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November 15, 2025 15 mins

Last weekend, neo-Nazis gathered outside NSW parliament. Organisers had registered the protest with police – and nothing was done to stop it going ahead.

When two female politicians spoke out against the fascists who gathered, they were targeted with threats of violence and death.

The premier has said there will be an investigation into how this was allowed to happen. But this protest is not isolated. Neo-Nazis have been gathering in cities and towns in recent months, marching through the streets and terrorising communities.

Back in September, they marched from an anti-immigration rally and descended on Camp Sovereignty – a sacred place for First Nations people in the heart of Melbourne. They attacked and hospitalised people who were gathered there. 

Today, writer and 7am host Daniel James – on what happened at Camp Sovereignty and the continued enabling of neo-nazi-violence.

It’s Sunday, November 16. This episode was originally published in September. 

 

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Guest: Writer and 7am co-host, Daniel James

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. Last weekend,
Neo Nazis gathered outside New South Wales Parliament. Organizers had
registered the protest with the police and nothing was done
to stop it going ahead. When two female politicians spoke
out against the protests, they were targeted with threats of
violence and death. The premier said there will be an

(00:22):
investigation into how this was allowed to happen, but the
protest is not isolated. Neo Nazis have been gathering in
cities and towns in recent months, marching through streets and
terrorizing communities. Back in September, they marched from an anti
immigration rally and descended on Camp Sovereignty, a sacred place
for First Nations people in the heart of Melbourne. They

(00:42):
attacked people who were gathered there. Today writer and seven
AM host Daniel James on what happened at Camp Sovereignty
and the response from authorities. It's Sunday, November sixteen, and
this episode was originally published in September.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
So Daniel, let's.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Begin by talking about the attack on Camp Sovereignty in Melbourne.
That attack was captured on video, some of it was
streamed live on Facebook. So can you walk me through
what we know happened.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
It's a scene that Aboriginal people, through the history of colonization,
are all too familiar with. It was all filmed. There
was a sixteen minute Facebook live stream that captured the
whole thing. Ran about five pm on Sunday, as the
light was fading. There were a handful of people as

(01:40):
custodians of camp. So I'm already sitting around the campfire.
There dozens of men dressed in black approached from the west.
Then all of a sudden start running towards the camp, charging,
yelling all sorts of things, and started tearing the camp apart,

(02:03):
started attacking some of the people there, who are mainly
Aboriginal women. They were beaten, people were kicked in the stomach,
thrown to the ground. Unfortunately and horrifically, this is actually

(02:24):
the third confrontation between now Nazis and Camp members that
day and a lot of questions are being asked about
how it could happen. There was a huge police presence
within the city. You would expect that there would be
a degree of intelligence being shared between authorities in the city,
and even if there wasn't. Unfortunately, this attack on camp

(02:46):
soeverbrity was entirely predictable.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Well, let's talk about why Neo Nazis targeted this site
in particular, what is cap sovereignty, Why is it sacred?
Why did they pick it?

Speaker 3 (03:00):
The main reason they picked it was because there was
easy pickings for them. It's an area that is open
to the public. It's available for anyone to go along
and participate and sit around the campfire there and learned
out why it is a sacred site. And the reason
it's a sacred site is that it's a burial site
in King's domain and the location of a permanent vigual

(03:23):
that has been set up there since January twenty twenty four.
The site is a reminder of First Nations people's survival.
It is a place that is an invitation to the
rest of the community to come along and sit beside
Aboriginal people and find out what happened here. They came

(03:43):
by after being trumped up at the Raleigh for Australia,
on which their main head, Honcho Thomas Sill, who was
a New Zealand born now Nazi and the leader of
their group that we'd seen, was not only just given
a microphone, he was actually given the keynote address on
the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne.

Speaker 4 (04:04):
Not this new Australia that they're trying to build, but
our Australia, the Australia we were bred in and raised it.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
And on the back of that, that's the kind of
validation these type of characters need. And so they would
have walked away feeling validated, they would have felt emboldened.
And unfortunately Camp Soeverrety is a place that is open
for neo Nazis to come and defile.

Speaker 5 (04:30):
Let's talk a little more about the rally, how it
came about, who was there, because in the days leading
up to it there was talk about it being about
immigration and about housing, and obviously some of that frustration
that some people were feeling was weaponized by neo Nazis.

