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Melbourne, Australia – The recent anti-blockade protests in Melbourne exposed the rise of far-right movements due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment and continued lockdown measures.
The most recent-arguably the most violent-protests were triggered by the state government’s decision to suspend work on construction sites for two weeks and force construction workers to be vaccinated.
Construction workers protested at the union office in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city, and several other groups joined, many of which came from far-right backgrounds.
The protest quickly became violent, and the police responded with rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray.
“Soon we saw’freedom marchers’ joining the protests [with] Other right-wing opponents,” Josh Ross, a senior researcher at the Alfred Deakin Institute in Melbourne and a far-right analyst, told Al Jazeera.
“Then it gives the impression of a bigger movement than it started that day. It has gone from hundreds of angry union members to thousands.”
The protests once again focused their attention on the far right in Australia. Two years ago, an Australian white supremacist attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people.
The condemnation of the September rally was widespread, and Labour MP Bill Shorten publicly denounced the protesters as “tough right-wing baby boy Nazis.”
But Ross, who has advised the government on such groups, said such stereotypes are too simplistic and misleading.
He said that for Australia to fight the far right, people need to understand what it is, and these groups are not just “boots and Nazi symbols”, even if they have publicly displayed Nazi symbolism and salute before.
“The one on the far right is much more subtle. It has evolved and took on new shapes and evolved into something more complex than that stereotype,” he said. “The extreme right has its own vocabulary. It has extreme right discourse. This is anti-Semitism. This is racism. This is anti-Muslim. It is mainly anti-female.”
At a rally held last month against mandatory COVID-19 vaccination and a two-week construction shutdown, protesters waved flags as they gathered at the memorial memorial site in Melbourne [File: James Ross/EPA-EFE]“This is serious anti-science, dissemination of false information and distrust of the government. It believes that the world is ruled by oppressive and corrupt liberal elites in the wider society. To some extent, it overlaps well with conspiracy theories. .”
This conspiracy theory, which is mainly spread on social media, includes the belief that COVID-19 is a hoax, that the vaccine is designed to kill people, or that the recently launched 5G technology should be blamed on the pandemic.
False information about the pandemic has also quietly entered the Federal Parliament recently. Liberal MP George Christensen has publicly promoted the use of ivermectin as a treatment for the coronavirus-although Australia’s drug regulatory agency Therapeutic Goods Administration prohibits it from being used to treat this. Kind of disease.
Roose said that it is this overlap that is worrying, coupled with unemployment and time spent on social media, it creates a far-right avenue for disgruntled people.
“People have been unemployed most of the time for 18 months,” he said. “There are a lot of people sitting at home feeling angry, looking for someone to blame on social media.”
Mario Peucker, author of “Contemporary Australian Far Right”, agrees.
He said that Australia’s current social environment is a “hotbed” for far-right recruitment, and the suspicion of the government “resonates with the narratives of the far-right groups—the government is not trustworthy”.
Peucker added that although the emergence of Australia’s extreme right seems to be a new phenomenon, its roots lie in the country’s history.
“As far as racism and xenophobia are concerned, we must first recognize that Australia’s nation-building process is based on the concept of white supremacy and racism,” he said.
History of racism
Australia was settled by British colonialists in the 18th century. They declared the country “Land of No Owners”, which is a Latin word meaning no land. They deprived the Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders of their land-they lived there for tens of thousands of years.
European culture is portrayed as being superior to the culture of indigenous peoples who have suffered brutal massacres, and indigenous peoples often die from diseases brought by colonialists.
The subsequent government meticulously planned to remove indigenous children from their families, and the “White Australia” immigration policy ended only in the mid-1970s.
Recently, anti-refugee and anti-Muslim sentiments have emerged, usually driven by elected politicians such as Pauline Hansen of the One Nation Party.
The more recent emergence of Australia’s far right can be linked to the media-driven panic over ISIS (ISIL) and the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States [File: Paul Miller/EPA]Peucker said that the recent appearance on the right was centered on the rise of media-driven anti-Muslim “moral panics” in mid-2010, led by the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US President. Encouraged by the right-wing part of the Australian media.
What Peucker called the “exponential growth of far-right groups” is now being driven by the coronavirus pandemic, and Australia’s security services have not ignored this.
Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) Director-General Mike Burgess said last year that one-third of his organization’s resources are currently used to respond to threats of violence from far-right groups.
He issued a statement online, saying, “Compared with previous years, right-wing extremists are more organized, more sophisticated, more thoughtful, and more active.”
“Many of these groups and individuals have caught COVID-19, believing that it reinforces the narrative and conspiracy at the core of their ideology. They see the pandemic as a testament to the failure of globalization, multiculturalism, and democracy, and confirm Social collapse and’race wars’ are inevitable.”
But Peucker said that there was a “gap” in ASIO’s response-pointing out that security organizations are mainly concerned with direct threats of violence and that it needs “early intervention” to crack down on entering such organizations.
The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network, a community and legal group dedicated to protecting the safety of Australian Muslims, agrees.
In a statement to Al Jazeera, the organization said: “The government needs to crack down on bad actors who dehumanize minorities through false information and platforms that support them.”
They stated that their research shows that Facebook and Twitter are “too late to act on false information, and the success rate is very low.”
“Get people back to work”
In response to the growing threat, the Victorian Green Party recently announced that they will call for a state investigation into the rise of extreme right-wing groups in Victoria, the capital of Victoria.
Leader and spokesperson Samantha Ratnam told Al Jazeera that her party “has been worried about the rise of the extreme right in Victoria for years, but has escalated in recent months and now the pandemic seems to have provided The perfect solution. It is a hotbed of their dangerous ideology.”
Ratnam himself has also been insulted by far-right supporters: “Shortly after I entered [Victorian] In the 2018 parliament, I was harassed and stalked by right-wing extremists,” she said. “This is terrible. There has been an increase in online attacks on me last year. “
She said the Green Party’s investigation will investigate the far-right recruitment and communication methods, the risks their plan poses to Victoria, their connections with anti-vaccine misinformation groups and the necessary steps to counter their influence.
Last month, union workers and far-right activists participated in a protest against COVID-19 regulations on Melbourne’s Westgate Highway.The protest is one of the most violent in recent years [File: James Ross/EPA]Ross said getting people back to work as soon as possible can also help counter the appeal of hard-line ideologies.
“People are really fed up and just want to get back to work, which is vital to their socialization, self-esteem and sense of purpose for the world,” he said.
“If we bring people back to work — bring children back to school — we will start to see the potential of these mass movements dissipate significantly.”
However, despite the announcement of the relaxation of restrictions, Melbourne’s continued lockdown-now the longest lasting and some say the most severe measure in the world-means that many people may not be able to return to employment until the end of this year.
The state government’s mandatory vaccinations for the resumption of work in many industries have also proven to be controversial and unlikely to eliminate anti-government sentiment.
Given the deep-rooted cultural roots of the far right, solving this problem may be more challenging in the long run.
“The question is, what do you do when far-right extremism takes advantage of powerful cultural and political trends rooted in Australian culture and racism, anti-immigration, and deep-rooted misogyny? This is a major challenge that seeks to address the rise of the far right One,” Rose said.
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