Published: 15 March 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
KRISTY CAMPION: While security chiefs focus on foreign interference, the extreme Right flourishes in the background, aided by murky online transnational links
THE EXTREME RIGHT in Australia appears to be slipping down the security agenda, with counterterrorism now coming second to foreign interference.
Even though these are overlapping threats, the risk posed by the extreme Right has not diminished. We should be more alert than ever about the dangers posed to sections of the community who are so frequently the subject of extreme Right violence.
It has been three years since “one of New Zealand’s darkest days”, when an Australian citizen stormed two mosques in the city of Christchurch, shooting 100 worshippers: 51 people died, including children, and another 49 people were injured. The terrorist was motivated by right-wing extremism, with an ideology anchored in white supremacist beliefs.
Before the Christchurch attacks, right-wing extremism was not high on the Australian security agenda, and indeed, interest in the threat it posed was relegated to a select few.
This is despite the fact that right-wing extremism has been surging for years and numerous sections of Australian society had been victims of its violence.
This was most clearly demonstrated with the 2016 arrest and subsequent conviction of Phillip Galea on terrorism act offences. Galea, a white nationalist, had been plotting to kill left-wing political opponents and businesses in Melbourne. Around the same time, Ricky White, a white supremacist and member of the Wotansvolk fraternity (a racialised pagan group) was charged with setting fire to a Pentecostal church in Taree. on the NSW mid-north coast. Galea was jailed for 12 years, and White was convicted and jailed.
The Christchurch attack did not come as a bolt from the blue; it was an escalation in an existing pattern of violent behaviour in the Australian community.
