In early August, Australia witnessed one of the largest street protests in its history when as many as 300,000 Australians joined the pro-Palestinian “March for Humanity” across the Harbour Bridge in Sydney. This momentous event was celebrated by many as a great success in popular mobilisation.
For others, however, it was the final motivational push to organise a very different kind of nationwide protest — the so-called “March for Australia”, which took place four weeks later across the country with the prominent involvement of openly neo-Nazi groups. In some cities, although they were a minority, these groups even established themselves as the faces and public voices of the protests.
Anti-immigration demonstrators holding a banner reading “Stop Immigration” on 31 August 2025 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Asanka Ratnayake / Getty Images)
Instead of humanity, these crowds marched for Australia. What does that mean? Officially, the core theme and political demand of the tens of thousands who attended these protests in most capital cities and several regional towns was to stop what they considered “mass immigration” — though the far-right contingent notably dropped the “mass” and simply displayed “stop immigration” banners.
It is tempting to point out that immigration numbers have actually gone down significantly from a previous post-pandemic peak. It is also tempting to argue, as many have done:
that Australia desperately needs immigration for economic growth and to address skill shortages in the domestic workforce (including in the building sector);that our health care system would crumble without overseas-born health professionals;and that the housing crisis is not primarily caused by immigration and was particularly dire during a time when Australia saw an historically unusual population decline in 2021.
Fact-based arguments like these should shape public debates and democratic deliberation, especially when it comes to potentially controversial and sensitive policy issues like immigration. But referencing immigration numbers, explaining how to accurately read the statistics and highlighting all the evidence did not help — these arguments neither reached nor deterred those who were determined to join these rallies.
“Tribal rage”
As for any large protest event, it’s impossible to capture the precise motives and grievances of each participant. What makes such an assessment even more difficult is that the various rallies unfolded in different ways in different location. People joined for various reasons, but they were all angry about something.
Grievances are by definition subjective, a perceived sense of injustice or the feeling that one is deprived of something to which they think they are entitled — from affordable housing, job security and economic prosperity, to the power to decide how Australian society should look.
Whatever it was, this anger was often expressed during the “March for Australia” as what Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth call a form of “tribal rage” that scapegoats others — in this case, either immigrants in general (though Indian Australians were singled out) or anyone who is not “white”.
While being critical of immigration levels as such is not racist or xenophobic, expressing it in this way arguably is.
Government mistrust and race-based agendas
There seem to be two main interconnected reasons why the “March for Australia” protesters resorted to “tribal rage” and remained resistant to any fact-based arguments about immigration.
First, they profoundly mistrust those who delivered these arguments: government, academics and other experts, and (most) mainstream media. After all, the marches were in part organised by actors and groups who have their origin in the anti-lockdown and anti-vax movements, notorious for their strong anti-government agendas. Mistrust in government and other public institutions is, however, not a fringe sentiment. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2025, for example, a record high of 64 per cent of Australians believe that government leaders purposely mislead people.
Second, for some protesters this march was not primarily about immigration but about race. Rally organisers have spoken about the importance of “protecting white heritage” and called not just for an end to “mass immigration” but for “remigration” — a euphemistic term commonly associated with far-right extremist rhetoric, referring to the deportation of all non-white citizens.
Unsurprisingly, the openly neo-Nazi white nationalist groups who either co-organised or appeared prominently at some of the rallies, overtly called for a return to “white Australia” and where heard chanting “deport them”. Stopping immigration may be one of their slogans but their actual political agenda seems to go far beyond that.
Despite the seemingly extreme political agenda of some of the organisers, a relatively large number of Australia felt undeterred from taking part in the rallies. This may have come as a surprise to those who cling to the false but comforting conviction that white nationalist sentiments are limited to the societal fringes. But they are not, and the social norms that have kept them in check for some time seem to have weakened.
The return of race in public discourse
The plummeting trust in government is widely acknowledged to be a problem, but what we have not fully recognised is that race has re-entered parts of the public discourse in recent years in a way Australia has not seen for decades. This is not a discussion about racism, which would be urgently needed to address ongoing systemic and interpersonal marginalisation of racialised groups in Australia. Instead, it is race itself that has gradually re-emerged, cloaked in claims of white victimhood and “reverse racism”, claims of being the self-declared natives who built Australia and through the more socially acceptable backdoor of “restorative nostalgia”.
For many decades, public discourse has been characterised by a reluctance to speak openly about race and the role racism has played in colonisation, the foundation of an independent nation, its racially exclusionary “White Australia” policy in the first half of the twentieth century, highly restrictive refugee regimes and many other manifestations of racism until today. In 1968, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner famously referred to Australia’s “cult of forgetfulness” — he called it the “Great Australian Silence” — with reference to the tendency to ignore the racist violence and dispossession that shaped Australia’s settler-colonial past.
