have Long Operated Here, Yet Have Been Ignored

Right wing extremists, as the ABC’s AM referred to them in a 25 July report, have always been a part of the social mix of Australian suburbia. Another term for them is white supremacists, and, for those who are unaware, Australia was founded on the White Australia Policy.

White Australian politicians and communities have never been too bothered about their presence, especially as many of them work for the defence forces, law enforcement and even some, sit, and loads have sat, in federal, state and territory parliaments.

Indeed, the fact that a Right Wing Extremist Movements in Australia Senate inquiry is taking place now is due to the authorities no longer being able to resist calls for it, especially as the advent of the internet has facilitated the networking of white supremacist patriots not just locally, but globally.

Yet, an odd moment transpired during a 24 July inquiry hearing, when a senior advisor of the New York-based Counter Terrorism Extremism Project, Alexander Ritzmann, advised that when their April submission was lodged, there were no active clubs in Australia. But six weeks later, one did form.

Active clubs are decentralised networks of small white supremacist groups, all with the same goals and the same prejudices, and, as the White Rose Society explained to the government in its inquiry submission, active clubs have been operating in Australia for years – not just since mid-May.

Protecting their own

The White Rose Society wrote on its blog on the same day as the ABC report on active clubs ran, that it “had previously provided a submission to this inquiry, detailing the recent history, organisational strategy, and capacity of the extreme right, including their international connections”.

And the antifascist researchers – who’ve long had their finger on the pulse in regard to the growing far-right, which began its present rise circa 2015 with the appearance of Reclaim Australia – added that their submission outlined, “the role of the Active Club model in Australian neo-Nazism”.

And the researchers had intended their submission to “be made available publicly”. However, the Senate committee would only accept it on a confidential basis “due to ‘adverse commentary’ about the groups MyPlace, Christian Lives Matter and the Australian Natives’ Association”.

Anyone on the ground who’s been paying attention to far-right white supremacists, knows that there has been prominent far-right networks operating in the active club manner at least since 2021.

So, the inquiry appears to be running with misinformation from an expert from abroad, which is disconcerting, especially when WRS spelt out the situation in its submission, which it considers “has not been taken on board by legislators or authorities responsible for addressing the extreme right”.

White man terrorists

Neo-Nazis have lately started publicly protesting, at least since March 2023. And when these events take place, the authorities seem to do as little as possible about them, which has emboldened the white supremacist. 

And this was evidenced last Saturday when a large group of National Socialist Network (NSN) members mobilised in Naarm, as they protested immigration. 

The NSN is one of two groups that WRS identifies as operating nationwide via the active club model. And the other is the European Australian Movement (EAM), which doesn’t receive as much of a mention in the local press as the NSN does.

If one ever sees a group of young white men marching down the street dressed in black, wearing balaclavas. carrying a banner that reads “Australia for the White Man” and chanting the chant “White man”, they’re likely some of these club members connected to both the NSN and EAM.

Obviously, slogans aren’t a strong point of these active club types, and neither is the lacklustre way in which they chant. But they are heavily into physical fitness and martial arts. And as WRS explains, it’s not so easy to join these groups, as the membership process can take up to 12 to 18 months.

The partial publication of the White Rose Society submission, which was lodged with the Senate inquiry and then ignored by it, is comprehensive in describing the way in which these active clubs and networks operate, along with their international connections.

Leader of the EAM Thomas Sewell is internationally renowned amongst far-right white supremacist groups. And while these active clubs might have physical distance between them, they’re all actively discussing the same goals online, which is basically the establishment of a purely white society.

“Sewell has stated that the active clubs in each state operate semi-autonomously,” the WRS informed the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. “There are currently active clubs in every capital city, except in the Northern Territory, and a number in regional areas.”

The propagated myth of the lone wolf actor

ASIO director general Mike Burgess appeared to be addressing the rise of the far-right in the wake of the COVID pandemic earlier this decade.

And as he explained in a Senate estimates hearing in 2020, the “evolving threat” of right-wing extremism was taking up 30 to 40 percent of his agency’s domestic surveillance workload, and this went on to peak at around 50 percent of its cases by 2023.

However, the onset of the Gaza genocide, as well as the disinformation campaign conflating antigenocide pro-Palestinian protest as antisemitism, has seen the far-right threat pushed back down the ASIO priority list, to the point that Burgess began flagging Islamic terrorism again in March.

The White Rose Society has been at pains to point out that the far-right are the real antisemitic threat in this country, and not people opposing a genocide.

Yet, this reality doesn’t quite fit the mould at the moment, as antisemitism is being used to dismiss the horrors of Gaza.

And further, the white Australian establishment bends over backwards to avoid charging a white man with terrorism, with one of the chief factors being that the violent actor appeared to have acted on their own and this tends to absolve them of any possibility of being charged with terrorism offences.

And as witnessed just a few months back, when a 16-year-old Muslim boy commits an act of violence, it is almost instantly identified as terrorism, and then 400 police officers are deployed to raid all of the teenager’s mates’ homes to perhaps charge them too with terror offences.

So, if the White Rose Society is aware of the active club networks operating across the nation, it’s fairly likely that intelligence agencies have too been long aware of this, yet for some reason it’s not being discussed.

And one aspect of law enforcement inquiries into incidents that appear to be acts of far right terror, such as the recent attempted beheading of a Labor MP or the stabbing outside Sydney University, is active club recognition would make it more difficult to dismiss them as individuals acting alone.

For those who want more information on the rising far-right in Australia, the White Rose Society submission is a good place to start, and perhaps even some of the Senate committee members should have a flick through it, instead of relying on offshore observers