The Australia First (AF) and Australian Protectionist (APP) parties — the two largest (Federally-registered) parties on the white nationalist fringe — look set to have another lean year in 2012. On the one hand, both major parties remain committed to “Fortress Australia”, and the country is blessed with a Prime Minister who “feels inclined to declare [her]self more offended at the accusation that [she] is racist than at the racism of the concentration camps over which [she] presides”. On the other hand, the population as a whole appears to be increasingly wedded to a paranoid nationalism to which both major parties give expression. As such, it would seem that much of the political territory which might otherwise provide organised expressions of white nationalist politics a foundation upon which to (re-)build has already been occupied.
Australian Protectionist Party
The APP held a tiny rally of supporters (excitedly titled ‘Stop the Parasitic Illegals! Deport Illegals Now!’) outside of Villawood Detention Centre on Sunday (February 5). The protest attracted less than 10 people (The Usual Suspects) and the semi-fictitious ‘Australian Defence League’ was sadly unable to send more than one representative (though in fairness to the ADL, if its English leader Martin Brennan was not on the other side of the globe, this number may have doubled). Thus while on paper the party has over 500 members it effectively functions as a dumping ground for the loonier elements of the Tory party fringe, providing a ‘safe space’ for deranged and sub-literate racists to express their butthurt. Indeed, the political ignorance and naiveté regularly displayed by its members would almost be touching — if the sentiments typically expressed weren’t so vile.
To date, the largest APP rally took place in Sydney on July 30, 2011. On that occasion the protectors were joined by the defenders in the ADL and a small platoon belonging to a short-lived splinter group of the Southern Cross Soldiers. (Two previous attempts to hold similar rallies against Islam and immigration in Melbourne, organised under the umbrella of the ADL, were largely abortive.) Given that wearing as well as waving the Australian flag has now become the costume de rigueur on Australia Invasion Shoe Survival Day — and ‘Fuck Off We’re Full’ a stable addition to the vulgar tongue — it remains possible that the APP will be less pathetic in future. However, while Cory Bernardi spearheads the Crusade against Islamo-fascism within the Australian Parliament, the APP has a poor record of public protest, and in the absence of any real political talent must instead rely on real or imagined Muslamic terrorist outrage to fuel its fire.
Australia First Party
Australia First spares itself any public embarrassment by simply not holding public rallies. Like its rivals in the APP it does, however, engage in semi-regular media provocations, the latest being the ‘Eureka Youth League’. In the past week, the EYL has gained some press by distroing agitprop around a number of University campuses, pitting Australian students against “aliens with dollars”. In targeting University students in this manner, AF is intruding upon the territory previously reserved for the ‘Nationalist Alternative’ groupuscule, although given the miniscule size of both sectlets there may be room for more than one racist, reactionary mob on campus.
Eureka Youth League
The EYL was officially launched at the beginning of 2010 in order to replace the failed brand that was the Patriotik Yoof Leauge (PYL). The PYL was formed in the early- to mid-2000s, gained a few adherents on a handful of campuses (including neo-Nazi elements belonging to the local Volksfront franchise) but eventually, after some additional media attention following the Cronulla riots (December 2005), became the exclusive property of a middle-aged tennis player in Brisbane named John Drew (an AF member who was expelled from the party in early 2009). In between its establishment and collapse its most notable spokesperson was Luke Connors, a Melbourne student who later joined the APP before retiring from politics, denounced by some of the more crazed elements on the far right as a ZOG agent.
As when Saleam’s former party National Action adopted the Eureka flag as its symbol, the EYL name was previously associated with the (far) left, in this instance the CPA. (On NA, see : Troy Whitford, A political history of National Action: Its fears, ideas, tactics and conflicts, Rural Society, Vol.20, No.2, April 2011.) In general, EYL propaganda is virtually indistinguishable from the kind Saleam was producing as a student activist back in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see : David Greason, I was a teenage fascist, McPhee Gribble, 1994).
Why it should appeal to any greater number of students now than it did then is something of a mystery.
See also : Australia First ~versus~ Australian Protectionist Parties: Sutherland Shire (October 17, 2010).
Jay.
