By Gladio

The Rise of Remigration

Remigration as a term in nationalist circles started to gain currency in the 2010s when European identitarians including Austrian activist Martin Sellner and French writer Renaud Camus starting using the word to describe a deliberate, policy-driven reversal of demographic change in Western nations, a different connotation to the more traditional ‘repatriation’. The idea was simple: if decades of mass immigration had fundamentally altered the ethnic composition of European societies, then a concerted political programme could begin to reverse that process.

For years, the concept remained confined to identitarian circles and the fringes of European nationalist politics. Then, beginning around 2024, it broke through. Austria’s Freedom Party campaigned openly on “remigration of uninvited strangers.” Germany’s AfD made it a centrepiece of its 2025 federal election campaign after concerted effort at regional level by identitarian activists. Parties in the Netherlands, Finland, and Belgium adopted the term or its close equivalents. Most strikingly, by late 2025 the Trump administration in America had embraced the language outright: The Department of Homeland Security posted “Remigration now” on social media, and the State Department’s proposed reorganisation included an Office of Remigration. While the American substance has not yet matched the style, for the first time since the 1930s, net migration to the United States has turned negative.

The question for Australian nationalists is what, if anything, ‘remigration’ means for us.

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Australia Compared to Europe: The Metapolitical vs The Legal-Bureaucratic

Here we encounter a paradox that anyone serious about immigration policy in Australia needs to understand.

In Western Europe, there is a large and growing public appetite for radical immigration reversal. The integration failures are, since Elon Musk bought Twitter, more visible than ever: parallel societies in French banlieues, Pakistani rape gang scandals in England, clan-based crime networks in Germany and Sweden, all alongside welfare dependency rates among third world migrant cohorts that dwarf those of native populations. These realities generate potent political energy. European voters are increasingly willing to support parties that promise not just to slow immigration, but to reverse it.

But Europe’s legal-bureaucratic environment is a thicket of impediments. The European Convention on Human Rights, EU asylum directives, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, deeply entrenched judicial review norms, and a vast ecosystem of NGOs with standing to litigate… all of these create procedural friction that makes large-scale removal extraordinarily slow and difficult. Even Austria, which achieved a record 14,156 deportations in 2025 and cut asylum applications by 36 percent, is operating well within these constraints rather than overcoming them.

Australia’s situation is almost exactly the inverse. Our legal-bureaucratic environment is, comparatively, far more permissive. We are not signatories to the ECHR. Our constitution contains few explicit individual rights protections applicable to non-citizens. The Migration Act grants the Minister extraordinary executive power, power that was expanded dramatically in 2024 when Parliament passed laws enabling third-country deportation arrangements, criminal penalties for non-cooperation with removal, and ministerial authority to reverse protection findings. A Senate inquiry estimated that 80,000 non-citizens could be susceptible to deportation under these provisions. Both major parties compete to appear tougher on border control. The institutional infrastructure is there and to a large extent we have the bipartisan consensus against boat people forged by the Howard and Abbott Governments to thank for it.

But metapolitically, things are tougher. Building a broad public constituency for demographic reversal is harder in Australia than in Europe, precisely because our immigration system has historically been more selective. We’ve filtered more strongly for English proficiency and employability. The result is that Australia’s immigrant population, on aggregate, is more economically productive and better integrated than Europe’s asylum-heavy intake. This makes the political argument for reversal less viscerally obvious to ordinary voters, even as the long-term demographic trajectory raises the same fundamental questions about national identity and social cohesion. It’s a lot easier to deport Mohamed the rapist drug dealer than it is the law-abiding Chinese-Malaysian doctor who’s been here for forty years and has many Australian friends. Compared to Europe, our migrant intake has proportionately had a lot more of the latter migrant. The more recent deluge of ‘skilled’ immigrants, particularly from the Indian subcontinent, only changes this problem at the margins. Any programme of ‘remigration’ that is based on wholesale deportation of fundamentally productive migrant groups will inherently face tougher political challenges as Australians confront how badly they really want to deport ‘the good ones’. Even the average One Nation voter (or leader!) seems to mostly want mere multi-ethnic assimilationism, a return to the Howard era.

Australian nationalists need to reckon honestly with both sides of this equation: the tools are better than we often realise, but the political case requires more sophistication than a European-style appeal to immediate crisis if we want to reverse our demographic direction while there’s still time to do so with a democratic majority.

Why Australian Nationalists Need Policy Detail

It’s not enough for Australian nationalists to simply declare “we need remigration” and leave it at that. The political landscape is shifting, and we need to be ready with actionable policy when the moment arrives, policy crafted to our specifically Australian conditions.

The next Federal Election will likely see the Liberal Party, already a hollowed-out and ideologically exhausted husk, obliterated. One Nation has definitively demonstrated that there is a substantial constituency for nationalist politics in Australia, and while they will have their best-ever election result in 2028, it seems likely they will not have the political talent or policy depth to provide a true alternative government on solid ideological grounding. The tumult of 2028 will create the conditions for reinvigorated right-wing political formation to contest what will be an era-defining set of elections in the 2030s. Whatever party takes the lead will need a policy programme to address the remigration question that is legally defensible, fiscally rational, administratively achievable, and politically palatable to the broader electorate.

Australia’s legal framework gives us more room to manoeuvre than European nationalists have but we need to be precise about what we’re proposing and how it will work.

Using the Tools at Our Disposal

A possible Australian remigration approach would centre on two tiers: Scaling up an existing government programme to become a proper voluntary remigration programme and increasing the flow of current immigrants out of the path to citizenship for eventual return to their homelands.

1. Incentivised Voluntary Departure for Citizens and Permanent Residents:

Australia already operates the Return and Reintegration Assistance Program, which provides support to non-citizens who choose to leave voluntarily. This programme could be substantially restructured and expanded. The key change would be offering significant financial packages to Australian citizens who hold dual citizenship or are eligible for citizenship in another country, in exchange for voluntary renunciation of their Australian citizenship and relocation.

The amount offered would be determined by an individual fiscal assessment prepared by Treasury but utilising data from Federal and State governments: a net present value calculation of the projected lifetime cost or benefit of that individual to the Australian taxpayer, incorporating variables such as welfare receipt history, criminal record, employment and tax history, qualifications, age, health indicators, and broader demographic data including country-of-origin fiscal profiles. The logic is straightforward: if an individual is projected to be a net fiscal cost over their lifetime, the government saves money by offering them a departure payment up to that amount. The receiving country’s cooperation could be secured through parallel government-to-government payments (as already allowed in the Migration Act 2024), sweetening the deal for nations that might otherwise be reluctant to accept returnees.

This approach is formally race-neutral as it targets fiscal cost, not ethnicity, but because fiscal outcomes correlate with the integration patterns of different migrant cohorts, the practical effect would be to disproportionately incentivise departure among those groups that are least economically integrated. The programme would be entirely voluntary: no one is compelled to accept. Those who are net contributors would receive negligible or no offers, regardless of background.

2. Accelerated Removal of Non-Citizens:

The 2024 Migration Act amendments already provide the framework for deporting non-citizens who have committed crimes, breached visa conditions, or otherwise failed their obligations as residents. Crucially, this can include deportation to third countries willing to accept them, with Australian government funding. Scaling this up is primarily a matter of appropriating funding, diplomatic effort, and political will. The 80,000-person pool identified by the Senate inquiry represents a good starting point for deportation but we can go further.

A key goal would be to enact supporting measures that are individually mainstream and politically palatable, but which collectively have the effect of reducing the flow of temp migrants into permanent residency and permanent residents into citizens. It’s a classic “self-deportation” approach (thanks Mitt).

A comprehensive programme would include drastically tightening student visa pathways to permanent residency, which have become one of the primary engines of demographic change; extending the qualifying period for citizenship from the current timeframe to ten or twelve years, with no access to welfare or other government benefits during the qualifying period; and imposing a substantial tax on outbound remittances, which currently represent a significant capital drain and whose taxation would both raise revenue and reduce the financial incentive for low-wage migrants to stick around.

None of these individual measures is radical or unpopular. All can be implemented as part of a general effort to ‘right the ship’. Student visa tightening is already government policy. Extended citizenship pathways exist in many comparable countries. Remittance taxation has been implemented or proposed in numerous jurisdictions. But taken together, and combined with the two-tier departure programme, they would begin to shift the demographic trajectory meaningfully, reducing inflows, accelerating outflows among the least integrated, and creating a migration system that once again selects overwhelmingly for people who will strengthen, rather than dilute, the national community.

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Conclusion

The remigration conversation has arrived in Australia, whether the political establishment likes it or not. The question is not whether it will be discussed but whether Australian nationalists will be ready with serious, defensible proposals when the political window opens.

The tools are already largely in our hands. The Migration Act is one of the most powerful pieces of executive immigration legislation in the Western world. The 2024 amendments expanded it further. The legal environment, while not unconstrained, is far more favourable than what European nationalists face. What we lack is not legal capacity but political organisation and policy specificity.

