The 19th of October 2025 saw the most recent iteration of the “March for Australia” rallies conducted around the country. The original marches, on the 31st of August 2025, were attended by over 50,000 people in various cities across Australia. The most recent marches saw significantly lower numbers. The next march is planned for Australia Day, the 26th of January.
The original marches included members of various Neo Nazi groups. The March for Australia website initially listed “remigration”, a far-right idea that non-europeans should be deported on mass from the west, as one of its goals. Reference to remigration was removed within a few days of the website going live. Organizers and promoters of the March for Australia have a history of online activity such as promoting the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, disseminating Neo Nazi materials, and posting pro-Hitler memes.
In the lead up to the first march, event organiser Bec Freedom said the purpose of the march was to:
“protect Australian heritage, culture, way of life. Next step, protect European culture, heritage, way of life. The next step is protect white heritage. So it all means the same thing […] By saying it that way, it is more appealing to the public. It’s going to deter them from saying, ‘Oh, it’s a Nazi rally, blah, blah, blah’. ‘Australian’ is white.”
A prominent Neo Nazi claimed on Telegram that they had “positive ongoing contact with event organisers, who are aware that we will be attending”.
The extent to which Nazi’s were instrumental in organising the original event has been disputed, but their prominent attendance at those marches, as well as their speaking publicly to the crowds, is undeniable. The Neo Nazis lead the march in Melbourne to the steps of parliament, and their leader addressed the crowd publicly. In a post on their Telegram channel, the Nazi Group claims that they “attended March for Australia in every state across the country” and that they “gave speeches to tens of thousands of patriots”.
The Nazis officially sat out the marches on the 19th of October, citing reasons like it being too soon after the previous march, as well as doubts about the relative success compared with the original marches, and the need to prioritise building and organising their own movement. Despite this, there were reports of plain-clothed Nazis in attendance at these more recent protests.
Since the Marches on the 19th, a Neo Nazi protest took place on 8th November on the steps of the NSW Parliament. The Nazis held a banner reading “Abolish the Jewish Lobby”.
Crucially, Nazi groups have stated that they will be in attendance at the up-coming March for Australia protests on the 26th of January.
The reaction to these March for Australia rallies on social media has been, predictably, polarising. For every post in favour of the marches there are a host of replies that contain Nazism accusations. But it’s important to keep in mind that there were tens of thousands of people at the marches on the 31st of August. Among these are those who insist their reasons for protesting are not racist, and that they have legitimate, non-hateful concerns about high levels of immigration levels. There are also, of course, posts from self-identifying Neo Nazis who do nothing to resist this characterisation.
Is it accurate to label everyone at these marches Nazis? Probably not; the significantly lower turnout to the more recent marches has been attributed to the initial event’s connections with Nazi groups, which suggests that the majority of those marching do not identify with the more extreme views on display.
But it’s difficult to defend any of these protestors, partly because the purpose of these marches has not been clearly defined, and does not appear to be consistently understood by participants. Organisers routinely cite causes like stopping immigration, or sometimes more specifically “mass immigration”, as being the purpose of the marches. But what exactly does this mean?
The Neo Nazi groups who attended the initial rallies advocate for ending immigration on straightforwardly racial grounds. They claim that Australia is for white people, and immigrants, who are oftentimes not white, should therefore be rejected from Australian society.
On social media, some of the discourse around the marches involved Nazi talking points and dogwhistles. The user featured below responded to posts from the official March for Australia X account with an image with the text “The Day of the Rope”. The Day of the Rope is a white supremacist concept on which “race traitors” of various kinds will be murdered on mass. It uses a version of the celtic cross that is often used as a Nazi symbol, and is in the colours and style of the Nazis from WWII.
Another user responds to a post about March for Australia with the numbers “88”. This is a white supremacist numerical code denoting the letters “HH”, for “Heil Hitler”.
We also see a number of “Free Thomas Sewell” comments in online spaces related to the marches. Thomas Sewell is an immigrant and prominent leader of an Australian Neo Nazi group who is currently serving time in prison after facing charges relating to an attack on Camp Sovereignty during the March for Australia rally in Melbourne in August.
Here, a user posts an image of a speaker at the march with the caption “We might be so back” followed by a lightning bolt emoji. Lightening bolts (or “SS bolts”) are routinely used as a Neo Nazi symbol.
Some protestors who would likely not self-identify as Neo Nazis also engaged in anti-immigration rhetoric that was extremely racist. Freedom’s own comments in the lead up to the march suggest that the event organizers took the protest to be about defending a distinctly white form of Australian society. On October 19th, Freedom reportedly told the crowd that “I wanted to hear people discussing how important it is to fight to keep our national identity, to protect our way of life and to protect our Anglo Saxon and European heritage and culture.” She went on to claim that the marches had the effect of reinstating pride in Australia’s “white heritage”.
