All Episodes

November 19, 2025 14 mins

On Wednesday, the NSW government announced it would amend existing laws to ban public displays of Nazi ideology like chants and slogans. It comes after a group of neo-Nazis held an antisemitic rally outside NSW Parliament a few weeks ago. In today’s podcast, we’re going to explain what happened on that Sunday morning outside Parliament, what the fall-out has been and how the NSW Government is responding.

Hosts: Zara Seidler and Emma GillespieProducer: Orla Maher

Want to support The Daily Aus? That's so kind! The best way to do that is to click ‘follow’ on Spotify or Apple and to leave us a five-star review. We would be so grateful.

The Daily Aus is a media company focused on delivering accessible and digestible news to young people. We are completely independent.

Want more from TDA?
Subscribe to The Daily Aus newsletter
Subscribe to The Daily Aus’ YouTube Channel

Have feedback for us?
We’re always looking for new ways to improve what we do. If you’ve got feedback, we’re all ears. Tell us here.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Already and this this is the Daily.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
This is the Daily OS.

Speaker 3 (00:05):
Oh, now it makes sense.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Thursday,
the twentieth of November. I'm Zara Seidler and I am
so excited to be back on the pod after a
little time away.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
I'm Emma Gillespian. I'm excited too, Zara.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
Welcome back.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Really really happy to have you back on the podcast today.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
As am I, look, we are going straight into a
big topic.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
We're not starting small.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
We're going into a big news topic that I have
watched across the headlines over the last couple of weeks
and that culminated yesterday when the New South Wales government
announced it would amend existing laws to ban public displays
of Nazi ideology. Now we need to rewind a bit
to understand how we got here, but it is basically
come after a group of neo Nazis held in anti

(00:59):
Semita rally outside New South Wales Parliament a few weeks ago.
In today's podcast, m we are going to explain what
happened on that Sunday morning a few weeks back, what
the fallout has been and how the New South Wales
government has now.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Responded, Sarah, As you mentioned, this is a story that
has been developing for a few weeks now. The context
of it goes back several years even, but I think
a good place to start is probably that actual event
that you mentioned, that neo Nazis held outside New South
Wales Parliament on the eighth of November, because everything that's

(01:36):
unfolded since is essentially because.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
Of what happened that day exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
So can you take us through it?

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:42):
So I remember we were all texting on a group
WhatsApp that morning saying, oh my goodness, there is this
image that has gone viral of essentially sixty men, all
dressed in black, standing outside New South Wales Parliament, so
just up the road from where we are now. And
that was a protest that was organized by a neo

(02:03):
Nazi group called the National Socialist Network. And what had
happened essentially was that that group organized to hold that
protest outside Parliament. They were standing there all in black,
some of them wearing sunglasses, others masked, but many of
whom were identifiable, and they were standing with a sign

(02:23):
in front of them that said abolish the Jewish Lobby.
Now the Sydney Morning Herald was there at the time,
and so we do have quite a lot of vision
of what actually happened that day. But we also understand
that the group chanted the slogan blood and Honor, which
we know is a chant closely associated with Hitler Youth.

(02:44):
The protest lasted about twenty minutes, just to give you
a sense of the length of it was really really short.
I saw one journalist refer to it as a made
for social media protest, and I think that that really
perfectly encapsulates it, because it was kind of this very
inflammatory photo that immediately went viral and got the whole

(03:05):
country talking.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
Yeah, it was not one of those protests that you
see with masses of thousands of people marching through the city.
It really did feel like a very twenty twenty five
kind of a protest. So it's a Sunday morning, we
have these sixty or so men holding up deeply offensive signs,
chanting Nazi slogans. I think sometimes we see these groups

(03:30):
try to be maybe a little bit more subtle in
their approach, if I can say that, But there was
no denying it here. Immediately there were questions from the
community circulating online about how this was allowed to go ahead.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Right, yeah, exactly. That was almost straightaway. So if at
ten am these images started circulating, I'd say within the
half hour there were questions being directed to both the
Police Commissioner and later to the New South Wales premiere
about how on earth this actually happened in the first place.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Did authorities know this was going to happen?

