CHAPTER FIVE

THE RADICAL-NATIONALIST FACE OF THE

EXTREME RIGHT 1982-95

This Chapter shall examine a number of organizations which are recognizable by their ideological and propagandist reference to the Australian labour, republican and nationalist heritage. These movements are described as the ‘Radical-Nationalists’, an appropriate label given their rejection of the political legitimacy of the Australian State whether in its imperial, American-alliance or client-internationalist phases. Several questions shall be resolved.

This Chapter explains:

· how the Radical-Nationalist position revamped itself out of the political failure of the Extreme Right 1975-82, to achieve permanence as one of its typological faces;

· how the new ideological initiatives integrated the Radical-Nationalist mythos with strategic-tactical ideas drawn from Australian and foreign Left and Right ideologies.

This Chapter analyses this Radical-Nationalist effort as achieving concrete results.

First, it discusses:

· how and why Radical-Nationalists participated in international Extreme Right politics?

· how Radical-Nationalists integrated the new ideological syntheses with political action?

Second, it asks:

· Did the new militancy have an effect such that it necessitated State/para-State reaction?

· Did the propaganda use of the labour heritage push the co-optation of the Left on the issues of race and national political-economic independence, during the period of its crisis and decline?

The Chapter advances data on the membership of Radical-Nationalist groups and integrates this information with questions of politics and organization.

Lastly, the continuing Radical-Nationalist activism shall be shown as an influence on the Extreme Right’s evolution.

1. The Emergence Of Australian National Action 1982–5

The foundation-circumstances of ‘National Action’ (NA) in Sydney have hitherto been described inaccurately.

Denis Freney asserted:

In April 1982, Saleam launched his fourth political organization: National Action … [and] … determined to keep it on the straight and narrow as a pure neo-nazi activist group, with an updated ‘Oz fascist’ ideology … [its] political programme is … an extension of earlier nazi party programmes … [1]

Freney continued:

National Action has its origins in the post-war nazi parties set up in Australia.[2]

The NA membership records[3] discount any continuation from 1960’s–1970’s neo-nazism, with 1 per cent attracted from that pool.[4] Between 1977 and 1981, National Action’s predecessors distanced themselves from neo-nazism.[5]

David Greason maintained he was both an intellectual influence and “founder”[6] who established NA in his “living room” in March 1982.[7] Yet he also cited a February establishment date.[8] Freney ignored Greason’s 1984 claim, first raised in material published by the International Socialists.

In truth, NA was founded by seventeen persons in Sydney’s Glebe[9] in February 1982 with an inaugural assembly on April 25 1982.[10] A committee of Saleam, Azzopardi, Boris Link (24, security guard) and David Merrett (22, public servant), was appointed to draft a programme and constitution, and hold a conference two years later.

Support was slim. Eugene Donnini’s Melbourne PNP section joined, as did individual PNP activists from other sections, such that by the close of 1982 an embryonic national structure was emplaced. In January 1983, Sydney NA opened a bookshop headquarters in Tempe.

The direction this new Radical-Nationalist organization would ultimately assume was suggested in the early period.

Although NA worked with other anti-immigration groups, such as Linke’s Perth Immigration Control Council, Dique’s ICA(Q) and Maina’s Sydney ‘Patriotic Lobby’ (PL) (formed in 1981 from NAA’s wreckage) in the July 1982 immigration consultative process, NA criticized lobbyist methods. A series of chaotic town hall meetings in state capitals focused public attention upon immigration issues,[11] but for NA its function remained one of organization-building. It subsequently signed a ‘Declaration’ for co-operation with the Sydney PL,[12] but avoided other Right entanglements.