The programme outlined above (a fiscally-indexed voluntary remigration policy, accelerated non-citizen removal, and a suite of supporting intake-reduction measures) is not fantasy. Every component either already exists in some form or could be implemented through uncontroversial, ordinary legislative and budgetary processes. It would not reverse fifty years of demographic change overnight, but it would, for the first time, begin moving the needle in the right direction, and do so in a way that can be explained and defended to the broader Australian public in the language of fiscal responsibility and national interest.

You don’t need to agree with my policy proposals, and I imagine many will read this article and be thinking “this bloke is cucking” because of the lack of explicit focus on ethnicity. So be it. I’m not asking anyone to agree with every point raised here. What I’m asking is that we start thinking about Australia’s specific circumstances, and how we can start building towards a policy suite that actually has a chance of getting implemented in the next five to ten years. If you want something more radical, how are you going to do it?

The political moment is coming. Our policy needs to be ready.

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Gladio is an oldhead frequently confused by zoomer memes. He is still waiting for Elon Musk to reinstate his Twitter account.

Written by Flynn Holman, find more of his content on 𝕏 @Flynn_Holman_

“There is a view that right-wing violence is a pathology to be eradicated, whereas left-wing violence is a grievance to be explained”. These words by Smith & Tan (2025) pinpoint the glaring double standard at the heart of the political polarisation narrative being pushed by today’s media. Much like the dogma of equity, diversity, and inclusion which has entrenched itself within modern institutions, the caricature of the “violent right-wing radical” is a manufactured bogeyman, peddled relentlessly to stifle dissent and justify government control. Feminist academics dominate the literature, pushing narratives which connect nationalism, particularly in young men, to a rise in violent attitudes. Educational curricula have increasingly incorporated elements designed to address this purported rise, encouraging a sense of shame and guilt among young Australian males. This narrative has even permeated popular media, as seen in Netflix’s series Adolescence, which, despite its fictional basis, has been promoted as educational viewing in schools. If the “young, violent right-wing radical” narrative remains unchallenged, it threatens to silence legitimate nationalist movements and embed ideological conformity within the Australian community.

Media outlets, politicians, and security agencies continue to push the narrative that Australia is on the brink of a nationalist terror wave. In the wake of the Bondi terror attack, perpetrated by Islamist extremists, politicians seemed more concerned with the hypothetical threat of right-wing violence and remained reluctant to deal with the true perpetrators. Measures such as hate speech laws and protest restrictions have been enacted under the banner of “social cohesion,” a term synonymous with mandated multiculturalism. While “Nazis” serve as convenient rhetorical foils in this leftist fever dream, a closer examination of the evidence reveals scant support for the claimed escalation of right-wing violence.

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The emphasis on a rising right-wing extremist threat gained momentum after the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings, where the actions of a single individual triggered widespread scrutiny of Australia’s nationalist movements. ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess has stated that nationalist and racist violent extremism now comprises up to 40% of counter-terrorism caseloads, with young men radicalising online. The national terrorism threat level was raised to “probable” in 2024 and remains elevated. But ASIO’s own figures distinguish between investigations and actual violence: the principal completed attacks and deaths continue to come from religiously motivated (Islamist) extremism. This gap between rhetoric and reality has real consequences. It justifies expansive hate-speech laws, surveillance of nationalist groups, and pre-emptive bans, egged on by a compliant left-wing ecosystem.

Yet these same sanctimonious leftists turn a blind eye to the rhetoric and outright violence spewing from their ideological allies. Numerous examples illustrate this disparity:

• The British Australian Community has meticulously chronicled scores of vandal assaults on Australian monuments, peaking around our national day. These acts including beheadings of cultural icons, blood-smeared statues, and wanton destruction are the handiwork of Aboriginal extremists committed to terrorising “white colonisers.” This is ethnic intimidation, yet media coverage contorts it into justified protest born of “generational trauma,” refusing to condemn it as the assault on our shared heritage it truly is.

• Since 2000, all confirmed terrorist attacks on Australian soil have involved Islamist extremists, underscoring a pattern that warrants greater focus, yet we have seen politicians pandering to Muslim communities and seeking to repatriate ISIS-aligned extremists from Syria.

• An alleged terror plot targeting participants in the March for Australia in Brisbane elicited minimal ideological scrutiny compared to similar scenarios, for example, in Perth on Australia Day.

• Climate activist groups like Rising Tide and Extinction Rebellion employ disruptive tactics bordering on eco-terrorism, yet these are often portrayed as principled advocacy for urgent environmental action.

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Even high-profile international examples fit the pattern. The 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah was carried out by Tyler Robinson, whose family and prosecutors have described as having largely left-wing views, yet media coverage avoided labelling the murder “left-wing terrorism”.

Right-wing and nationalist figures, however, face severe repercussions and condemnation for minor infractions. Pauline Hanson has encountered gaol threats for asserting “there are no good Muslims,” while leftist politicians like Lidia Thorpe have issued comparable provocations without consequence. Online nationalists like AUSPILL have endured condemnation and legal threats for a postering campaign highlighting the oxymoronic use of the term “Aussie” today. Drew Pavlou’s investigation into ethnic communities’ NDIS rorts faces defamation suits, Joel Davis was imprisoned without bail for online posts, and Brandan Koschel was gaoled for delivering a speech at a public rally.

Repeatedly, left-leaning activists benefit from contextual explanations rooted in grievance, inequality, or historical injustice, whilst right-wing figures face personal and legal threats. This creates an institutional asymmetry: right-wing expression is presumed dangerous and swiftly met with legal intervention, while left-wing activism is analysed through a more forgiving sociological framework. This bias originates in academic research that advances personal ideologies under the guise of objective inquiry, which ultimately influences government policy.

Much of the policy narrative rests on academic work that receives uncritical media amplification. A prime case is the June 2024 University of Melbourne policy brief Misogyny, Racism and Violent Extremism in Australia by Sara Meger and colleagues. Widely cited as proof that “misogyny and racism” drive violent extremism among young Australian men, the brief’s own data tells a more complex story.

Researchers surveyed 1,100 young Australians. They measured seven forms of “violent extremism” support with a single Likert-scale question each. Anti-feminist violent extremism, for example, was defined solely by agreement with: “Feminism is damaging to our society and should be resisted by force if necessary.” Nearly 14% of respondents agreed overall; men were at 19.4% vs 8.3% for women. Young men showed higher rates, but the study also recorded substantial female agreement — a detail absent from most headlines. In fact, anti-feminist sentiment was the strongest of the seven forms of extremism in women.

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Misogynistic attitudes (including questions such as “Women often make sexual assault accusations as a way of getting back at men” or “Sometimes a woman can make a man so angry that he hits her when he didn’t mean to”) and racist attitudes (e.g., “Usually, the lighter someone’s skin, the more natural intelligence they possess”) were tested as predictors. It’s unsurprising many of these questions received much agreement among the respondents. There are numerous documented cases of women making up or inflating sexual assault accusations, and many academic studies have found strong links between skin colour and IQ. Nevertheless, fact does not seem to be a consideration in this ‘scientific’ publication.

Using logit regression, the authors reported dozens of “significant” results at a p < 0.1 threshold. This is a lenient standard that is higher than the standard 0.05 metric and, across multiple tests, inflates false positives, bringing into question the reliability of the investigation conducted. Crucially, misogyny and racism predicted support for violence across the spectrum: religious, ethnic, economic revolutionary (left-wing wealth redistribution by force), economic reactionary, incel, anti-feminist, and white-supremacist forms. Racism was a strong predictor even for left-wing economic extremism. Universal correlations like this are a common problem with broadly defined and imprecise variables, with low significance thresholds.

The brief’s authors, whose prior work includes “Che Guevara and the Case for Revolutionary Feminism“ and “Morbid Symptoms: A Feminist Dialectics of Global Patriarchy in Crisis,” indicates a feminist foundation that influences the interpretations. There is clear evidence in their conclusions and public commentary that they have cherry picked their data to emphasise right-wing and misogynistic links while downplaying the cross-ideological findings. Unsurprisingly, the links between sexism, racism, authoritarianism and left-wing extremism, which was often stronger than with that of right-wing extremism, was deliberately ignored. Media outlets ran instead with headlines about radicalised young men and the “manosphere.” Yet the one form of ‘extremism’ with no link to misogynistic attitudes were the so-called white supremacists – the opposite of what most public commentary suggested. This selective framing betrays the work’s undeniable ideological contamination with the authors’ radical feminism. This is not neutral social science, yet it shapes government policy.

