Lidia Thorpe, ‘Posie Parker’ and the neo-Nazis

Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. You may have seen the clip by now of Senator Lidia Thorpe being thrown to the ground by police outside Parliament House in Canberra. She was trying to confront a British anti-transgender campaigner whose tour of Australia has attracted support from neo-Nazis, including at a rally in Melbourne. It’s raised concern about the growth of extremist groups in the country. Today, an expert on the far right on what’s fuelling it.

Kaz Ross: My name is Dr Kaz Ross and I’m an independent researcher into the far right and conspiracies.

Sam Hawley: Kaz we’ll get to the incident with Lidia Thorpe soon. But first, let’s talk about this protest in Melbourne, because it was really disturbing, not something that you would expect to see in a city in Australia.

Kaz Ross: Yes, that’s true. I think that for a lot of people this was a huge shock, what happened on the weekend in Melbourne.

Counter-protester: You’re protecting Nazis. Trans rights are under attack.

Kaz Ross: But for those of us that have been watching things building up over the last few years, it came as no surprise. We had a global tour of a very provocative activist from the UK.

Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull: Nobody cares, nobody cares about your pronouns.

Kaz Ross: And her strategy is to provoke conflict.

Sam Hawley: Right. Who’s she?

Kaz Ross: So her name is Kelly-Jay Keen. She goes by the name Posie Parker. And she’s someone that’s risen to the top of the trans exclusionary, radical feminist movement. So, yeah, it’s a bit of a mouthful, but she she calls herself a women’s rights activist. But not a feminist.

Counter-protester: Why don’t you go away?

Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull: No, no, no. Not a feminist. I’m not a feminist. I’m not a feminist.

Sam Hawley: Right, so she’s not a feminist. She’s been touring the country, she’s been to Adelaide, she’s also been to Hobart.

Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull: I thought Scotland was bad. This is the worst place I’ve ever been.

Sam Hawley: And she really caused a stir in Canberra, where the independent Senator Lidia Thorpe tried to confront her.

Senator Lidia Thorpe: I went to tell her, that thing, that they are not welcome.

Sam Hawley: So what’s her objective, this Posie Parker?

Kaz Ross: So her main arguments are against trans people, against trans generally, particularly trans women. She’s particularly concerned over things like trans women in public toilets or changing rooms. And she’s extended that out to being anti what she calls ‘grooming’, which is children being able to decide their gender, children learning about sexuality and so on.

Sam Hawley: All right. Let’s go back to this Posie Parker rally in Melbourne. She had around 300 people turn up to it, but there was also hundreds of counter protesters there who opposed her views. And then also these neo-Nazis.

Reporter: A group of neo-Nazis, joined the Melbourne rally performing the Nazi salute and sparking violent clashes.

Kaz Ross: So the neo-Nazi group that turned up is Australia’s biggest, most organised group, the National Socialist Network. They’re led by someone called Thomas Sewell. He’s based in Melbourne. They turned up en masse to basically, they say, to protect the women having their rally. But in actual fact they have also said they turned up to be provocative for their group. Of course they’re anti-Semitic. They blame Jews for all problems in the world and they want to eradicate Jews, but they’re deeply, deeply homophobic. They’re against what they call degeneracy. And so that anybody that isn’t white and in a straight marriage and having children and living in a patriarchal kind of lifestyle.

Counter-protester: Look at the Nazis. Look at the Nazis.

Sam Hawley: And so offensive Kaz, at one point, they stood in a line on the steps of Parliament House and performed the Nazi salute. It’s so extreme.

Kaz Ross: Yeah, absolutely. So for them it was a show of force. They turned up, they were all dressed alike, they were masked up and they basically took over the steps of Parliament. Of course, for the people who were holding the rally for Kelly-Jay and her other organisers, they were appalled because they said, well, we didn’t invite them, they’re not with us. And now our message has been over, overwhelmed by their message. And of course, you know, the standing up and doing zieg heiling on the steps of Parliament has been condemned, you know, across society and even around the world.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, of course. And the Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, he came out really strongly against this.

Daniel Andrews, Victorian Premier: That rally was a nasty, hateful event long before anyone offered up the Nazi salute.

Sam Hawley: Making the point that the government will always support trans citizens. Anthony Albanese, he’s also condemned this behaviour and Peter Dutton, he tried to introduce legislation to amend the Criminal code, although that failed because it was argued that it just wasn’t enough time to consider it properly.