National Action considered Australian National Alliance had pioneered correct ideology, but concluded that its strategic and tactical planning was stunted. However, its criticisms of the Right were supported:

… National Alliance was not simply an anti-immigration movement. When … [it] … insisted on tactics, strategy, ideology these patriots looked on us as if we had come from the moon … [13]

Those divisions in ANA referred to in Chapter Four were ascribed to rightist contamination:

One side wanted an ‘acceptable’ party of ordinary Australians led by democratically chosen leaders; the nationalists urged the forging of a closed activist union of militants led by a closed leadership which refused to open the party to public scrutiny and disruption.[14]

National Action formally condemned the Right’s legalism, ‘Menzies-ism’, Anglophilia and pro-American anti-communism, in the same breath as it denied the marxist Left was its main enemy.[15] Rhetoric directed at the Right would become more critical as NA argued it would break from the Right:

Have you ever met cranks? Crazy old men obsessed with religion? Old men who argue anti-semitic doctrines, informing us China is run by Jewish capitalists?[16]

Nonetheless, NA’s aim was to gain dominance over the other anti-immigration groups; its enforced public profile was intended to sideline them and act as a magnet for their approachable elements.[17]

The NA leadership appreciated the importance of controversy. Its earliest activities at Sydney University were occasions for Left demonstrations and ‘exposure’ literature.[18] Although weak, NA initiated a provocative propaganda against the overseas-student program (1982–4).[19]

The organization won extensive publicity and confronted Leftist groups which, in rallying unconditionally to these bourgeois ‘victims of racism’, were lured into defending the de-skilling of Australia, displacement of the native-born and backdoor immigration.[20] However, when tested in campus politics in 1983 a candidate for President of the Student Representative Council at Sydney University, polled just 2.1 per cent.[21]

Andrew Guild, Victorian Chairman (1984–90), described a basic propaganda group:

Melbourne NA activities 1982–4 were centred on gaining a visible public presence and promotion of the name ‘National Action’. We distributed 200,000 posters, stickers and leaflets with the popular slogan ‘Stop The Asian Invasion’. This campaign resulted in a couple of hundred enquiries.[22]

The subsequent ‘Blainey Debate’ (1984) on immigration and multiculturalism was partly sparked through Blainey’s sightings of this repetitive message.[23]

During 1983–4 National Action did, in the battle for political space, strike at the Left. The amorphous Sydney Skinhead movement was enthused by NA’s presence; Skinheads operating from a derelict warehouse off Elizabeth Street, sallied forth to burgle the Maoist bookshop, arson Gould’s Left bookshop and intimidate ‘anti-racists’.[24] An ephemeral youth movement in Sydney’s depressed western suburbs – the ‘Western Guards’ – distributed NA propaganda, daubed walls and may have been responsible for the bashing of an anti-racist activist.[25]

Like the former ANA, National Action laboured to confuse opposition and create a ‘mystique’ around the new force. Here National Action employed an agent to dupe Denis Freney of Tribune into publishing reports of NA’s “connection” to the French Party of New Forces and the South African “AWB”, of its access to firearms and South African money.[26]

National Action affected a Janus-faced methodology. To affirm its legitimacy, National Action contested the February 1984 Hughes by-election (966 votes).[27] To intimidate opposition, it occupied the student union offices at Macquarie University as retaliation for an ‘unfair’ television confrontation with its President on the overseas student question.[28] Consequently, National Action became the first organization banned from a campus.[29] The organization interfered with State interest when it produced evidence that liberal aid organization Community Aid Abroad was a sanctioned-conduit for funds for Pan-African Congress and African National Congress terrorism.[30]

The political atmosphere of 1984 was race-charged. On March 22, Foreign Minister Hayden stated his preference for an Australia of 50 million people of Eurasian ethnicity,[31] while Professor Geoffrey Blainey soon after initiated an ‘immigration debate’ which saw marxists disrupt his public meetings and academics question his intellectual and moral integrity.[32]

By late 1984, National Action’s propaganda and physical force campaigns had created an organization of a few hundred supporters with additional mailing lists. NA was nationally known and pre-eminent over other organized ‘anti-immigration’ groups. As discussed below, its activism brought brushes with the law. National Action’s methods had damaged liberal and Left groups while bluffing them as to its resources and strength. Participation in the 1984 Federal poll brought results considered somewhat optimistically as a ‘breakthrough’ for its radical message.[33]

Table 5.1 National Action 1984 Election Results[34]

Candidate	Electorate	Result
J. Saleam	Reid (NSW)	2803 (4.72%)
M. Ferguson	Wills (Vic)	1360 (2.33%)
J. Van Tongeren	West. Aust. Senate	861 -

It remained to be seen how a ‘fighting organization’ could locate a coherent strategy, systematize its journalistic outpourings and create cadres from members.