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Now the Albanese government has turned this bias into law. New 2026 hate-speech legislation, the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act, hands ministers sweeping powers to proscribe “hate groups” below terrorism thresholds, with very few limits and no legal recourse. The National Socialist Network (NSN), Australia’s most prominent neo-Nazi group disbanded in January 2026 rather than face automatic criminalisation. The group has faced zero terrorist convictions nor committed any attacks, whilst leading associates have faced Antifa led car bombings and imprisonment for online posts. The group’s dissolution removes a community for angry young men, driving them deeper underground where they’re harder to police; exactly what experts on European bans have warned creates group fragmentation and unpredictable lone actors.

Blinded by this view that “violent right-wing radical” is the pre-eminent threat to Australian society, the government will continue to threaten Australian society whilst they refuse to recognise that they have emboldened Islamist extremism, forgiven left-wing extremists and potentially created a lone-actor threat. Currently the data is unambiguous: Australia does not face a right-wing terror wave. Left-linked activism has delivered widespread cultural vandalism and economic disruption, routinely excused, and Islamist extremism has delivered the body count.

Yet guided by ‘science’ built on ideology not evidence, governments continue to weaponise hate-speech laws against nationalists, expand surveillance on dissenters, and shame young Australian men in our schools. While real threats persist, Australia’s security infrastructure is diverted toward silencing legitimate questions about immigration, identity, and national security – a blatant attempt at ideological control.

This two-tiered system erodes trust, breeds resentment, and leaves actual dangers unchecked. Far from strengthening community bonds, the Albanese government’s response can only be seen as a further attempt to disenfranchise ethnic Australians and entrench their own ideological control. There are legitimate questions to be asked about the role of multiculturalism in Australian society. The violent right-wing radical might be a good rhetorical villain but ignoring the clear and present threats to Australians entrenched in Australia’s left-aligned multicultural and activist communities will only continue to fracture our once homogenous society. The numbers don’t lie.

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By James Turner

Contrary to what is often taught in this modern era, Australian bushranger culture was not an aberration on the margins of colonial society; rather it was one of the first truly native expressions of it, forged amongst the trials and struggles of colonial efforts to tame a previously untamed land.

Long before Australia imagined itself as a nation, this land produced figures who rejected artificially imposed authority, contested distant power, and insisted, albeit often clumsily, and sometimes fatally, on the right to live by their own terms.

The bushranger emerged from a landscape and a social order that were equally unforgiving: a continent administered by a remote empire, governed through unforgiving penal discipline, rigid hierarchy, and laws designed for English fields rather than merciless eucalyptus scrub. In this new harsh environment, defiance in the face of such factors did not arise as philosophy first, but as action driven by instinct.

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Our earliest colonies were fundamentally founded on coercive force. Convicts, exiles, and the working poor were pressed into a system that often favoured compliance over dignity, and survival over justice. Land was claimed, labour extracted ruthlessly, and law enforced by men who rarely belonged in spirit to the new land they ruled, but rather the lands from which they came. The bush - vast, indifferent, and unknowable to newcomers - was the place where imperial order thinned, and a man could live and die by his own merit alone.

To step into the bush was to step outside the bounds of colonial control. The bushranger did exactly that. He fled not merely the gallows or the lash, but the presumption that authority was owed simply because it had arrived by ship.

Bushrangers were shaped as much by the land they fled into as by any sense of overt rebellion. The Australian bush fundamentally rewards self-reliance, bushcraft, and local knowledge; and it punishes dependency and hesitation without mercy. These men learned to navigate by stars and creeks rather than roads and milestones. They relied on community ties rather than official institutions. In doing so, they inverted the colonial hierarchy, inevitably threatening it by their very nature. The mounted trooper, uniformed and armed with the law behind him, was often outmatched by men who understood the country intimately and moved within it as natives, regardless of birth. That inversion resonated deeply with many of the colonial layfolk. It suggested that legitimacy arose from earned belonging and competence, rather than by simple decree of a distant statesman or monarch.

Figures like Ned Kelly endure to this day not because of their crimes, but because of what they symbolised. Kelly’s defiance was not abstract; it was directed at police harassment, judicial bias, and a system that treated often-downtrodden Irish settlers as permanent suspects. His Jerilderie Letter reads less like a criminal manifesto than a colonial indictment. They are a raw, unpolished assertion that authority without true justice is tyranny, no matter how legal it claims to be. In that sense, the bushranger tradition anticipated a distinctly Australian political instinct: scepticism toward power, hostility to unearned status, and an expectation that authority justify itself in practice, not merely in law. A tradition that unfortunately is still very relevant even today.

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From a modern Australian nativist perspective, our historical bushranger culture represents our forebear’s early refusal to accept foreign imported values as inherently superior. The colonies were administered as extensions of Britain, yet life here quickly diverged from British assumptions. Distance bred independence. Harshness bred pragmatism. Equality in hardship eroded reverence for rigid class structure, favouring instead meritocratic aptitude and community collective endeavour in the face of a harsh, unforgiving new land.

The historical bushranger, for all his flaws, embodied this divergence. He did not aspire to proper English respectability; he forged a rough, local identity often grounded in survival, mateship, and resistance to external control. That identity would later resurface in many new iterations according to historical time, place and circumstance. The same core, fundamental spirit can be found again in the digger, the shearer, and even in the early unionists—different expressions of the same insistence that Australians govern themselves according to their own realities.

Importantly, bushranger mythology was sustained not only by the men themselves, but by the communities that sheltered them. Farmers, settlers, and itinerant workers often provided food, information, and silence. This was not mere fear; it was sympathy born of shared grievance. Many saw the law as an instrument of distant interests - usurious banks, exploitative landlords, and uncaring administrators - rather than a neutral arbiter. Protecting a bushranger could feel less like criminal complicity than communal self-defence. In that quiet collaboration lies the cultural seed of Australian localism: loyalty to one’s own over blind obedience to imposed systems.

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To acknowledge the inspirational aspect of bushranger culture is not to romanticise the often brutal violence perpetuated by the most notable of historically recorded bushrangers, nor deny its costs. People were harmed; lives were cut short.

However, it is vital that we acknowledge that bushranging as a culture was far larger than just Ned Kelly, Captain Thunderbolt, or the vicious Mad Dog Morgan. For every notable name in history records, hundreds more went unremembered, yet whose quiet and hard-fought defiance went on to build a fundamental component of our national spirit. These men lived lives of their own choosing, in the face of demands to the contrary.

National myths are never to serve as moral accounting exercises. They endure because they articulate a truth about how a people see themselves. The bushranger mythos reflects the foundational Australian spirit that valued autonomy over compliance, fairness over formality, and lived justice over abstract legality. It insists that resistance is sometimes an ethical response to power that has lost legitimacy.

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Today, in an era of globalised governance and increasingly remote authority, the bushranger archetype remains relevant precisely because he was local. He belonged to the land he moved through and the people he relied upon. His rebellion was not ideological in the modern sense, but instinctive and grounded - a dogged, honest refusal to be managed from afar without consent. A sentiment any decent man can respect and empathise with. For modern Australian nativists, this resonates as a reminder that self-governance is not granted; it is practiced. It emerges from shared experience, mutual obligation, and a willingness to challenge systems that no longer serve the community they claim to rule.

Australian bushranger culture is not a relic to be apologised for, nor a fairy tale to be swallowed uncritically. It is an early articulation of a national temperament that still runs deep. In the shadow of gum trees and under open sky, a distinct voice first said no - to distant rule, to imposed order, to the idea that authority need not explain itself. That voice, rough and imperfect, helped shape a country that has never been entirely comfortable being told what to do, and is all the stronger for it.

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Written by longtime Liberal Party member Daniel Jones, find more of his content on 𝕏 @veryfrenly

In my long membership of the NSW Liberal Party, I must have heard that quote repeated dozens and dozens of times, usually by some Party Leader who is appealing for a sense of unity among the squabbling (Left-wing) Moderate and Conservative factions.

It is well known that the Liberal Party has factions. John Howard himself characterised as mere preselection co-operatives, I too have seen the factions operate as nihilistic vehicles for the ambitions of talentless hacks, the ongoing battle over net-zero for example has played out on those Moderate and Conservative factional lines. Regardless, they do represent the broad strokes of the Liberalism of John Stuart Mill and the Conservatism of Edmund Burke.

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The Moderates have generally held sway in the largest states of New South Wales and Victoria; they have institutional advantages that their Conservative rivals have not been able to match. The Moderates dominated the Liberal Party, most clearly in NSW, because they were concentrated in the safest and wealthiest Liberal seats and, resultantly, the Moderates could get their people over the line in preselections. Before the coming of the Teals, a Moderate MP never had to worry about losing an election, so they could spend the bulk of their time and resources on factional activity.

In the safe seats, the typical Moderate party activist was a retired or semi-retired professional; their activists were the wealthiest people in the party with padded out Superannuation accounts and defined benefit pensions. They were people who had plenty of time and money to play, and frequently win, in the game of factional politics.