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, well, this is the interesting thing.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
So police did know it was going to happen, not
the Police Commissioner, and I'll get back to that in
a moment. But police knew it was happening because they
received a notice of intention to hold a public assembly.
It's just a whole lot of words to say. The
group applied to protests and that intention was made clear

(04:27):
on the twenty eighth of October, so days before it
was held.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
The notice of.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Intention was filed by a group called White Australia. So
per your previous comment about not obscuring what we're talking
about here, and they made what they wanted to do
really clear. I won't go into the specifics of how
the actual process of applying to protest works because I
know that you guys covered that in a pod a
little while back. It's nice to you know, have these

(04:54):
threads throughout the podcast. But essentially police did not object
to the application to hold this protest and so it
was allowed to occur. So it wasn't necessarily that they
ticked and it was approved that way. But because they
didn't object to it and it therefore didn't make it
to the courts, it meant that.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
They were allowed to proceed. Okay.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
The Police Commissioner, though, as I just said earlier, didn't
know the protest was taking place. He said that was
because of a communication error internally within the police force
and because he didn't know about it, he said he
obviously couldn't tell the New South Wales government about it,
and so they didn't know about it either.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Interesting.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
I wonder if, because of the smaller scale of this protest,
if it slipped under the radar in some way. We know,
when there are thousands of people expected to attend a
protest that that requires you know, streets to be shut down,
extra police to be on duty, safety precautions and the
likes thereof.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
So I wonder if it just sort of slipped through
the cracks.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Well, yeah, every other time we've spoken about a protest
on this podcast, we've been talked about tens of thousands
of people and public safety and everything that comes with that,
But you're right, this was obviously a much smaller scale,
but there were still rightly questions about how it was
allowed to proceed, and we know.

Speaker 3 (06:14):
It proceeded despite the scale that it dominated headlines a
few weeks ago, and in the days since, both the
government and police were questioned by journalists on many occasions
about how this was allowed to go ahead, And then
this week the attention really turned to who the men
in that protest actually were, because, like you mentioned, Zara,

(06:36):
many of them were visibly identifiable.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, I do want to shout out just some excellent
journalism that I've seen here, because so much of the
work that has gone into identifying who these men were
were done by journalists who either attended or have been
able to identify these men based on things like a bracelet,
so yeah, and then being able to verify it against
other photos. So there's been some really incredible journalism done

(07:02):
in the last couple of days. But as you said,
we have now got a fuller picture of who was
actually in attendance, who those sixty men actually were, and look,
they include people like an engineer, a teacher, an employee
of Australia Post. These are, you know, men who are
working everyday jobs who have then on the weekend gone

(07:25):
and protested in this neo Nazi rally. I do want
to focus on one of the men. He has really
dominated the headlines. His name is Matthew Grutter. Now, based
on the ABC's reporting, we've learnt that Gruter attended the
rally and that he was wearing I said before that bracelet.
He was wearing a bracelet engraved with blood and honor.

(07:46):
Again that's the Nazi slogan. The reason there's been so
much interest in Gruta specifically is because he's actually a
South African national. He is not an Australian citizen, and
he is in this country on a and since he
was identified by media and organizations working to help identify

(08:06):
who was there, he has since had his visa revoked
and he will be deported from this country.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
We'll be back with more of today's deep dive right
after a quick word from our sponsor.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
So Zara.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
We've got Matthew Gruder. He was identified by that bracelet.
Then his visa was canceled. I'm assuming that that was
a decision by the Immigration Department. We've had a few
kind of high profile visa stories lately.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Tony Burk's been very.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Busy, he has and it was Tony Burke who announced
the decision this week. I do want to read out
something he said. He said, We've got a really strong
principle here. If you're on a visa, you are a
guest in Australia. If someone turns up for the purposes
of just abusing people and wrecking the place and damaging
the cohesion, you can ask them to leave. That is

(08:59):
exactly what Tony Burke and the Immigration Department has asked
of Matthew Gruter. And there was an immigration raid. It
was like a seven am, very early morning immigration raid.
After he was identified and he was detained.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
He is now at Villawood Detention Center where.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
He is awaiting deportation, which Burke says he expects will
happen very soon.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
So this South African national is essentially in federal custody
awaiting deportation. So just to recap Zara, we had at
the beginning of the month, this rally held by Neo
Nazis outside New South Wales Parliament. Police knew it was
going to happen, although the Police Commissioner did not. Since then,
people who attended the rallies have been identified. We know

(09:48):
many of them are quote unquote everyday people in the community,
working everyday jobs. One of them is facing deportation. Has
the government responded to all of this? What has been
said at that level?

Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah, it's a really good question and we got the
I guess fullest answer yesterday in the form of legislation
from the New South Wales government. So they announced on
Wednesday that they were going to introduce amendments to the
Crimes Act that would crack down on public displays of
Nazi ideology by giving police and courts greater powers. Now,

(10:24):
just to be clear, Nazi symbols things like the swastika,
for example, are already banned in New South Wales. You
cannot be publicly displaying that. But these changes will target
the actions that we saw specifically at that rally outside parliament.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Right, So it's about where you protest and where these
messages are broadcast.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, that's one of the things that's going into it,
but it's also what was being said, So you know,
a swastika is imagery, for example. But these men were chanting,
and so it's really doubling down on things like that.
So chance and slogans, the kind of Nazi retrick that
we were talking about, blood and honor.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah, this is really targeting that sort of thing. Got it.

Speaker 3 (11:09):
So those like emblems, the swastika, the imagery. I guess
this is a little bit of a loophole that has
existed since that crackdown, which the New South Wales crackdown
triggered a national crackdown. That's a symbol that is now
federally outlawed.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
You're exactly right, They specifically, the New South Wales government
specifically said they've already you know, made actions in this space,
but clearly there is a need to strengthen the laws,
and that's what this is trying to do.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
Got it. So just to talk about what would.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
Happen in the instance where you know, this rally were
to go ahead again, anyone who engages in the conduct,
which includes as we just said, using Nazi chants or
slogans in public, would face up to a year in
prison or a maximum fine of eleven thousand dollars. Now
you referred just then m to the location when somebody

(11:59):
is you know, using this sort of slogan or chant,
and this legislation really zeros in on that because it
says those penalties will increase if the offense is committed
near a synagogue, so a Jewish place of worship, or
a Jewish school or the Jewish Museum which is a
Holocaust museum here in Sydney, and in that instance the

(12:20):
offender would be facing up to two years imprisonment or
a twenty two thousand dollars fine. So we're exactly doubling
in the instance that this is happening near a Jewish
landmark as well.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Yeah, you mentioned police powers changing as well under this
New South Wales legislation.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
What's the update there.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
Yeah, so the amendment would also give police new powers
to order an offender to take down the suspected Nazi symbol,
so something like that sign that we saw outside parliament.
In announcing the new laws, New South Wales Attorney General said,
the deplorable stunt we saw outside New South Wales Parliament
has no place in our society. Nobody should be subject

(13:02):
to this vile hatred because of their background or faith.
We are giving police and the courts additional powers to
hold Nazi extremists to account for their abhorrent views. Very
clear language being used there from the New South Wales government.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
And so just to finish off this law.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Just in terms of the process from here, yep, it's
been sent to a committee. Legislation often is, so a
committee will have a look at it, see if there
are any concerns with it, give some recommendations. Then it
will be back to the House to be voted on.
And we will absolutely keep our listeners updated as to
where that legislation ends up.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
A really important and fascinating stories. Ara, thank you for
making sense of all of that.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
For us, and it's so nice to have you back.
It's so good to be back, and thank you for
listening to.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
This episode of The Daily Ours. We'll be back a
little later on today with your evening news headlines, but
until then, have a great day.

Speaker 2 (13:58):
My name is Lily Madden and I am a proud
Arunda Bunjelung Calkatin woman from Gadigol country. The Daily oz
acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of
the Gadigol people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and
torrest rate island and nations. We pay our respects to
the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Advertise With Us

Popular Podcasts

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.

Crime Junkie

Crime Junkie

Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.

Stuff You Should Know

Stuff You Should Know

If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.