2. Structural Weakness, New Radical-Nationalist Organizations And Their Strategic Options

Vanessa Coles’s limited research into National Action – in favour of neo-nazism as the axis of Extreme-Right study – had a harsh conclusion:

… [NA was] … incredibly undecided … on basic beliefs … to such a point where policy formulation was practically impossible … [35]

While an inappropriate description of NA as it developed, this description was accurate at a particular point.

Certain divisions in NA, and the birth of new Radical-Nationalist and other formations (1984–5) are germane to an appreciation of ideology and style on the Extreme Right. They demonstrated that the Australian case validated Griffin’s analysis of neo-fascism’s[36] achievement of “ideological and organizational innovation” marred by “chronic structural weakness.”[37]

Certainly, NA rendered obsolete Al Grassby’s argument that the ‘racist Right’ was dominated by Anglophiles, conspiratologists and racial-haters.[38] In challenging the old-Right, NA and its forebears in ANA, had opened themselves to influence by European ‘revolutionary-nationalist’ ideological, political and organizational models.[39] Griffin has rightly characterized this enormous corpus as “highly nuanced”.[40] Under disciplined assimilation any ideological corpus could fertilize the indigenous product, whereas under other circumstances this penetration would result in division. The evidence will show both results.

The first expression of foreign influences conformed microcosmically to Leonard Weinberg’s analysis of Italian neo-fascist terrorism. He noted that some student activists would progress through stages: from campus activism, through ‘populist’ agitation towards frustration in failure. Recrimination would lead some to armed struggle.[41] Certain NA activists grouped around Merrett and Link reviewed the ‘failures’ of ANA/PNP and imagined success in an ‘armed party’ similar to French and Italian ‘black terrorism’. Efforts were made to acquire weapons – and funds via marijuana cultivation. The scheme collapsed in early 1984 when two Toronto men were arrested on drugs charges.[42] Trace evidence is available to suggest members of the group became informer-provocateurs for Special Branch after 1985.[43]

The early 1980’s witnessed considerable fermentation on the international Extreme Right. Husbands recorded the ‘survival’ of the British National Front as a sub-culture in working class areas.[44] Thurlow and Eatwell noted the strategic-tactical divisions in early 1980’s ‘British Nationalism’ over the class orientation of the movement.[45] National Action was part of this international debate encouraging the NF’s ‘working class’ faction and receiving their reciprocal endorsement.[46] The NF’s release from ‘neo-nazi’ control had a particular dynamic occasioned by the intervention of Canadian neo-fascist, John Jewell. Through his Direct Action bulletin he introduced an ‘anti-virus’ – “Strasserism”.[47]

Jewell’s revisitation of the ‘pan-European-socialist’ Strasser faction of the NSDAP, and its struggle against Hitler’s ariosophical anti-Russianism and “betrayal” of the working class in the Rohm purge,[48] had little to do with rehabilitating Nazism (although some neo-nazis attempted that[49]), but with disintegrating the neo-nazi infiltration of Extreme-Right organizations in several countries.[50] Jewell argued that neo-nazis were ‘right-wing’, part of President Reagan’s anti-Soviet politics, negative quantities with irrelevant programmes for activism.[51] Other researchers have ignored Jewell’s influence. Yet, his Strasserist critique of the “Hitler cult” destabilized international neo-nazism, drawing frenzied rejoinders. National Action’s preventative use of the “anti-virus” also caused disputation.