When I went out into Western Sydney where the Conservatives held sway, I would see middle-aged blokes coming in off a day on the tools, attending branch meetings and hitting the phones organising volunteers for campaigning. For these people, politics and factional activity was something that had to be done in the evening since they had to hold down a real job by day.

As well, Moderate ideology of squishy centrism meant that they were infinitely politically flexible. They could always get the donations from Business interests and big Corporates because they would never say or do anything that stepped on their toes, such as advocate for reduced immigration. Their fundraising vehicles were donation machines.

Although the Moderates have been dominant. I always wondered whether the Moderate or Conservative faction of the Liberal Party actually represented the larger cohort of voters. The membership of the NSW Liberal Party is somewhere between 5,000-10,000, approximately 0.1-0.2% of the 5.7 million voters enrolled in NSW, so it was always unlikely that the membership was representative of the broader electorate.

Now this is finally coming to the test, and I believe that it really shows how little support Small-L Liberalism really held amongst voters.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is polling at 28% of the vote federally. The Liberals are down to 13% (excluding the Queensland LNP). Watching the Liberal vote crash in the polls feels like watching Bear Stearns share price crash in March 2008, it feels like there is no bottom, and it is careening towards political bankruptcy.

This reveals the fundamental truth; The Liberal Party always depended on the much larger cohort of Big C-Conservative voters to actually vote for them on Election Day. My guess is that now the Moderate Liberals could win only 8-12% of the vote by themselves, the same polling numbers that the Australian Democrats would pull and the Greens can never break through.

After all these years, we finally know the truth: the Liberal Party was always a Moderate icing on a much larger Conservative cake.

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In 1996, when Pauline Hanson launched herself into Australian Politics with her dynamite maiden speech, she threatened to split the Conservative side of Australian politics.

John Howard was the X Factor that blunted the rise of One Nation the first time around.

Howard called himself the most Conservative leader the Liberal Party has ever had. He refused to engage in the nasty game of ‘Racist!’ name-calling that the Left and the Media directed at Hanson and her supporters; he knew that it would only drive them permanently into Hanson’s arms.

Howard could keep One Nation’s voters on the reservation by pinching Hanson’s best ideas, such as mandatory offshore detention of asylum seekers and wrapping himself in the Australian flag. As well, the economy was booming, and the budget was recovering; so there was enough Government largess to go around, affording him the ability to spend as much as was needed to keep her voters happy.

Once it was all over and Hanson was finished in 2004, he could ramp up immigration and unleash the Howardwave to satisfy the Business Lobby’s unquenchable thirst for cheap labour.

There is no John Howard to bail the Moderates out like the last time that Hanson got momentum behind her in the 1990s. One Nation has already blown past 10% that it polled at the beginning of the 1998 Federal Election. Conservative voters are deserting the Liberal Party reservation in droves.

Neither Hastie nor Taylor nor any other pretender to the Liberal Party throne can hold a candle to John Howard’s raw political talent and Machiavellianism. The reckoning has been delayed for 30 years, but the dam cannot hold back the flooding river anymore.

By all appearances, the Moderates aren’t going to change and are going to moderate themselves into Total Liberal Death.

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We also chatted on Trump’s recent incursion into Venezuela and the pending takeover of Greenland!

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The following is one chapter titled ‘What of the ACTU?’ from The National Observer’s recently published book Australia Forever, written by Australia’s most courageous MP, Graeme Campbell.

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As far as the high immigration intake generally goes and its specific effect on Australian workers, what of the ACTU [Australian Council of Trade Unions], the supposed guardian of working conditions? What was it doing while immigration numbers were being forced up? During the rise of multiculturalism and a strident brand of feminism the ACTU found itself under attack by middle class left leaning academics for not taking these concerns to heart. The ACTU resisted these criticisms initially, but gradually gave way.

People of the sort who made the criticisms, rejecting the aspirations of their own class, but not the comforts of the lifestyle, have systematically taken over the Labor Party. The agenda of these people reflect their own aspirations and desire for status. They may still support workers in specific efforts to secure better working conditions, but their support for a high immigration rate means that wages and working conditions will invariably be undermined anyway.

Also in other respects, such as lifestyle, they regard the Australian working class with derision, particularly the working class male. They realise that the working class is most resistant to their agenda, particularly the god of multiculturalism. Workers who regard themselves first and foremost as Australian have not only been denied a voice but also their lifestyle and their value as human beings are being attacked by the organisations which are supposed to represent them. Bob Hawke, when Prime Minister, and other Labor politicians, were never slow to join these Volvo socialists in their attacks. The old Australian working class will find more sympathy for them as people in the mainstream old Australian middle class than they will amongst the trendy lefties and social poseurs who have insinuated themselves into their organisations.

So multiculturalism and feminism have become high on the Labor and ACTU agenda and distorted their more traditional working class concerns. The ACTU, in its support of multiculturalism and fear of being branded racist, did not feel as though it could publicly criticise the high immigration levels.

In fact, particularly through its ethnic liaison officer, Alan Matheson, the ACTU is extremely anxious to appease ethnic lobby groups and so very reluctant to confront family reunion. Mr Matheson has also gone so far as to suggest that there is little that can be done to prevent the worldwide movement of labour impacting upon Australia. This echoes the opinion of someone such as Michael Stutchbury of the Australian Financial Review who clearly believes in the “free” movement of labour, along with capital, between nations, as though labour were just a commodity and local governments had no obligations to their own people.

The free movement of labour would mean that the labour export schemes which already widely operate in Asia would be introduced into Australia, with devastating effects on local wages and working conditions. Local workers would essentially be faced with modern day indentured labourers as competitors, particularly if China entered the market in a big way.

China has yet to embrace labour export schemes to any great extent, but has made significant moves in that direction. The Far Eastern Economic Review, in a 2nd of April article on migrant labour schemes noted that China officially classifies 200 million of its workers as “surplus”. Were a portion of those to be released onto an open Australian labour market the effects can be imagined. The Chinese have already reportedly offered to send two million migrant workers to Japan, to the horror of the Japanese.

That Mr Matheson appears to be oblivious to such potential problems illustrates just how out of touch he is with the sentiments of the people he is supposed to represent: Australian workers. In fact he acts as though he is little more than a captive of the multiculturalist industry and echoes their tactics in trying to take the high moral ground. He has called for “a positive strategy to combat racism” in Australia which no doubt involves more multiculturalist bureaucrats. He and the ACTU in general, as apologists for the policy of multiculturalism, have badly failed Australian workers on immigration.

Big business, real estate operators, property developers and the like, realising multiculturalism’s effect on immigration had moved in behind it before the ACTU. They were free, with ethnic pressure groups, to push for ever higher immigration intakes without the traditional opposition of organised labour. As has been seen, big business favours immigration both because it has a downward effect on wages and working conditions, particularly where those people come from countries with no strong tradition of organised labour, and because, for developers and real estate operators, more people mean more development, regardless of the best interests of the country.

In April 1991 however, the ACTU made a submission to Cabinet for a cut in immigration, though it was very careful not to target the family reunion category. The ACTU called for a cut in skilled immigration of 20,000. This was a short term response to the recession, which had little impact upon the Hawke-led government, but was at least a start. The long term impact skilled immigration has on local training opportunities has to be considered. As long as employers know they can import skilled workers readily there is little incentive for them to train locals.

Apart from locals losing opportunities for training, our unthinking cargo cult commitment to skilled immigration has also meant an oversupply of skills in some areas. The 1990-91 Budget papers acknowledge that overservicing by GPs is caused by the oversupply of doctors. The AMA [Australian Medical Association] recognises that this oversupply is largely caused by the immigration of doctors and is rightly concerned about it. Like engineers—whom we continue to import—we have too many doctors, at least in city areas, where the overwhelming majority of immigrant doctors settle. This not only leads to overservicing pressures, it denies local residents places in medical schools, which because of the oversupply have cut back on student numbers.

Yet the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Health Mr Howe has been very slow to confront this problem. On the contrary he initially threatened to flood the country with foreign doctors in his battle with the AMA over his proposed Medicare patient charge of $3.50, which was eventually revised downwards to $2.50 in the face of opposition from the Labor Caucus and ultimately abandoned by Prime Minister Keating. This charge was proposed to offset the costs caused by overservicing.

Mr Howe’s threat to use immigration as a way of attempting to break the strength of local doctors was an echo of the tactic some employers down the years have advocated to break the strength of trade unions. The irony—and the dangerous precedent he would have set—seemed to have been completely lost on him. Mr Howe though subsequently acknowledged that some restrictions on foreign doctors may be necessary and since then has conceded that some form of entry restriction is necessary.

A paper drafted by the Director of the National Health Strategy, Ms Jenny Macklin, entitled The Future of General Practice and released on 15 March this year, took account of the problem of the immigration of doctors. This paper, among other things, called for the intake of overseas doctors to be restricted to 10 per cent of the output of Australian medical schools, which themselves would face a 10 per cent cut in student places. Mr Howe said he supported the thrust of the proposals.