Speaker 6 (04:49):
Like Thomas Seule. So what role do you think that
australia Is media and political landscape played in how this
all unfolded In the.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Lead up to the march for Australia was one that
was characterized by ordinary Austrains being fed up with things
like the cost of housing, portioning the blame at the
feet of immigrants.

Speaker 7 (05:18):
Crime is clearly up as a result of mass immigration
in certain areas, and we're continually told on top of
that that Australia is built on stolen land and that
our history is something to be ashamed of. Is it
any wonder then that so many regular mums dads are upset?

Speaker 3 (05:35):
But if you actually have a look at any sort
of social media page, it was clear from the very
very outset that this was a rally that was organized
by extremists, both inside and outside the Parliament. It was
something that neo Nazis were always going to attend, and
there was an attempt to mainstream it by trying to

(05:57):
get everyday Australians to come up long and attend. And
for my sins, I listened to talk back on a
regular basis. I don't know why I do it, but
I was listening on Sunday afternoon and a woman called
up a commercial radio station here in Melbourne and she
was going to the anti immigration rally, as she said,

(06:17):
for her grandchildren.

Speaker 8 (06:19):
We're doing this because Victoria and Australia isn't the way
it used to be, and you know, we're doing it
for our grandchildren.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
Her voice was very interesting, it trembled, but there was
also a defiance in her voice as well. You could
sense that she was engraved danger of the Australia that
she knew slipping away, and was mirrored in the evening
too when I listened to talk back as well. It
was just people that were insisting that they were there peacefully.

(06:52):
They were there as an act of love. But there
wasn't too much about the speech that the Nazi gave.
There was no think about the racist placards that were
also there. There was nothing about the fights or the
police court and that had to separate them from other
protesters in the city for various reasons. And then of
course the grandmothers of the world, rightly or wrongly, are

(07:16):
therefore able to give cover for what it was and
that was basically a far right Nazi rally coming up.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
Should this attack be treated as an act of terrorism.

Speaker 9 (07:38):
Prime Minister, welcome, good afternoon, Patricia.

Speaker 10 (07:40):
Do you think there were good people with legitimate concerns
at these anti immigration rallies this weekend?

Speaker 4 (07:46):
Of course, there's always good people will turn up to
demonstrate their views about particular issues. But what we have
here is neo Nazi has been given a platform that's in.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
The wake of the marches. On the weekend, the Prime
Minister and the Albanesi said that while there were quote
good people who attend to the is rallies, they were
ultimately about selling division. So let's talk about that response.

Speaker 6 (08:15):
What do you make of it.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
This is not a time for our politicians to be
really doing about with this. This is not a time
for clever politicians like Anthony Albernesi and clever politicians like
Susan Lee to try and weave their way through some
sort of middle road.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Here.

Speaker 10 (08:33):
What units is Australians will always be stronger than those
who seek to divide us. That unity is at risk.
The Coalition stands ready to work with the government to
repair our social cohesion. This is a moment the demands leadership.
The Prime Minister must show that leadership now.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
We are now in a situation where we have neo
Nazis openly on the street preaching hate against minorities, against
immigrants and its First Nations people in the open. These
extreme views are now being centralized, They are now being
embedded within the mainstream politics of this place itself. If

(09:11):
you want to look at the Victoria Liberal Party, for instance,
you will find people that hold extreme views within the Parliament.
It's very alarming to see what I would term as
a placid response from our political leaders.

Speaker 4 (09:25):
They weren't big numbers in the scheme of things in
a nation of almost twenty seven million people. Let's be
clear here, So you do think.

Speaker 10 (09:33):
This is a tiny proportion of the Australian population, this
anti immigration center.

Speaker 4 (09:38):
That shows that that was the case.

Speaker 5 (09:40):
And there's always been.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
The attack on camp so I already hasn't yet been
dubbed a hate crime or a terrorist attack, but what
other way could you describe it? It wasn't a fight
over property, it wasn't an aggravated burglary. It was there
to destroy the camp and to destroy in many ways
the movement that Aboriginal people have set up for ourselves there.

(10:02):
So the response from our political leaders so far has
been wishy washy at best and appeasing at worst.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
And so late yesterday afternoon Thomas Saw and two others
were arrested in relation to the attack.