Not everyone at the marches, either those in March or more recently in October, was motivated by racism. Some called for an end to all immigration. Most experts agree that this position is harmful to Australia; immigrants play a crucial role in filling skills shortages in essential services like healthcare. Furthermore, the idea that rising rates of immigration is primarily to blame for the housing crisis has been rejected by analysts.
The mere assertion that immigration should stop, or be reduced, is not itself hate speech but part of reasonable political debate. The idea immigration is contributing to the housing crisis, for example, has been shared by mainstream politicians and ordinary Australians would not be acting unreasonably in debating such ideas, even if the evidence as mentioned above disproves the claim. Examples of comments that fall within the scope of reasonable debate, rather than the promotion of racism, include:
By contrast, the view that all immigration should halt was sometimes coupled with the much more radical position that everyone born overseas should be “sent back”. This echoes the far-right concept of “remigration”. This position is problematic; it denies immigrants a role in Australian society and threatens them with being ripped from the life they have built for themselves here. It would also destroy Australia as 27.6% of Australians were born overseas according to the 2021 census. As we can see from the comments below, the motivation behind such a view is often racist and assumes only immigrants from some countries would be sent back. One user writes that we should “Send all Muslims and Indian people back overseas”, and another replies “Salvs and polacks as well, fkn dirty wop cnts”.
Others suggest immigration should be curbed, rather than stopped. One common theme amongst those defending such a view is that immigration should be stopped only for those immigrants who fail to integrate into and contribute effectively towards Australian society.
Whilst there is nothing inherently hateful in the idea that immigrants should be expected to adhere to the laws of the country in which they now live, a host of commonly associated ideas can be harmful. For example, the idea that immigrants are more likely to be criminals or engage in violence, or the idea that immigrants should be forced to shed any aspect of their cultural heritage to be welcome in Australia, can demonise migrants and exclude them from society. Requiring immigrants to adopt certain core Australia values is reasonable, but those values include multiculturalism meaning respect and celebration of the different cultures that immigrants bring to Australia and the culture our First Nations people share with us.
Some who attended the March for Australia take the view that immigration should be lowered to a level that doesn’t cause an impact on housing availability and prices, or on social services. Others expressed the view that the government should crack down on illegal immigration, and claimed to have no issue with legal migration into the country.
The March for Australia included people with a wide range of views. It isn’t clear whether any single person in the crowd is advocating for an extremist Neo Nazi position, to stop all non-white immigration, to stop all immigration, to send all or some immigrants back to the country they came from, to more strongly enforce adherence to Australian values for immigrants, to reduce immigration to ease the burden on housing and services, or to crack down on illegal immigration.
We see this confusion online. One Tiktok commenter asks whether immigrant families, who have been in Australia for 50 years, are welcome at the marches. The first reply says that they are, as long as the family came here legally. Another user disagrees, claiming that the government allowing too many legal immigrants in is “the whole problem”.
So while the attendees are marching about “immigration” there is in fact very little agreement on what that means. The details are crucial, because without clarity well meaning people can end up being used as camouflage for a far more sinister campaign.
And that’s just immigration. These marches have also been taken to stand for a host of other, independent issues including ousting Albanese, stopping government corruption, and fighting back against trans-inclusionary practices in schools. This further blurs who is there, what they think they are supporting, and how many people extreme elements are able to pull in behind them.
HEADING: How the Nazis are using people
The Nazi groups who attended the rallies on the 31st of March are already marketing the success of those marches as evidence of support for their own extremist ideas. In the following post on Telegram, a Neo Nazi takes the success of the protests as an indication that “Nationalism could easily overpower everything else on the right in this country”, and asks users to “get involved” by participating in up-coming white supremacist events.
In this next post, a Neo Nazi claims they received a warm welcome from the general public at March for Australia, and concludes “We have the support of the public. We have the strength.”
This demonstrates the danger involved in engaging with these kinds of ideas. It is possible to express concerns about immigration without being hateful, but it is extremely important that the details of one’s position, and the reasoning behind that viewpoint, is made clear. If it isn’t, then one’s view might be conflated with something much more extreme and harmful, with the risk of normalizing that position in the process.
Social media often doesn’t allow for this nuance. It breaks everything down into the simplest, more superficial and digestible chunks for its users. Few have the time or inclination to read a careful statement of the kinds of immigration that are acceptable and unacceptable and the reasons for thinking so, but many users will readily engage with a post that simply calls for an end to immigration. And, on social media platforms, engagement is everything.
This constitutes a way in which social media can lead to the radicalisation of its users; it presents potentially inflammatory ideas that are stripped of any context or detail. Even if the original poster didn’t mean to be hateful, it can still be interpreted as such by those engaging with it. Public support for that idea, measured by likes and reactions, can then be taken as public support for something much more extreme that the original user intended. This can give the illusion that radical ideas have mainstream support. This is a problem we saw with the March for Australia, but it’s also one that happens routinely in the online spaces that we inhabit every day.