The Macklin paper pointed out that over 400 foreign doctors per year were being allowed to settle permanently in Australia, which was more than five times the number of overseas doctors allowed to settle in Canada, a country with a much larger population. On 16 May this year Dr Howe announced that the number of overseas trained doctors allowed to settle in Australia would be reduced to 200 a year in 1992-93. This followed an announcement by Mr Hand that the qualification of medicine would be downgraded for immigration selection purposes. So there is some progress on that front.

But the problems do not exist only with doctors. Note should be taken of the problems Australian shearers have been experiencing. The Australian of 9 September 1991 stated:

In Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland, Australian shearers are gradually being outnumbered by their New Zealand counterparts to a point where more than 42 per cent of the country’s flock is shorn by foreign hands. Meanwhile at least 80 per cent of Australian shearers remain unemployed.

The Australian Workers Union NSW secretary, Mr Ernie Ecob remarked:

Over the last three and four months there has been a completely orchestrated, organised campaign by the National Farmers Federation to have these foreign teams come in and do the work which has been traditionally done every year, for 20 years, by the locals. The large graziers are bending to the wishes of the NFF to ensure they get the work.

The Australian reported that the itinerant NZ gangs were working for rates of about $90 per 100 sheep, compared with the award rate of $137. This is an example of the traditional attempts to undermine the wages and working conditions of locals by using cheap foreign labour. Further, much of the money earned by the itinerant workers is taken out of Australia. This trend has continued.

As the New Zealand gangs are predominantly Maori, the issue has become complicated by racial factors. It is interesting to note that the Office of Multicultural Affairs sponsored an episode of the ABC’s ‘A Big Country’ screened in 1991 in which the Maoris were portrayed as being better shearers than the locals. It is typical of OMA’s propaganda techniques that locals are portrayed as inferior to migrants or foreign workers. By such insidious means OMA, a publicly funded body established by a Labor Government, is justifying the undercutting of the wages and working conditions of locals.

The shearers set up a camp outside Parliament House in May/June this year and put their case to the ALP Caucus. Among other things the shearers called for work permits for New Zealanders.

The Closer Economic Relations agreement between Australia and New Zealand stipulates free movement of labour between the countries. Historically Australia and New Zealand have had a special relationship and free movement between the countries has been part of the legacy. With changing times though circumstances are different. A passport requirement was introduced for travel between the countries in 1982 and clearly the case for work permits exists.

CER is basically a trade agreement and it does not follow at all that the freeing up of trade automatically means that labour should be able to move “freely” between nations if this is clearly shown or is likely to disadvantage local workers. Yet in The Sydney Morning Herald of 30 May, a spokesman for the New Zealand Minister for External Affairs and Trade is reported as stating: “You can’t have free trade between countries without a free labour market.” This is apparently the New Zealand Government position.

This one example of the shearers being undercut by cheap New Zealand labour gives a small scale indication of what would occur were the present push for freer trade with Asia to be followed by free movement of labour. As already indicated the consequences for local workers would be disastrous. Yet this prospect is seriously proposed by members of the academic and bureaucratic elites. Is this to be the subtext to the “free” trade push—namely the deliberate undermining of local wages and working conditions by the “free” movement of labour in order to minimise production costs? It becomes clear why the bible of high finance in the USA, the Wall Street Journal, preaches open borders in its editorial pages.

The Caucus Immigration Committee backed the shearers. The support of committee chairman Andrew Theophanous may be largely due to the fact that the professional ethnic lobby has always been against preferential treatment for New Zealanders and this was a good opportunity to drive the point home. At any rate the caucus committee recommendation called on the Minister for Immigration to:

Cancel forthwith those aspects of these arrangements, which allow New Zealanders automatic access to the Australian job market, so that uniform standards apply to all non Australians and all eligible visitors seeking employment opportunities in Australia.

A watered-down resolution, which did not support work permits, was later accepted by caucus on 2 June. It called on the government to “cancel those aspects of the travel arrangements that allow New Zealanders to work without paying income tax and in breach of awards”. This however was considerable progress and the shearers dismantled their camp, though they intend to continue pushing hard on the issue, particularly in the lead up to its consideration by Cabinet.

One evocative part of the shearer’s general protests was a meeting on Sunday 31 May of a group of about 100 shearers under the Tree of Knowledge in Barcaldine, Queensland, to support their fellow shearers in Canberra and call on the government to support the resolution of the Caucus Immigration Committee. Under this tree in 1891 a group of shearers met following their disastrous defeat in strike action that year and their resolutions led to the formation of the Australian Labor Party. It is an understatement to say that in recent years they have become disillusioned with the party their predecessors founded.

Whether doctors, shearers or carpet layers, Australian governments and bureaucrats have an obligation to support locals first. If they don’t then nobody else will and if they don’t why should locals have any respect or regard for their government?

Mr Howe also has a grand, but imprecise, plan for the cities, yet nowhere does he acknowledge the impact of immigration on the cities. Cut immigration and a great deal of pressure on the cities would be eased. In fact Mr Howe is all for development of new growth corridors, which combined with urban consolidation, he seems to believe is the answer.

It is clear from the example of doctors and shearers that immigration and itinerant foreign workers have had a negative impact on local employment. In a more general sense, while it is true that there is no hard evidence that immigration increases overall unemployment in the long term, it can hardly be doubted that by increasing the labour pool it has a downward effect on wages and working conditions.

Wages in Australia are already among the lowest in the OECD, but select well paid economists continually stress that lower and middle income real wages must fall, while not suggesting that their own salaries or those of the bankers or executives many of them work for should be cut. In saying Australian real wages are too high they are not comparing us with OECD countries, but Asian countries. It is part of their grand vision of Asianisation that real wages should fall to those of Asian countries, so we can properly compete and “integrate” with Asia.

The call for Australia to integrate itself with Asia is essentially a call to the majority to deliver itself into the hands of the economic imperialists. These economists, bankers and big businesses would benefit individually, but Australia would merely become a colonial satellite, a quarry and construction dump, with the bulk of the locals a cheap labour pool without unity or a sense of national purpose.

People who support Asianisation, high immigration and the “free” movement of labour, should be very clear that in doing so, whatever noble motives they think they have, they are riding shotgun for those who would reverse all the gains in working conditions that the labour movement has fought for and which Australians in general take for granted. They are also acting as agents for the social disintegration of our country.

The was one chapter titled ‘What of the ACTU?’ from The National Observer’s recently published book Australia Forever, written by Australia’s most courageous MP, Graeme Campbell.

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In 1980, at 41 years of age, Graeme Campbell was elected the Labor representative for Australia’s then-largest electorate, Kalgoorlie. Few could have imagined then that Campbell would come to stand as the single most principled opponent of the many forces that have wrought havoc on Australia in the decades since.

Having spent most of his life amongst salt-of-the-earth Australians, it is no wonder that Campbell’s outlook diverged sharply from the rest of his colleagues in Canberra. While his own party leaders, first Bob Hawke and later Paul Keating, championed multiculturalism and free trade, Graeme Campbell wrote, spoke, and campaigned tirelessly for Australian nationalism and protectionism.

By 1995 Campbell could no longer stomach compromise with the Labor Party leadership and left the Party’s ranks to continue his fight to put Australia first as an independent member of parliament. That same year Campbell published Australia Betrayed, exposing the truth about the corrupt immigration program, poisonous multiculturalist ideology, and other key political flashpoints that defined modern Australia.

Australia Forever stands alone as a collection of the essential essays of Graeme Campbell, on the topics of Australian history, the immigration catastrophe, industrial policy, the goals of Australian nationalism and Australian independence. The collection also contains within a handpicked selection of Campbell’s greatest parliamentary speeches covering topics ranging from Aboriginal issues and energy policy to unions, censorship, drug legalisation, Israel, gun rights and even the elimination of the Northern Territory!

For both committed Australian nationalists and readers seeking a deeper understanding of Australia’s political landscape, Australia Forever offers a compelling and provocative insight into one of the nation’s greatest political thinkers.

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Over recent weeks, a simple but powerful claim has gained attention in Australia’s migration debate: that there are “more Indians in five years than Italians and Greeks in 100.” The statement was heavily circulated by the March for Australia organisers, and I published a graphic on X illustrating the rapid growth of the Indian-born population compared with the European migration waves that followed the Second World War.

The claim quickly went viral. It was repeated at the nationwide ‘March for Australia’ rallies on August 31, featured prominently in speeches and materials, and since then has been widely discussed in both Australian and international media. Its traction reflects a growing unease about the unprecedented scale of migration that is reshaping our country.

