The March for Australia is a gift to the Big Australia agenda

The March for Australia is a tribute to the power of spontaneous political organising in the age of social media. For the first time ever in Australia, thousands of Australians attended co-ordinated multi-city marches against mass immigration.

Yet was the ‘success’ of these marches a damaging own goal for the broader cause of public discussion about the substantive impacts of population growth on environment, housing and infrastructure? In the event, these substantive issues were overshadowed by the mainstream media’s (MSM) highlighting of violent clashes and involvement of far-right racist neo-Nazis at the marches.

Some would argue that this is merely typical of the MSM, which have an ideological pre-disposition to tar all debate about population and immigration with the racism brush. While there is some truth in this, the problem also lies elsewhere.

As already noted in commentary by Erin Rolandsen and Leith van Onselen, the March organisers chose an ultra-nationalist politics of identity as the theme for the March – and in so doing put out the welcome mat for far-right groups. A week before the marches, the environmental advocacy group Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) also issued a statement expressing concern about the lack of transparency by the organisers of the March.

The March’s key promotional material made no effort to condemn racism and racist far right (e.g. neo-Nazi) groups.  The material made no statements to distance the March from these extreme elements or to discourage them from attending, and the organisers did not put in place practical measures to prevent these elements from having opportunities to speak via PA system to the marchers.

The long-recognised potential for debates about immigration to descend into toxic racism was therefore reinforced in stereotypical fashion. The organisers failed to do a simple thing, namely to construct a doctrinal and practical firewall to insulate themselves from the far right. All that remained was for neo-Nazi groups to show up at some of these events as they promised they would – and they did.

That gave the MSM carte blanche to go full bore on the racism and white Australia theme. As such, the March provided perfect fodder for the promoters of Big Australia-style population expansion to claim any opposition to high immigration is racist and xenophobic.

Was this naiveté on the part of March organisers? Lack of awareness? Or was it a conscious choice, knowingly made? The evidence points to the latter.

A key organiser and public face of March for Australia goes by the name Bec Freedom, who claims a background of anti-lockdown and anti-vax activism. The day before the marches, in a planning meeting (a recording of which is publicly available on X/ Twitter), Freedom outlined her position on whether neo-Nazis could attend the March:

I’ve put up several updates in relation to the NSN [National Socialist Network] being there. The fact is, I mean, the only way that I am putting it, and this is the exact reason why I’ve stated from the beginning that nobody will be banned from attending, they’re fighting the same fight as us. We might not all agree with what their political opinions are or whatever. But at the end of the day, their heart is in the right place, I truly believe, and they’re fighting for Australia, just the same as anyone else that is attending will be fighting for Australia. I mean, I’ve been getting called a Nazi since COVID. Um, and just because I didn’t want to have a vaccine, I was called a Nazi. Go figure. Anyone that’s leaning towards the right is going to get called a Nazi for anything they fight against. Um, and yeah, the best thing I can tell you is yeah, everyone there is fighting for Australia. If you fight for Australia, then come. If it makes you a Nazi too fricking bad, but thank you. I do understand. Yeah. People are concerned about that, but it’s, it’s always going to be what it’s going to be. Anyone right leaning is instantly a Nazi. (emphases added) (statement is at the 22-minute mark)

These statements sum up perfectly the political thought process of a key March organiser. They reflect, at minimum, an extreme libertarianism that makes no distinction between fascism and any other right-leaning position. The key point is that Freedom’s simplistic conflation of all right-wing positions is the beginning of the slippery slope to actual fascism. To anyone whose forebears served or even gave their lives in the fight against fascism in WW II, this must be concerning. In the era of Trump, with the USA sliding ever-closer to an authoritarian dictatorship, this is not merely of academic interest.

As pointed out by SPA’s statement on the March: “Those promoting population expansion seek to suffocate any questioning of immigration settings, leaving such decisions to business lobbyists, ministers and bureaucrats behind closed doors. Polarising the debate in this way ignores the vast majority of Australians (repeated polls show 70%) who oppose further population growth. There is no more sure-fire way to drive people to political extremes than to dismiss sensible and respectful debate about Australia’s population future.”

With this March, the far right has managed to claim the organisational initiative in opposing mass immigration. In actuality, such opposition is shared (although for distinctly different reasons) by many in the centre or centre-left – it crosses conventional political alignments.  Many across the political spectrum are seeing the damaging impacts of extreme population growth on economy, environment and yes social cohesion as well. They recognise population size matters, scale matters and rates of growth matter. Many also reject the hyper-woke cancel culture that has tried to enforce a population taboo to stifle debate and dismiss these concerns as racism.  Yet such rejection does not extend to embracing, or even tolerating, fascism.

Now that the far right has established a foothold in this oppositional space, the question is whether a genuine coalition, free of fascist elements, can be constructed. Can moderates on the right recognise such a coalition must be firewalled from fascist groups and ideas? Can those in the centre and centre-left acknowledge the flaws in their population taboo? Evidence from Denmark suggests that when a social democratic government actively engages with and addresses community concerns about immigration levels, the appeal of right-wing populism dramatically weakens. Or, failing that, is this the beginning of increasing polarisation and discord in Australia, as we are seeing with right-wing populism in much of Europe, Great Britain and the USA?

The first step forward is to understand what just happened, and why.

Peter Cook, PhD, is vice-president of Sustainable Population Australia. The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily of SPA.