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A subsequent post by the former personal trainer railing against the government probe read: “Newton’s Third Law might be that ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’ but Jimbo’s First Law is ‘f— around and find out’.”
Sewell and his neo-Nazis have been seeking to rebrand nationally as “everyday Australians” concerned for their children while they move to form a political party called “White Australia”. But online their rhetoric is escalating as they aggressively recruit angry, young men for their “race war” and “network” with overseas extremists.
Last month, two Nazis were charged by the Australian Federal Police over threats to MPs, and last week, Sewell appeared on a livestream hosted by a British white supremacist to brag of the “serious money” and influence now flooding his group as its recruitment numbers soar.
He spoke of his ties with convicted Nazi terrorists such as Benjamin Raymond and Ashley Podsiad-Sharp who are serving time in the UK, and said he sympathised with young recruits who strayed into “edgier paths” like violent Satanism, such was his own rage at the system.
“I’m still really angry and like when we win … here in Australia, I’m going to make an example,” Sewell said. “I’m going to do shit that’s never been done before. I’m going to do crazy shit … I want to make [Manson’s] Helter Skelter look like a moderate when we win. I’m telling you, these people are going to suffer for what they’ve done.”
In June, Sewell told another far-right podcast his Nazi group had already set up “homeschool networks for the mums and bubs and all the young kids” around the country, as the group looks to create what he calls a “parallel economy” and society for white people.
In his online posts over the weekend, neo-Nazi Roberts accused those seeking to police “how white Australians educate their children” of being afraid that those kids may “begin tearing down this corrupt and traitorous system alongside their parents”.
Members of the NSN’s mothers’ groups in Melbourne celebrating summer solstice in December 2024.Credit: Telegram
The NSN’s mothers’ groups have been expanding, posting photos online of regular events, usually featuring more than half a dozen women and children in each state.
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While many children are not yet of school age, a parent of a former recruit told this masthead that he knew of teens whose parents were established NSN members joining the group’s actions as “second-generation Nazis”.
“It’s terrifying to think they [could be] running anything like a school,” he said. “I only just got my son back in school after all this.”
Researchers at the anti-fascist White Rose Society have also tracked the rise of mothers’ groups, which they say are key to the NSN’s “tribe and train” motto. They said they were concerned for women brought into the fold, then isolated with their children away from non-extremist loved ones. “Children born to them will be brought up with extremist views and home-educated in an insular community to become ‘Hitler soldiers’,” they said.
New-Zealand-born Sewell used to work with some of the state’s most vulnerable children for his job in residential care, and has previously boasted of recruiting “hundreds of autistic teenagers”.
His fiancee, Rebecca Konstantinou, works as a behaviour consultant in schools with children affected by trauma and disability, though she told a court last month she was currently on leave to care for her two children with Sewell.
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Sewell laid out his vision for the homeschool network to followers last year, arguing a network of like-minded “cliques” homeschooling their kids would grow until you “could found a school or a series of schools that subscribe to a certain curriculum … across the country and even across the world, and then it’s very hard for the government to shut down”.
“The operation starts getting too big,” he said, even if “it still needs to be sneaky where it needs to be sneaky”, to avoid government crackdowns.
It is a crime to run an unregistered school in Victoria, and in February, the Allan government tightened laws even further, increasing penalties to $23,700 for those who don’t comply with child safety rules and other standards.
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In mid-2024, Sewell told followers that if the government started making threats to take the children of those in the NSN, there would be violence. “That’s the line in the sand,” he said. “That’s when I become a terrorist. If you take my child off me, I’m going to start killing people. And I’m going to encourage every single person that I know to also start killing people that are responsible, starting with probably the police and the judges that ordered for a child to come off one of us.”
Sewell’s close friend, white supremacist leader Blair Cottrell, has also spoken online of homeschooling young children, complaining in a livestream in 2023 about the Holocaust content allocated to students while he said he was homeschooling “a young girl in the family”.
“Kids should opt for homeschooling because the school system is corrupt and dangerous,” he said, but argued it would be better to get kids together in a group so they could still socialise.
Cottrell has previously called for Australian students to read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and for the Nazi dictator’s picture to hang in every classroom.
A government spokesperson said: “Parents who choose to home-school their children have a responsibility to do the right thing – to provide a safe and quality education.”
The AFP would not comment on its investigations into the group.
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