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In a 2022 article, Glenn Kefford, Benjamin Moffitt and Annika Werner concluded that nativism — defined as an exclusionary or xenophobic form of nationalism — is “mainstream in Australia”. For the past few decades, the parameters of exclusion and national belonging have mostly been drawn along cultural or religious (not along racial) lines targeting certain groups of immigrants. The 2023 Mapping Social Cohesion survey found, for example, that “more than three-in-five … people have a negative attitude towards one or more of the migrants groups from Asia, the Middle East and Africa … or one of the non-Christian religions”, most commonly against people from Muslim communities.
Explicit references to race or whiteness used to be rare; the surveys did not even ask about race. We seemed to assume that we have left the predominant race-based framing behind, which used to be at the core of Australia’s nation-building and national identity between 1788 and the late 1950s and 60s. Since the adoption of multicultural paradigm in the 1970s, race had been a mostly dormant and taboo topic in the public and political discourse, while cultural or religion-based racism prevailed. But this seems to be changing.
Race as “white victimhood”
In 2017 and 2018, a Victoria University study examining the online messaging of twelve far-right groups in Australia found that in the mid-2010s these groups mostly expressed anti-Islamic, “Aussie pride” style cultural superiority narratives. In 2019, however, months before an Australian far-right terrorist murdered 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, we noted an increase in messaging around “white pride” and claims of “white victimhood” or even “white genocide”. At this time, references to alleged threats to the “white race” were still mostly limited to far-right extremist spaces, but this was also about not change.
In 2021, an explorative survey among 335 Australian men, conducted as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded research project, revealed that one third of respondents agreed with the sentiment that “white people are the victims these days”.
An activist holds a placard reading “Vote No to Racial Division” during a “No to the Voice” rally in Melbourne, Victoria, on 23 September 2023. (Photo by Alexander Bogatyrev / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
Race also became a powerful tool in the public mobilisation against the referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament in 2023, with many opponents falsely arguing that the Voice would introduce race into the Constitution and be racially divisive as First Nations peoples would unfairly gain an institutional mechanism to assert political influence unavailable to other Australians.
“Restorative nostalgia”
The “March for Australia” rallies represent a new escalation in the overt public displays of whiteness as the purported foundation of Australianness in a settler-colonial multicultural society. Many in the crowd justified their racially exclusivist stance by drawing on what cultural theorist Svetlana Boym described as “restorative nostalgia”, driven by “paranoid determination” to rebuild an idealised past in a “Manichean battle of good and evil” (as opposed to “reflective nostalgia”, which accepts historic changes and lets the past be the past).
In more blunt and less theoretical terms, many protesters called for a return to a white Australia, which shaped Australia’s foundation both as a settler nation as well as a political entity through Federation in 1901 and was institutionalised through the “White Australia” policy for more than half a century.
This race-based national identity may have been officially abandoned over fifty years ago when Al Grassby, who was immigration minister in the Whitlam government, declared the “White Australia” policy “dead” and asked for a shovel to “bury it” in 1973. Assimilation policies were then replaced with the new policy paradigm of multiculturalism. But Australia’s past and foundation offer a seemingly convenient and morally righteous blueprint for a return to the “good old days” of white Australia — a blueprint that can make racially exclusivist positions appear more legitimate and socially acceptable. After all, this was what Australia’s founding fathers believed in and what had shaped the national story for many formative decades prior to and after 1901.
Race as a benchmark for belonging
Of course, the tens of thousands of protesters who showed out for the “March for Australia” did not take to the streets for the same reasons, and certainly not all of them subscribed to the racialised dystopia of white Australia. Many also vocally expressed their discomfort or even disgust about the presence of neo-Nazis at these rallies.
Nevertheless, these marches are a strong warning that race is increasingly being weaponised as a benchmark of belonging and Australianness. This manifests in white nationalism gaining traction in segments of society, which offer far-right extremist groups new opportunities to grow their membership base and pursue their anti-democratic, authoritarian, antisemitic and Hitler-glorifying agenda.
But the re-emergence of race in the public debate can also further cement and aggravate racial hierarchies and social norms that signal to many racialised communities in their everyday lives that their Australianness is contested.
These rallies have caused a lot of uncertainty, safety concern and fear across many non-white communities. Let these events be a wake-up call, then, reminding us that it takes a lot more concerted efforts to continue the path towards a modern, mature and diverse Australian society. There is nothing wrong with nostalgia — looking back at and acknowledging our history is crucial for the way forward — but it must be critical and reflective, not restorative nostalgia that guides us on this nation-building journey.
Mario Peucker is an Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Industries and Liveable Cities at Victoria University. His most recent book is Democracy Strikes Back: Understanding and Countering the Rise of the Far-right.
Posted 2h ago2 hours agoMon 8 Sep 2025 at 10:02am, updated 2h ago2 hours agoMon 8 Sep 2025 at 10:13am