Peter Dutton, Opposition Leader: I would support any legislation in this Parliament that you choose to move to make illegal in our country the display of any aspect of Nazi glorification.

Sam Hawley: We’ve spoken to you before about this spread of far right extremism in Australia and we saw another clash outside a Sydney church a few days ago. Just explain what that was about, and what else have we seen? Are we seeing more and more of this?

Kaz Ross: Yeah. So one thing that’s happened during the pandemic is a number of different groups have suddenly all joined up and found that they have some common themes. So all of these groups have coalesced around this concept of gay people, trans people in particular. But gay people as groomers. ‘They’re preying on children’. ‘They’re doing drag story time hour’, and the children are at great risk.

Christian Lives Matter members: Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus

Kaz Ross: So what we saw in Sydney was basically a group Christian Lives Matter, calling Christians to protect a prayer service at a church because a small group of people, trans rights activists, were planning to go to the church and protest Mark Latham giving a speech about religion. And what we saw was really sickening and really shocking. A group of maybe 12 people were huddled between two parked cars with police trying to protect them.

Police officer: Don’t come any further. Can you just move back for me, please?

Kaz Ross: As a few hundred men tried to bash them, swore at them, abused them, tried to hit them.

Protester: We both know that they deserve to cop it, but that’s enough.

Kaz Ross: And so this is the problem with people like Kelly J. Is that her speech, she says she’s just speaking about women, but actually she’s accusing trans people of being paedophile groomers. And that kind of language leads to this kind of violence on the street.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, it’s really horrible. Let’s go back to this issue of these neo-Nazis and the Nazi salute they were using because the Victorian government, it wants to crack down on that. I would have thought that would have been illegal already, quite frankly. But it’s not. They weren’t arrested after it. So what can the government do? Can it stop or make it illegal for these people to act in this way?

Kaz Ross: So often people think about this in a free speech kind of framework, but I suggest there’s a different way of thinking about it. If you think about why Nazis use swastikas, why they use the Roman salute, it’s to make their targets feel afraid. So I think that it’s important that all the states have been grappling with how to deal with Nazi symbols being used in this way. And that’s why the swastika bans coming in, in in most states. Unfortunately, in Victoria, the swastika was banned, but with some caveats on it. So, for example, tattoos have been exempted, which means that Nazis can go to the beach, take off their shirts. They’ve got massive swastika tattoos on their chests. That’s not illegal. And by only banning the swastika, then you miss all the other symbols that they use as well. And that includes the Roman salute. So somewhere like Tasmania has got proposed legislation which says Nazi symbols used with a Nazi intent come under the legislation and and people can be charged for using it. And I think that’s really important.

Sam Hawley: The Federal Government has identified violent extremism as a real threat to our security. We saw a terrible killing of those police officers in rural Queensland in December that was deemed an act of domestic terrorism. So are we, I mean, I know we always come back to this, but are we doing enough to actually counter it?

Kaz Ross: I think there’s a number, a number of initiatives which will help. The national gun register will definitely help in terms of, in the case of the Queensland family that did the shooting. It’s hard to even know whether these groups are expanding in membership. They’re certainly becoming bolder and acting in public. I think that there is a movement in Australia, there are extremists, there are individuals that pop up that may not even be joining into a group that are inspired by the groups. And we also know that some neo-Nazis are connected to terrorist groups overseas. Some of them are in the army That’s been revealed in the last week or so, and some of them are seeking to fight overseas. It is a concern and it’s something that we as a community need to be onto. We can’t just leave it to police to deal with. We need to be watching out. We need to be keeping our communities safe as well.

Sam Hawley: Dr Kaz Ross is an independent researcher into the far right and conspiracies. The Australian Federal Police says the interaction between officers and protesters opposing Parker’s rally in Canberra will be referred to the Professional Standards Committee. The Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews has vowed to enact legislation to ban the Nazi salute, while Tasmania and New South Wales are also considering a change to laws. This episode was produced by Flint, Duxfield and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is Stephen Smiley. Over the weekend, Catch This Week with David Lipson, where he’ll be looking at what to expect from this weekend’s New South Wales election. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily. We’ll be back again on Monday. Thanks for listening.