Yet almost as soon as the claim entered the public conversation, it was targeted by a “fact check” from the Australian Associated Press (AAP). In his article March for Australia group's claim about Indian migrant numbers is false, reporter Matthew Elmas sought to discredit the claim outright. His piece uses the word “false” at least seven times, as though sheer repetition could make the argument convincing. But when one looks closely, the AAP fact check relies on a single cherry-picked dataset and one interview with Professor Alan Gamlen of the Australian National University - whose name, tellingly, the article manages to misspell. This is not careful analysis. It is pro-migration spin dressed up as fact-checking. And it reflects a broader pattern: rather than addressing genuine concerns about migration levels with honesty and transparency, critics are dismissed and accused of spreading “falsehoods.”

When the full range of migration data is properly examined, it becomes clear that the claim is not only defensible, but accurate. Indian migration in recent years dwarfs anything seen in Australia’s modern history, both in absolute numbers and on a per capita basis.

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Why the Claim Matters

Before delving into the numbers, it’s worth asking why this claim so contested. The answer lies in the role of migration in Australian identity. Policymakers and media commentators often invoke the “nation of migrants” story to defend high migration intakes, pointing to post-war Italian and Greek arrivals as a precedent. This narrative is used to reassure the public that what is happening today is nothing new, just another chapter in the multicultural story. Not only that, but it is also essential to our function as a nation. If today’s migration wave is qualitatively and quantitatively different, that narrative falls apart. The AAP’s eagerness to dismiss uncomfortable comparisons reveals how politically sensitive the issue has become.

The Population Evidence

Let’s start with the simplest measure: the number of migrants actually living in Australia. According to the 2021 Census, there were 712,040 Indian-born residents. By 2025, projections put that number close to one million. That is a staggering increase in just a few years.

Compare this to the historical peaks of Italian and Greek migration. In 1971, the combined total of Italian- and Greek-born residents was 449,676. That figure has declined since, as these communities have aged and the migrant intake has slowed. At every point in the past five years, the number of Indian-born migrants in Australia has exceeded the maximum number of both Italians and Greeks ever recorded. That alone should settle the matter. But because AAP tries to redefine the debate around “net overseas migration,” let’s examine that too.

Net Overseas Migration: The AAP’s Cherry-Pick

AAP bases its “false” verdict on net migration data from one specific five-year period: 2015/16 to 2019/20 (highlighted in blue below). During that window, the ABS records 279,450 net Indian arrivals, compared to 517,883 combined Greek and Italian arrivals between 1924 and 1971. This sounds damning, until you realise it is a cherry-pick. Why did they choose to end at 2019/20, just as Indian migration was accelerating? The choice is even more suspicious when you remember that 2019/20 was the first year hammered by COVID border closures. Migration numbers plummeted, not because demand fell, but because the government literally closed the gates. Using that year as the endpoint guarantees an artificially low figure. Either AAP’s author knew this and deliberately chose a window designed to mislead, or he failed to grasp the most basic fact about the dataset he was relying on. Neither explanation inspires confidence in the integrity of the “fact-check.”

Once you look at the data beyond 2020 (shown in red), the picture changes dramatically. The post-COVID rebound has been extraordinary, with Indian migration levels three to five times higher, in raw terms, than anything seen during the European post-war boom. Far from being “false,” the claim reflects the reality AAP tried so hard to conceal.

Moreover, the AAP notes that “The combined cumulative net migration (migrants arriving minus migrants departing) of Greek and Italian nationals between 1924 and 1971 alone was 517,883” implying that including a further 50 years of data would significantly increase this total. In fact, only 78,125 Italian and Greek migrants were added to that total between 1971 and 2025, giving a complete figure of 596,008 – 208,598 Greeks and 387,410 Italians – over the 100-year period to 2025.

The reality is that the ABS releases migration figures with significant lags, and the years after 2020 saw extraordinary increases in Indian arrivals. This lag hinders our ability to make topical and up to date commentary on the migration waves of today. The most recent available net overseas migration data is from the year to June 2024. Therefore the 5 years proceeding this still included the effects of Covid-19 which artificially decreased the migration numbers. There is, however, a clear trend in the number of net Indian arrivals from 2010 until today, as can be seen below in red.

Taking this artificial decrease into account, the expected number of migrants in 2020 and 2021 would have been significantly higher. Combining those estimates with the actual data from 2022, 2023, and 2024, the five-year period to 2024 represents roughly 420,000 net Indian migrants. That total surpasses both the 208,598 Greeks and the 387,410 Italians who arrived in Australia between 1925 and 2025, and it is set to climb further once the ABS releases the 2024/25 figures.

So, when AAP says the claim is “false,” what it really means is that if you pick one narrow dataset, ignore later years, and exclude context, you can tell a different story. That’s not fact-checking. That’s narrative protection. Ironically, even the 279,450 figure which the AAP leaned on, covering 2015/16 to 2019/20, is itself higher than the entire Greek migration to Australia across the last 100 years. In some ways, that’s the most damning comparison of all. Over back-to-back five-year periods (2015/16–2019/20 and 2019/20–2023/24), net Indian migration dwarfs the total Greek intake of the past century twice over.

Per Capita: The Strongest Rebuttal

Even more compelling is the per capita evidence. In the AAP article, Professor Gamlen argued that migration should be judged relative to Australia’s population size at the time. On this point, I agree. But his conclusion, that post-war European migration was “much larger still”, is flatly wrong.

Using ABS population estimates, the annual net overseas migration data can be adjusted to directly show the relative size of the migration waves. Even with this change, Indian migration is at an equivalent or higher level than the Italian migration peak in the 1950s. The bar chart specifically highlights the 5 years with the highest net migration per 1000 persons in the Australian population.

The key data from this representation is that:

• In 2022, Indian migration reached 3.61 net arrivals per 1000 people, the highest per capita figure ever recorded in Australian history.

• Four of the top five years for per capita migration since 1924 have involved Indians, all of them after 2008.

• Italian migration in 1952 is the only European year that comes close, and it still ranks below India’s recent surge.

On a per capita basis, the so-called “great European migration wave” is eclipsed by today’s Indian intake. There is no evidence to support Gamlen’s claim that post-war European migration was “much larger still.” In fact, the cumulative per capita data also shows the opposite. While Italian and Greek populations grew steadily across a decade, peaking in 1971, the Indian-born population has been expanding exponentially since 1980, with no sign of slowing. In every year since 1900, the past five years of the Indian migrant population have outstripped both Italians and Greeks as a share of the Australian population.

Why AAP’s Approach is Misleading

Fact-checking is supposed to clarify public debate, not distort it. By selectively quoting one figure, ignoring more recent context and data, and labelling the claim “false” with such force, AAP undermines trust in the very idea of fact-checking. People can see the Indian community growing rapidly around them. Census data confirms it. The number of protestors at the March for Australia confirms it. Yet the fact-checkers tell them it’s “false.” That creates dissonance and feeds the perception that the media is gaslighting ordinary Australians.

Moreover, by downplaying migration’s scale, the fact-check shields policymakers from accountability. High migration has enormous impacts: on housing affordability, infrastructure, wages, and social cohesion as we have discussed many times at the National Observer. Australians are entitled to a fair debate, grounded in the full evidence, not massaged numbers designed to shut it down.

Conclusion: Fact or Spin?

Let’s return to the original claim: that there are “more Indians in five years than Italians and Greeks in 100.” Look at the population figures. Look at the net migration. Look at the per capita data. On every measure, the statement holds true. What AAP calls “false” is, in fact, supported by the numbers.

It is also misleading to equate the post-war European arrivals with today’s flows. The Italians and Greeks came in a very different economic and social context. Their migration was largely permanent settlement, at a time when Australia actively recruited European labour for reconstruction and industry. By contrast, much of the Indian intake is temporary or semi-permanent: student visas, ‘skilled’ workers, who later convert to permanent residency.

The final graph shows the trend clearly: when averaged across five-year spans, Italian and Greek migration rarely exceeded 0.5 arrivals per 1,000 Australians per year. Indian migration today runs at three times that level, 1.5 to 2 per 1,000 annually. The churn is higher, the numbers are bigger, and the rate of growth is far faster. Saying “we’ve seen it all before” is not only wrong, but it also erases the unique scale and nature of what is unfolding now.

It is time we faced the facts. Indian migration is unprecedented in both scale and pace. Pretending otherwise is not journalism. It is political cover. Political cover to hide this reality until it is too late to do anything about it. It is clear the Australian public won’t stand for this and if the reality they know is true is continually ignored by the political elite, the rallies we saw on August 31 will only be the start of the political storm to come.

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Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and find more of his content on 𝕏 @Aussie_EliasP

Is the homeland central to nationalism? Do we feel at home in Australia’s landscapes? How these two questions are answered will decide the direction of nationalism in this country and determine whether it will become true Australian Nationalism, or mere nationalism in Australia. So, what is the distinction between these two destinations and how is the Australian Natives’ Association working towards ensuring that it is Australian Nationalism that triumphs?

