Australia is sleepwalking down the road to white supremacism 

Lost in the mist of the right’s fusillade of historical denial and absurd lies over the Voice to Parliament these past days came an ominous portent of what such racist pandering might ultimately provoke.  

“Liberal Jews,” declared a flyer shared by Donald Trump on his social media platform, had “voted to destroy America”. The apocalyptic-sounding post, which coincided with the conclusion of the Rosh Hashanah holiday on Sunday, went on to say: “Let’s hope you learned from your mistake and make better choices going forward. Happy New Year!”

This wasn’t by any means the first time the former US president’s stance or rhetoric has pulsed with grotesque anti-Semitism, much less undisguised intimidation and demagoguery. But it was nonetheless a disturbing nod to the footing such alt-right nationalist thinking continues to enjoy in the man who, perversely or not, remains the most powerful force within the Republican Party today. 

The relevance to the present moment of such thinking lies in its instinctive allegiance to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, an iteration of which — as Crikey explained earlier this week — finds loose reflection in much of the incendiary rhetoric of the right’s No campaign.

At the heart of this racist theory are imaginings of a monolithic force shadowing white civilisation: one that invokes the spectre of a sinister plot on the part of leftist or Jewish elites to increase or fortify cultural diversity through non-white immigration and various social policies, and one that has as its menacing object the “ethnic and civilisational substitution” of white sovereign power. 

Like all conspiracy theories picked from the seedbed of unreality, such thinking is little more than fevered fantasy. But it’d be a mistake to dismiss the theory’s capacity to anchor and shape understandings of the Voice across the full spectrum of the right. 

So much is distilled in a video created by neo-Nazis Blair Cottrell and Joel Davis some months ago and broadcast on social media. Seized with anti-Semitism and eugenics-inspired vitriol, the pair of white supremacists framed the Voice as something destined to supersede or dangerously erode the “sovereignty of white Australia”. On their telling, the Voice could rightly be perceived as the latest frontier in the ongoing “war on white Australia”, which — so their theory goes — owes its existence almost entirely to the anti-racist, multicultural “agenda” of various people drawn from the Jewish community since the fall of the White Australia policy 50 years go.  

To the minds of both Cottrell and Davis, the perceived influence harboured in the pro-Voice positions of former shadow attorney-general Julian Leeser and prominent lawyer Mark Leibler, both of whom are Jewish, are the final threads that bring this disturbing tapestry of reality to completion.

The point of providing this cursory, sanitised insight into this white supremacist thought isn’t to platform it or overwhelm anyone’s mental real estate, but to expose its parallels to some of the thinking associated with the right’s No campaign. 

Take, for instance, former prime minister Tony Abbott, who’s warned the Voice is a “Trojan horse”, concealing what is, he claims, a way for Indigenous peoples to use “recognition” and “consultation” to snatch the “sovereign power over the future direction of the country” away from those whose “ancestry in this country dates only from 1788”.

Or prominent No campaigner Gary Johns, who in June directly echoed these screeds and referred to Indigenous peoples as an organised lobby group “crawling all over Canberra”. Or Kerry White, who’s similarly declared First Nations peoples will use the Voice as a vehicle to destroy Parliament and modern Australia’s way of life: “The Voice will end up taking over,” she’s said, “and all the white people here will be paying to live here.” 

And, not least, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton himself, who’s likewise dipped a toe into these dystopian seas via his indulgence in aligned conspiracies and false descriptions of Indigenous “elites” and the “Orwellian” future that awaits should the referendum succeed. 

It’s not that these arguments expressly or consciously draw on the language of replacement, still less any conspiracy involving “Jewish elites” (as opposed to “Indigenous elites”). It’s that it’s easy to discern in them the gradual peregrination of replacement theory from the margins of white extremism to what now passes for mainstream thinking on the right. 

