{"id":46508,"date":"2021-10-05T04:23:29","date_gmt":"2021-10-05T04:23:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=46508"},"modified":"2021-10-05T04:23:29","modified_gmt":"2021-10-05T04:23:29","slug":"australias-far-right-gets-covid-anti-lockdown-protest-booster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=46508","title":{"rendered":"Australia\u2019s far right gets COVID anti-lockdown protest booster"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Melbourne, Australia<\/strong> \u2013 Recent anti-lockdown protests in Melbourne have exposed the rise of the far-right movement over fears stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment, and continuing lockdown measures.<\/p>\n

The most recent \u2014 and arguably most violent \u2014 protests were sparked by the state government\u2019s decision to suspend work on building sites for two weeks and make vaccination mandatory for construction workers.<\/p>\n

Construction workers protesting at the trade union offices in Melbourne, Australia\u2019s second-biggest city, were joined by several other groups, many from far-right backgrounds.<\/p>\n

The protest soon turned violent, with police responding with rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray.<\/p>\n

\u201cVery quickly we saw \u2018freedom marchers\u2019 join the protests [with] other right-wing antagonists,\u201d far-right analyst Josh Roose, a senior research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute in Melbourne, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat then gave the impression of being a much larger movement than it necessarily was at the very beginning of that day. It\u2019s gone from a couple of hundred angry trade unionists to several thousand people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The protests have focused attention once again on the far right in Australia, two years after an Australian white supremacist attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people.<\/p>\n

Condemnation of the September rallies was widespread, with Labor Member of Parliament Bill Shorten publicly dismissing the protesters largely as \u201chard-right man-baby Nazis\u201d.<\/p>\n

But Roose \u2014 who has previously advised governments about such groups \u2014 says such stereotypes are simplistic and misleading.<\/p>\n

He says for Australia to combat the far right, people need to understand what it is, and that such groups are more than just \u201cjackboots and swastikas\u201d even if they have previously held public displays of Nazi symbolism and salutes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe far right is a lot more nuanced. It has evolved and taken new shapes and morphed into something far more sophisticated than that stereotype,\u201d he said. \u201cThe far right has its vocabulary. It has far-right discourse. It\u2019s anti-Semitic. It\u2019s racist. It\u2019s anti-Muslim. It\u2019s primarily anti-women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Protesters wave flags as they gather at Melbourne\u2019s Shrine of Remembrance during last month\u2019s rally against mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations and a two-week shutdown of the construction industry [File: James Ross\/EPA-EFE]<\/figure>\n

\u201cIt is deeply anti-science and propagates disinformation and distrust in government. It views the world as governed by liberal elites who are oppressing and corrupting wider society, and to that extent, it overlaps nicely with conspiracy theories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such conspiracy theories, circulated primarily on social media, include the belief that COVID-19 is a hoax, the vaccine is designed to kill people, or that the recent rollout of 5G technology is to blame for the pandemic.<\/p>\n

Pandemic disinformation has also recently crept into the federal Parliament, with Liberal MP George Christensen publicly promoting the use of ivermectin as a coronavirus treatment \u2014 despite the Therapeutic Goods Administration, Australia\u2019s medicine regulatory agency, banning its use for the disease.<\/p>\n

It is this overlap that Roose says is concerning, and coupled with unemployment and time spent on social media, it has created an avenue for disgruntled people to gravitate towards the far right.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have been out of work for the best part of 18 months,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are a lot of people sitting at home feeling angry, on social media and looking for someone to blame.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mario Peucker, author of The Far Right in Contemporary Australia, agrees.<\/p>\n

He says the current social context in Australia is a \u201cbreeding ground\u201d for far-right recruitment, and that suspicion of government \u201cresonates with the narrative of far-right groups \u2013 that the government is not to be trusted\u201d.<\/p>\n

Peucker adds that while the emergence of the far right in Australia may seem like a new phenomenon, it has its roots in the nation\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn terms of racism and xenophobia, we have to start by acknowledging that the nation-building process in Australia is built on an idea of white supremacy and racism,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Racist history<\/h2>\n

Australia was settled by British colonialists in the 18th century, who declared the country \u201cterra nullius\u201d, a Latin term meaning no-one\u2019s land. They dispossessed the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of their land \u2014 where they had lived for tens of thousands of years.<\/p>\n

European culture was portrayed as superior to that of the Indigenous people who suffered brutal massacres, and often died from exposure to diseases that the colonialists brought with them.<\/p>\n