First the distinction. Many of us will already know that the word “nationalism” is derived from the Latin root “natio”, which refers to the biological relation of birth and is preserved in this meaning in the English words “natal” and “native”. To be a native, then, would simply mean to be born into a community of common blood. But if we end our analysis at this point, then we risk missing out on another key dimension of healthy nationalism - the importance of the homeland. True, it is possible for a nation to lack a homeland, like the Jewish diaspora did between the destruction of Israel by Rome and its resettlement under the Zionist project. This, however, is an abnormal situation that will twist the spirit of a people, rendering them rootless and parasitic in character. Having a homeland is vital.

On the other side, there is also the familiar risk of falling into some form of civic nationalism based on place alone. A familiar slogan criticising civic nationalism, summing up a very reasonable stance, is that civic nationalists believe in “magic dirt theory” - the idea that by virtue of simply stepping onto Australian soil a migrant becomes the same as a true Australian, born here to heritage white Australian parents. Clearly, the correct stance must chart a course between both extremes and accept the fundamental importance of both race and place.

Recently, a few people, some more prominent than others, have been stressing the idea that Australian identity, historically, is fundamentally British and that we should identify more with the old Empire than with any “parochial” or “kitsch” sense of uniquely Australian identity. I believe this reveals a deep sense of uprootedness that is typical of modern cosmopolitanism but certainly should not be typical of nationalism. There have been many declarations of the importance of “blood and honour” but let us not forget that all nationalists must respect blood and soil as well.

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Every nation needs a homeland, and any nation that lacks a homeland must perish or degenerate into something unnatural. Our dirt may not be magic, but we still find ourselves standing on it, and we do not wish to stand anywhere else. The soil, the earth, forces us to be particular. The mind may think in universals and abstract terms, but our body must stand in a concrete place. Yes, without our blood we could not belong to our people, but it is the Australian soil that truly forces us to be Australian Nationalists and will accept nothing else. To deny this and speak of terraforming the Bush after the pattern of European forests or other such absurdities betrays a subtle sense that we of Europe’s old blood do not truly belong here. In a way, this attitude reinforces the propaganda of the “welcome to countries” that say that this continent will always be the land of the Aborigines, no matter what European landscapes may come to cover parts of its surface.

But perhaps these fellows would say that to love the Bush is treason to our European origins? To this, I’ll let Ian Mudie respond through his poem If This be Treason:

This is powerful stuff, and unfortunately it is now easier to forget than ever before as we have all been transitioned to some extent from the physical world to the virtual world of the internet and the screen. How can we approach our relationship to our land in real concrete terms? In the Australian Natives’ Association, we believe that remembering this centrality of the land to nationalism must be the purpose of Wattle Day, the start of the Australian Spring on the 1st of September. But it is not enough to simply think the “right” thoughts about nation and homeland. You must be comfortable ranging across the Bush and feel at home camping among the waratah and the wattle.

For this reason, among others, we in the ANA have been working on getting our outdoorsmanship and bushcraft wing, the Rangers, more formalised so that it can one day stand as a proud Australian institution in which future generations of men can develop traditional Australian virtues such as resource, independence, comradeship, and endurance. We must lean into and accept the heritage handed down to us from the Australian bushmen of the past, right from the first convicts who, on arriving in Van Diemen’s Land, felt they were entering a paradise in comparison to the squalid and cramped conditions of urban and industrial England.

Let us stand by the two pillar proposition of true Australian Nationalism and see no contradiction between them. An Australian is born into a European-descent, predominantly Anglo-Celtic, national community. An Australian truly loves and belongs to this land.

Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and find more of his content on 𝕏 @Aussie_EliasP

Hegel. The name might strike fear into the professional philosopher who knows the mountains of secondary literature on him, or raise an unsettling memory in an unsuspecting victim who thought they’d have a go at reading one of his books - after all, how hard could it be?

But although Hegel’s philosophy is complex, it is fair to say that at its core is the relatively straightforward desire to reconcile the organic national culture and language expressed in Romanticism with the universal ideals of reason that were championed in the Enlightenment. According to the Hegel scholar, Charles Taylor, the Romantic side of Hegel’s thinking is concerned with “unity with nature, other men, and himself” while the rationalist side seeks to preserve “radical moral autonomy”. These are the two sides of a dialectic of opposites that Hegel wanted to sublate - to overcome the contradiction between the two while preserving their best aspects in a higher unity.

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Australian Nativists have much to learn from this Hegelian project. Like the Romantics, we are interested in the organic development of the Australian people and culture, and we identify with Australia on a deeply emotional level. We love our Banjo Paterson Day when we enjoy poetry that reflects our folk spirit. We love our Wattle Day when we deeply appreciate and feel a sense of unity with the Bush and the broader natural world that expresses the goodness of being, the beauty of God’s creation. This organic rootedness that we have in our Australian homeland was best expressed by Ian Mudie in his poem Earth:

But even though we understand and feel comfortable in this Australian particularity, like Hegel we must also learn to appreciate its dialectical opposite: universality and rational ideology. Let me expand on this briefly. The nature of rational thought and conceptualisation is universal. When we think of a concept, like “tree”, we think it generally and when we predicate in a sentence we bring the particular that we see under the umbrella of the universal that we think: “This thing is a tree.” As in Plato, both sides of the sentence, the thing and the concept, are based on the Idea. The world of matter is ideas embodied in patterns, and these are mirrored in the world of thought. The difference from Plato is that Hegel believes that these patterns develop dynamically through a dialectical process.

All of Hegel’s philosophy is basically a development of these actions of speech and dialectical development. For Hegel, the Subjective Spirit, or God in Himself, embodies Himself in nature as the Objective Spirit in order to express and discover His possibilities through a providential, rational, and dialectical movement through history that culminates in His understanding of Himself as the Absolute Spirit. This is a complicated combination of Platonist, Christian, and Gnostic ideas on God’s creation and providential guidance of the world that we do not need to delve into too deeply or follow too closely. To be absolutely clear, I do not think we should adopt Hegel’s metaphysical apparatus, particularly his process theology. However, what we should understand is that this picture of creation that Hegel paints forms the paradigm for his understanding of human society and politics, where the subjective consciousness of individual human beings is embodied in collective social and political institutions and is worked out through these institutions towards the goal of achieving the good and just society.

So, let’s look at this political paradigm in a little more detail. We can see the organic expression of society in the family, based on natural reproduction between a man and a woman, with the man forming a patriarchal household. As Robert Filmer taught, this patriarchal household formed the basis for the development of absolute monarchies with fictive “sons” for their subject aristocracies and “brother” kings in the realm of international relations. Similarly, for Hegel the basis of an organic communitarian society is the family, and not the abstract liberal individual. On the other hand, as societies became larger and more complex, they required rationalising bureaucracies and processes of deliberation in order to develop good, efficient, and effective government. Furthermore, the growing desire for individual freedom in politics leads to political assemblies and representative democracies.

Similarly to Plato before him, Hegel suggested that the ideal political form should sublate these two aspects of politics, and proposed the Constitutional Monarchy as the form that could preserve both the organic national expression of the people in the familial relation to the king, and the requirements of rationality and free expression in the deliberation of the representative assemblies.

When it comes to this political project, Australia is not starting in a bad place. We are already a constitutional monarchy, and while we may not have the best king or a system of representation that actually represents the interests of the Australian people, we are at least accustomed to the general idea and have a constitution with a lot more potential for creating what Australian Nationalists desire than our current politics may lead you to believe.

It’s a common catch cry that “conservatism hasn’t conserved anything”, but the fundamental point of conservatism is that it aims to preserve the organic development of the spirit of the people rather than engage in a rationalist project to build a utopia. The strength of conservatism can be seen in things like the English common law, which has continued to develop here along Australian lines. When it comes to our constitution, we Nativists should embrace this strength and be conservatives who aim to preserve the tradition of our founding fathers. The weakness of conservatism is that it lacks the philosophical tools to critique missteps in the tradition or effectively counter any rationalist projects that seek to tear its traditions apart.

To some extent, Nativists share this weakness. We look to our history for inspiration and stick closely to what our forefathers did so that we can conserve our Australian culture and environment. These are good things, but we also need to work on developing the rational and ideological side of our politics. We need to envision an Australian political utopia that we can measure the current system against and critique it when and where it is found lacking. Hegel has given us the outlines of a political project. It is on us to continue to work on an Australian sublation of the political dialectic.

Article by Jo Gullett, find more of his content @ColonistSettler on 𝕏

If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you’ve listened to the latest National Observer podcast which featured an interview with ex-Senator Gerard Rennick, founder and leader of the People First Party.

For many of us, Rennick was a breath of fresh air. Entering Parliament initially as a Queensland LNP Senator, he soon had himself on the outer with senior Party leaders for his uncompromising stance on issues like the safety and efficacy of the rushed COVID vaccines and the politicised efforts of the BOM to hype up climate change hysteria.

