Turn Far Right To Fawkner
The Age
Wednesday August 20, 1997
YOU might expect the National Action bookshop, which promotes right-wing messages through stickers, literature and stubby holders - "Stop the Asian invasion!" - to be as brazenly positioned as the group's policies.
But in Tyson Street, Fawkner, amid the orange brick-veneer homes, milk bar, and continental sausage shop, is a shopfront where barbed wire crouches above the doorway and blue boarding barricades the windows.
Beyond this facade is a dark, smoky room. Books and pamphlets are neatly laid out on a trestle table, T-shirts and flags bearing slogans - "land rights for whites" - hang off the walls. Like the (now outlawed) Builders Laborers Federation once did, National Action has appropriated the Eureka Flag and seeks to define itself as a party of patriotic and rebellious reform.
Two men sit smoking cigarettes, waiting for business. For political activists, the men are long on rhetoric but short on personal detail. Damien and Les will happily sell you a 10-cent sticker reading "Sink them! Deport 'boat people' now", or dismiss the groups who protest at their doorstep as "extreme lefties, bloody homosexuals or transvestites". But they refuse to disclose their full names, backgrounds, be photographed, or explain why they give their time.
"We prefer not to give our names because we don't want to be persecuted," says Damien. "We sometimes get weirdos coming here . . . we have to put up with a lot of cranks, who for some reason think this is a bit of a joke. It's not, we are a political party."
They are similarly secretive about business details: "Some days are real busy, others are a little bit slow," says Damien. "We don't make a fantastic amount (of money). This is not so much a profit-making experience, it's more to get the message to the people."
What led this right-wing group to such a bland suburban location? How does their fortified structure fit with the local community?
National Action's chairman, Michael Brander, says Fawkner was an obvious choice. The shop opened in January.
"We believe that it's a very ordinary Australian suburb, and most ordinary Australians live in suburbs like Fawkner, and most of our members come from ordinary suburbs," Brander says by telephone.
National Action was formed in Sydney in 1982. Brander says it has never been formally based anywhere, and while there are branches in each state, there is no single headquarters. It is not aligned with other parties and is funded by members' contributions.
He explains the party's three main platforms: increase tariffs and stop cheap imports so as to achieve full employment; stop all Asian immigration, Australia should seek a European, not Asian identity; and a push for a national state, or a republic, although Brander says the Keating republican model is wrong as it seeks to align Australia with Asia.
But he denies that the policies, and anti-Asian logos emblazoned on beer mugs and bumper stickers, are racist.
"We're taking into account racial differences, and I reject that that entails racial hatred. There is confusion in that we are defining people according to their racial differences - but that's not racism," Brander says.
"So we're not about racial hatred but, of course, a lot of people do hate them."
While he promises the party will field candidates at the next federal and state elections, Brander baulks when asked about membership: "We have a policy of not discussing membership figures."
Back in Fawkner, Damien stands ramrod straight, decked out in a navy shirt and trousers. He is frustrated that people confuse his party with the Nazis.
Picking up a stubby holder bearing the Eureka Flag's royal blue and Southern Cross emblem, he says: "I can't see how people can say this looks like a swastika. It's dinky-di, true-blue, type stuff . . .
"We're Australians. The Nazis sold Australia out to Japan . . . If we were Nazis, the old diggers would be coming down here beating the living crap out of us."
Local Asian leaders say National Action's statements and rallies make them feel persecuted and threatened. None of the group's Fawkner neighbors are prepared to speak publicly about them.
"People are complaining that this is a nice neighborhood, why did they have to come here?" says one local who asks not to be named.
Phong Nguyen, the coordinator of the Springvale Indo/Chinese Mutual Assistance Association, says the community must take a stand against such groups.
"The fact that they exist and are legal makes a mockery of our racial vilification laws," he says. "These groups say blatant, hateful things which strike fear and doubt . . . We have to ask where does democracy end and where does racism start? The community has to be mature enough to say this is racism dressed up in democracy's clothing and we should treat it as racism with the full strength of the law."
Various community groups have held protests outside the National Action shop, but on one occasion, some protestors were arrested for assaulting police.
"That's the dilemma," says Nguyen. "Silence can suggest the community agrees (with National Action) . . . but if the protests are violent or too vocal, the protestors look bad as well."
Rabbi John Levi, the senior rabbi at Temple Beth Israel, disputes Brander's claim that his anti-Asian message is not racist. He says groups such as National Action demonstrate the changing nature of racism in the suburbs.
"Surely, after all this time, we must understand that the pigmentation of someone's skin or the shape of their eyebrows is all a part of the human condition," he says.
"Racism's focus has changed. In the old days, Jews were the most prominent and vulnerable minority. My feeling is now the hostility is focused against people who are obviously different because of the color of their skin or their dress."
It is no coincidence, says Jeremy Jones, that anti-Semitic attacks increase whenever there is an increase in anti-Asian or anti-Aboriginal sentiment. Jones, from the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, keeps a national database on anti-Semitic vandalism, attacks, harassment and violence. He says that whenever right-wing groups get away with campaigns against other groups, they are emboldened to broaden their scope.
Jones reports a rise in anti-Semitic harassment from March 1996 (the federal election) to March 1997. The figures have returned to normal only during the past few months. "Although normal means maybe only four, rather than six, reports a week of people being abused as they come out of a synagogue or receiving threatening phone calls in the middle of the night," Jones says.
His experience shows that hateful campaigns are quelled only when police and senior government officials denounce them. "They only stop when the groups get the feeling the state is going to come down on them like a ton of bricks. These people don't particularly want to be martyrs."
© 1997 The Age
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