Subsequent governments orchestrated the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, and a \u201cWhite Australia\u201d immigration policy ended only in the mid-1970s.<\/p>\n

More recently, anti-refugee and anti-Muslim sentiment has emerged, often fuelled by elected politicians such as One Nation\u2019s Pauline Hanson.<\/p>\n

The more recent emergence of Australia\u2019s 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]<\/figure>\n

Peucker says the recent emergence of the far right was triggered around the media-driven anti-Muslim \u201cmoral panic\u201d surrounding the rise of ISIS (ISIL) in the mid-2010s, bolstered by the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president, and emboldened by right-wing sections of the Australian media.<\/p>\n

What Peucker calls \u201can exponential growth in far-right groups\u201d that is now being fuelled by the coronavirus pandemic, has not gone unnoticed by Australia\u2019s security services.<\/p>\n

Director General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Mike Burgess said last year that a third of his organisation\u2019s resources were currently deployed to address the threat of violence by far-right groups.<\/p>\n

In an online statement, he said that \u201cright-wing extremists are more organised, sophisticated, ideological and active than previous years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMany of these groups and individuals have seized on COVID-19, believing it reinforces the narratives and conspiracies at the core of their ideologies. They see the pandemic as proof of the failure of globalisation, multiculturalism and democracy, and confirmation that societal collapse and a \u2018race war\u2019 are inevitable.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Peucker says that there is a \u201cgap\u201d in ASIO\u2019s response \u2014 noting that the security organisation was largely concerned with immediate threats of violence, and that it needed to \u201cintervene earlier\u201d to combat entry into such groups.<\/p>\n

The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network, a community and legal group that works to safeguard the safety of Australian Muslims, agrees.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government needs to crack down on the bad actors who are dehumanising minorities through disinformation and the platforms that enable them,\u201d the group said in a statement to Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

They said that their research showed Facebook and Twitter act \u201ctoo late on disinformation, and with a very poor success rate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Get people back to work\u2019<\/h2>\n

In response to the rising threat, the Victorian Greens recently announced that they will be calling for a state inquiry into the rise of far-right groups in Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital.<\/p>\n

Leader and spokesperson Samantha Ratnam told Al Jazeera that her party has been \u201cconcerned about the rise of the far-right in Victoria for a number of years, but there\u2019s been an escalation in recent months, now that the pandemic seems to have provided the perfect breeding ground for their dangerous ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ratnam has herself been abused by far-right supporters: \u201cNot long after I entered [Victorian] Parliament in 2018, I was harassed and followed from my office by right-wing extremists,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was frightening. And the attacks on me online have increased over the last year.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Greens\u2019 inquiry will investigate the far right\u2019s methods of recruitment and communication, the risks their plans pose to Victoria, their links with anti-vaccine misinformation groups, and the steps necessary to counter their influence, she said.<\/p>\n

Union workers and far-right activists take part in a protest against COVID-19 regulations on the West Gate Freeway in Melbourne last month. The protests were some of the most violent of recent years [File: James Ross\/EPA]<\/figure>\n

Roose says getting people back to work as soon as possible can also help combat the appeal of hardline ideologies.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are quite literally fed up and just want to get back to work, which is critical for their socialisation, critical for their self-esteem and sense of purpose in the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we get people back to work \u2014 and kids back to school \u2014 we will start to see the potential for these mass movements dissipate significantly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet despite an announcement on easing restrictions, Melbourne\u2019s continuing lockdown \u2013 now the longest, and some say toughest, measures in the world \u2013 means that a return to employment for many may not occur until the end of this year.<\/p>\n

That the state government has made vaccination mandatory for many industries to return to work has also proved contentious, and is unlikely to dispel anti-government sentiment.<\/p>\n

Tackling the issue over the longer term may prove more challenging given the far right\u2019s deep-seated cultural roots.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe question is what do you do with far-right extremism when they draw on strong currents that are embedded in Australian culture and politics of racism, anti-migration and a deep-seated misogyny? That\u2019s one of the significant challenges in seeking to address the emergence of the far right,\u201d Roose said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Melbourne, Australia \u2013 Recent anti-lockdown protests in Melbourne have exposed the rise of the far-right movement over fears stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment, and continuing lockdown measures. The most recent \u2014 and arguably most violent \u2014 protests were sparked by the state government\u2019s decision to suspend work on building sites for two weeks and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}