Now while the fervour and rigour with which he went after these issues separated him from many of his Liberal Party colleagues in Parliament, there were other things of particular interest to nationalists beyond these more ‘standard’ enthusiasms of the Liberal Party right, primarily those emanating from his old-school protectionist economic standpoints.

Whether criticising ex-PM Paul Keating for introducing neoliberalism into Australia, advocating for a public banking option, or expressing his fondness for the Queensland Caudillo Joh Bjelke-Petersen, there was a vibe from Gerard that was quite different from, say, an Alex Antic.

Here was a man that seemingly had a vision that centred the nation as such, recognising that its welfare was threatened not just by overweening government, but also a rootless and cartelised private sector.

Having through his outspokenness made himself untouchable with Liberal Party powerbrokers, he was, in murky circumstances, denied pre-selection for a winnable spot on the 2025 Queensland Senate ticket. Realising the futility of continuing to ‘play the game’ within the LNP, Gerard burnt his ships and launched the People First Party.

Encouragingly, the new party went into the election with the strongest platform on immigration reduction of any party with a realistic shot of winning office, and, for a party with effectively no media support and no big donors, did admirably well, with Rennick himself winning over 5% of the Queensland first preference vote and for a time seeming to threaten the spot of One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts.

Alas, preference flows meant it was not to be, but Rennick didn’t give up. He promised to struggle on with People First, building it into a party with the genuine internal democratic input missing from both the Liberals and One Nation.

The opportunity this offered to the nationalist right to get involved with a vehicle that posited a strong immigration reduction platform, a holistic nationalist economic program AND a seemingly genuine goal to build a party that through its vitality and intelligence could unite not just the minor party right but even threaten the stranglehold of the LNP was enticing. No longer would our membership fees go to funding the inclinations and lifestyles of a Christopher Pyne or a James Ashby!

But then it all came crashing down with Tuesday’s Backbench Drivers podcast. Rennick said People First was a pro-immigration party. He said we can’t be seen to be “bashing migrants”. He blamed misbehaviour from Muslims in Australia on neocon foreign policy decisions. He even said he didn’t like some of our banter on Twitter… say it ain’t so Gerard! IT’S OVER.

But is it?

Despite these comments I think that Australian nationalists should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Politics is more than surface-level rhetoric, and People First may still have a structural utility for nationalist ends that cannot be replicated in any other party.

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Surveying the Landscape:

The Libs

If we go back as little as twelve months ago, I am somewhat ashamed to say I thought the Liberal Party held some promise. In a previous article I wrote about how the Voice referendum showed the way to an enduring anti-globalist majority for the Liberal-National Coalition – if they wanted it. Even into the start of 2024 things looked promising. Dutton as Opposition Leader had promised reductions in net overseas immigration, breaking a taboo not breached since Tony Abbott did so (very briefly) in the leadup to the 2013 election. The polls were rewarding Dutton accordingly.

The history is well-known from there: The backdown from the immigration promise, the cargo-culted lifting of the chintziest MAGA policies, the botched election campaign and, most of all, the inability of Dutton as Party leader to stand up for right-wing members of the Coalition such as Ben Britton (after he failed to help Rennick in his pre-selection) put paid to that thesis. Mea culpa. Unsurprisingly, lacking both spine and vision, the Liberals were pummelled at the election by a more disciplined Labor outfit.

The election loss has left the Liberal Party Right in a precarious position. The disappointment of the campaign (including the huge effort put into winning back Teal seats for minimal gain) has caused many members of the Party to resign. The factional Left is on top in Victoria, Queensland and, likely, New South Wales. Tassie and NT are largely inconsequential (sorry guys) and the WA party is a rump, unlikely to recover. The only state division of any significance which is firmly controlled by the Right is South Australia, but even there, Senator Antic’s reign is of a more Pentecostal Christian flavour, unsatisfying to many nationalists.

New Opposition Leader Susssssssan Ley now enacts her pantsuit regime, moving the Party leftwards in search of (^◦^)aspirational(^◦^) voters, under the watchful gaze of Alex Hawke, a man who would make a literal hollow suit seem substantial.

But there is a reaction. Old warhorses Tony Abbott and John Anderson are engaged in an effort to rehabilitate the Liberal Right, scouting out talent over lunches at various private clubs and conservative societies, trying to recast classical liberalism for a new age of sub-altern ethnic conflict – Tony has even been heard testing out the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’. Can we expect Frank Salter to get a tap on the shoulder to run for the Libs at the next federal election? Don’t count on it.

The Liberals will increasingly make use of sounds of a ‘based’ nature to try and contain the growing energy of the youth right, but there will be no policy follow-through. The path to a nationalist Liberal Party has been tried, and it has failed and no amount of Danube Institute conferences will change that.

The great danger of the Liberal Party is that they are structurally incapable of being a nationalist party due to their ties to anti-national funding sources, but they still have the reach to stymie the development of any genuinely nationalist forces to their right.

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One Nation

Despite their own lethargy and ineptitude, One Nation improved their results in the election, winning back Malcolm Roberts’ Senate seat and just squeaking in two more Senators in NSW and WA, bringing their total to four members of the upper house, once you include the off-cycle party leader, Pauline Hanson. This was One Nation’s best result since the double dissolution election in 2016.

In the circumstance though, this can’t be seen as anything other than a disappointment. With a historically unpopular Labor government crushing Australia with a tidal wave of foreigners and a spasmodic Liberal Party that couldn’t seem to get anything right, to have only gained 6.4% of the national vote is an indictment.

The reasons for this failure would be familiar to any seasoned observer of right wing politics in Australia: lack of campaigning, lack of on-the-ground support and, in many cases, lack of a credible local candidate. In short, the same pitfalls of any party focused only on winning a sinecure Senate seat for a dictatorial party leader while running paper candidates to hoover up the votes of disaffected but low-information voters and milk public funding, all to be sent back up to Queensland HQ for who-knows-what.

Post-election, One Nation have promised to establish a branch network (clearly in response to the threat of People First). There are now two ‘pilot’ branches! We’ve seen this movie before… this party ‘democracy’ will only continue as long as it keeps the party under tight reins and the coffers controlled by Hanson and Ashby full.

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Where to now?

So to come full circle, it is clear that in order to open space for a genuine nationalist right option, the Liberal Right can not be allowed to regather and recuperate identitarian energy, and One Nation must be destroyed entirely. The question remains: Is People First the right vehicle to do this, even with the recent comments of party leader Gerard Rennick?

I must answer in the affirmative. The kind of person who votes or volunteers for the Liberal Party Right is not ideologically well-formed, and all sorts of submerged liberal ideas will cause them to be spooked by an appeal of any kind of strongly identitarian nature. This is changing, and the metapolitical winds are blowing in an identitarian direction, but the time is not now for that kind of party.

The most important thing is to threaten the Liberal Right and One Nation with a professional and friendly appeal that speaks for the nation in the way most Australians still understand it: a civic identity with an understated but non-exclusive ethnic homogeneity underpinning it, and a focus on bread-and-butter economic issue to which mass immigration is the key detriment.

This is all very obviously based upon the ‘optics-cucking’ side of that perennial nationalist debate, but this is necessary to achieve the structural realignment proposed above – we must break the Liberal-National-PHON cartel to allow new perspectives in, and to do that requires a degree of pragmatism that will not satisfy purists. To take enough power, and disrupt our ideological enemies enough to reframe the debate around the good of the nation even if the composition of that nation is overly-broadly construed is necessary AND achievable.

People First’s immigration policies leave plenty of room for the working out of details by young, dedicated activists with a long term view. The only real line-in-the-sand that Rennick continually mentions is the “100,000 visas”. This by itself amounts to net negative migration… better than promised by any other party. Remove the pathway to citizenship, perhaps some kind of bureaucratic overlay for ‘cultural compatibility’ in the selection phase… all of a sudden you’re looking at a program that is far, far more rigorous than anything taken to an Australian electorate in a long time, all still wrapped up in nice-guy packaging.

We often look overseas and ask “when will WE get our based populist party?” but people forget that the most successful European populist parties are, in the main, civic nationalist parties: The Sweden Democrats, French National Front, and Germany’s AfD are all based around a civic conception of nationhood. The latter has a lesbian leader with a Sri Lankan ‘wife’!

It’s good to take stock, to reassess our options in a time of flux, but don’t get spooked by rhetoric that doesn’t entirely line up with your own preferences. Think about the structural requirements of the next political moment and I hope you’ll see that People First and Gerard Rennick are not to be written off just yet.

LINKS

📲 Follow Gerard Rennick on X
📷 Follow Gerard Rennick on Instagram
🔵 Follow Gerard Rennick on Facebook
👤 Check out the People First Party

📲 Follow John Lawson on X
📷 Follow John Lawson on Instagram
🤳 Follow John Lawson on Telegram

🤳 Follow Matthew on Telegram