Speaker 10 (10:20):
What are the victoria you're under arrested with the fury
of yourself.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
Of course, there were many other people involved. So as
the investigation goes on, what do you think needs to
happen from here.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
What do we need to do from here? I mean,
my view is that the sovereign citizen movement and the
Nazi movement in Australia need to be categorized as terrorist
groups because they are becoming increasingly emboldened. People are dying,
people are getting beaten up, and it's fraying at the
civility of our society. And the mainstream media has a

(10:57):
fair degree of blame when it comes to that. The
algorithms that our social media sites that we use, such
as Meta, send people down rabbit holes so deeply that
there is seemingly no way for them to come back
and join us here in the real world. We need
to start taking this incredibly seriously, and I'm not sure
that our political leadership or our security agencies are taking

(11:20):
this as seriously as they should. What happened on Sunday
should never have happened.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
And when you look at the scale of what occurred,
it's estimated that there were more than twenty thousand people
attending these protests in cities across the country, which is
not an insignificant amount of people. So what does that
reveal to you about where the country is at right now?
And the extent to which these beliefs have taken hold.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
They've become more and more mainstream, they have become more
and more acceptable. The level of hate that is fired
at our authorities, at our political leadership, the level of
hate that is of course fired at Aboriginal people and
other marginalized communities is out in the open, and so

(12:08):
people are being emboldened to say these things. And the
more that these things are said, and the more that
these things are heard, the more likely it is that
there is going to be action like we saw on
Sunday against innocent people at Camp Sovereignty.

Speaker 4 (12:24):
I describe it as an act of terror, actually, as
a terrorist act terrorize those follow herselves, very scary for
those people.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Uncle Robbie Thorpe, he's one of our respected elders here
and basically the man who can be attributed to setting
up Camp Soeverrity. He's made a very good point. There
has been new hate laws that have come out to
protect places of worship, and this is something that Senator
Lydia Thorpe has also come out and question. She's asked

(12:53):
the question, how do you define a place of worship?
Aboriginal places of worship, there are no Buildingsstensibly, Camp Soeverrity
is a place of worship. It's a place of remembrance.
It is a place where we go to hell and
to move forward and to educate. Is that a place
of worship? And should that be protected under hate laws?
We have covered for mosques and synagogues, and rightfully so.

(13:16):
But the question needs to be asked. Can Aboriginal people
worship their elders, worship their own spirituality, worshiped land without
fear of being attacked by Nazi extremists?

Speaker 1 (13:31):
And the people who were attacked at Camp Sovereignty, how
are they doing?

Speaker 3 (13:35):
Deeply, deeply rattled? For people were injured, two were taken
to hospital with head wounds. But I think it's fair
enough to say that the whole Aboriginal community has been
injured by this. What happened on Sunday was had all
the hallmarks of a massacre. We've had hundreds of massacres
in this country at the hands of white men approaching

(13:59):
camps at low light when there are only a handful
of people around to commit acts of violence. Now, the
only thing that was separate from what happened on Sunday
and what has happened throughout the history of this place
was the body count and the fact that there were
witnesses there, the fact that there were people filming it.

(14:19):
One would hate to think what would happen if this
was actually out in the bush somewhere and a group
of emboldened Neo Nazis came upon an aboriginal campsite. How
far could it have gone? These are questions that are
not rhetorical. These are questions that need to be asked
with a degree of sobriety in the cold, hard light
of day, because these movements are getting away from the authorities,

(14:43):
They're getting away from our ability to contain them, and
they have shown that once they've given a little bit
of validation, they become more and more emboldened, more and
more extreme, And I just hate to think what will
happen next.

Speaker 6 (15:00):
Well, Daniel, thank you so much for speaking with me.

Speaker 9 (15:03):
Thanks Ruby, thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 (15:16):
Tomorrow, Daniel James will bring you an interview with one
of Australia's leading political observers, the writer and former advisor
to two Prime ministers, Sean Kelly. Sean has just written
a new quarterly essay where he considers the vision Anthony
Albereneze holds for Australia. He explores whether Albaneze is more
interested in staying in government or changing the country for
the better, interrogating which issues the PM is willing to

(15:38):
take on and where that leaves us. It'll be a
fascinating conversation. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks
for listening.
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