White supremacists, for their part, appear to laud the No campaign’s success, but despise a seeming pusillanimity in its appeal to the sanctity of “colourblind” equal rights to win ordinary Australians to its cause. “This framing is just so poisonous,” Davis told fellow traveller and neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell in a video broadcast to social media two weeks ago. “There’s a kind of soft self-erasure of the white man in civic nationalist ideology that makes it more pernicious [than leftism].” 

What’s interesting, however, is that Sewell didn’t fully subscribe to Davis’ point of view: “You see the centre-right of politics doing thinly veiled pro-whiteism, and they’ve always done thinly veiled pro-whiteism — and that’s always been an undermining feature within conservatism [in Australia],” he told Davis. 

“And you [can] see how far the centre-right of politics has come in the last five years — they are mimicking and echoing our radical, extreme talking points from three or four years ago. And they’re mimicking them in the public space.” 

This isn’t, it bears emphasising, some pedestrian political observation or throwaway line steeped in grandstanding. It’s a coldly accurate observation that goes to the altered character of the Coalition as a political force. Since the days of the Howard government, it’s retreated ever inward, finding itself unmoored from its pragmatic, Burkean conservatism. What’s emerged under Dutton is a populist, nihilistic movement that has, as matter of course, elevated fear, bigotry and disdain toward minorities — from refugees to welfare recipients and First Nations peoples — into the organising principles of its warped ideology.    

This is why it’s inaccurate to view the right’s (intellectually dishonest) insistence on equal rights in the Voice debate as a matter of either sincere concern or a cynical ploy limited to visiting a devastating political blow to the government. On the contrary, the long game is to make racist assimilationist thinking look respectable once again, as Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s incursion into historical denialism so usefully confirmed last week. 

We see this in the right’s hysteria around Welcome to Country ceremonies; in its suggestion that land agreements represent “an attack” on the rights of all non-Indigenous people; its lies about “vast”, wasteful expenditure on Indigenous peoples; and its increasingly emboldened use of racist, dehumanising language to describe First Nations peoples. Indeed, mere weeks after Abbott referred to Indigenous Elder Noel Pearson in The Australian as a “tribal chieftain”, we’re yet again left to wonder how the strikingly similar phrase “noble savagery” passed the broadsheet’s editorial process. 

On any fair-minded view, we’re entering the lowest points of a campaign defined by a series of nadirs. What’s truly alarming is that while the right looks to assimilationist thinking, trying it on for size across different policy fronts as though no-one can see or hear them, white extremist groups are planning to mobilise and capitalise on the racist resentment its antics have unleashed. 

The No campaign, Sewell said in the same video two weeks ago, had “really galvanised” the “entire right wing and the majority of the country”. This “pissed-off energy” gives the alt-right “a couple of options”, he told Davis, “and one of those is to transmute this energy over to the Jewish question, to transmute it over to focusing on white Australia and white power”.

Davis was of a similar view, suggesting their bid to bring people “into white consciousness” might do well to focus on people aligned with the freedom movement where they’ve met success before: “There’s a bunch of Australians that have been pissed-off that maybe weren’t that political before — we’ve got to figure out how to take that pissed-off energy and move it to the immigration issue.”

It’s such insights as these that show why it’s irresponsible and no longer possible for anyone to pretend the sum of the right’s actions is a form of harmless pandering to bigotry, unreality and no more. In much the same way Trump’s politics “changed the paradigm” or tenor of debate on racial issues in the United States for the worse, the right’s approach to the Voice debate heralds a shift in the alt-right’s trajectory now and in the years to come. 

There is, in other words, a sense of dangerous static energy enveloping the country. And once the lightning strikes, we may find ourselves hostage to the illiberal and extremist currents that come to animate our society. 

“I’m just gonna wing it,” Sewell said. “We’re going to start off soft … then we might amplify as we get to see how the media reacts and the left reacts. That I’m gonna play.”

There lies the potential future direction of our country. And it’s frightening.