Norwick under his pen name Saunders, authored The Social Revolutionary Nature Of Australian Nationalism which covered Strasserist ground with novelty. The ideologies of German non-nazi fascist Conservative Revolution and National Bolshevism were introduced to Australian readers to justify anti-Americanism, a Russophile ‘tilt’ and a critique of liberal-western “cosmopolitanism”.[52] Such references had been invoked by influential European ‘think tanks’, and researchers have assessed this as an aspect of ‘New Right’ discourse.[53]

At NA’s Easter 1985 Conference, Perth Chairman Jack van Tongeren raised certain strategic-tactical demands. This covert neo-nazi had joined to achieve NA’s nazification and affect its ‘turn’ towards the Conservative Right.[54] Saunders wrote of van Tongeren’s plan:

… [he] … purported to be able to recruit patriotic members of the old order based upon some conservative ideology … such as Bruce Ruxton … We wish … [him] … well … but … groups such as IRC, NAA, ICA, PCP, PNP …. often had the patronage of conservatives such as Bob Menzies and Bruce Ruxton … and achieved nil …[55]

When van Tongeren demanded an end with the Eureka Flag, the republican working class reference and NA’s criticism of the anti-communist Right, [56] he was essentially arguing for the Rosemary Sisson programme of 1978 and the British neo-nazi method which looked to conversion of the Tory Right.[57] His ‘Australian Nationalists Movement’ (ANM) split from NA. The continuing quest by some neo-nazis for accommodation with the Conservative Right demonstrated a strategic misreading of historical fascism’s method. Significantly, coded debate had also raged which would continue thereafter, with the ghosts of Strasserism and Conservative Revolution in contention with neo-nazis. Australian researchers have essentially ignored these strategic discussions.

Other splits from NA also brought loss of cadre, but the creation of new breeder-pools for Radical-Nationalist organization with new discursive forms. An ‘Australian Populist Movement’ (APM) was formed in December 1984 from a rupture in van Tongeren’s “conservative” Perth NA. A magazine – Stockade – appeared and a ‘radical’ red Eureka flag was raised. Under Eugene Donnini’s direction, APM published a leaflet, Fight For Australia! which espoused anti-nuclear neutralism.[58] The ‘green’ pretense underlay the Australian Populist Manifesto which argued also for direct democracy.[59] APM’s generalized condemnation of “America” as the progenitor of consumer-culture,[60] brought APM recruits amongst the Perth anti-foreign bases and environmentalist groups and from Melbourne’s sizeable ex-Maoist milieu. The immigration issue was sanitized. The Stockade proudly announced its link with English New Right journal The Scorpion,[61] whose right-to-racial-difference argument merged into ‘Green’ economic perspectives on sustainable growth and contra-globalization.[62] The idea of national independence would be remarketed to an alternative oppositional sector. The strategy was a challenging one for Australia where the marginalized Extreme Right was under constant scrutiny by Left-liberal forces. The APM’s kinship to NA brought warnings from Tribune and allegations that APM militants vandalized the CPA’s Perth offices.[63]

Clearly, APM’s plan to intersect with traditionally ‘Left’ movements predated the similar effort of Australians Against Further Immigration described below. However, APM disintegrated in early 1986, unable to penetrate its targets successfully – and amass resources for organizational intensification.

Another Radical-Nationalist initiative which promised much was that of ‘Australian National Vanguard’ (ANV) / ‘Australian People’s Congress’ (APC) in the years 1982–88. This Brisbane effort was directed by Robert Pash (born 1962). From an unstable family with a history of psychiatric illness, Pash was attracted by religion, finding a berth with the U.S. ‘Church Of Jesus Christ Christian’ (or Aryan Nations). His paper Vanguard had announced: “Jewry rules the West … “ and “ … only the pure aryan race … (can) … achieve His Noble Purpose.”[64] A transition was made to Libyan “Third Universal Theory” in 1983, with funding provided by the Libyan Embassy for distribution of Gaddafist propaganda.[65] In 1984, Pash approached National Action with promises of “unity” and Libyan support for anti-American propaganda, but arrangements were forever provisional.[66] When van Tongeren launched ANM, Pash decided to reconstitute ANV.

The ANV claimed to be “known within Trade Union circles, sections of the ALP and to overseas National Revolutionary governments”.[67] Pash argued for anti-imperialist national independence “in the same way as the CPA(M-L).”[68] The ANV used the Eureka Flag and NA’s labour-nationalist utterances via textual “plagiarism”.[69]

However, it was the overdone loyalty to Libyan strictures which brought ANV attention from Jewish, police and Left organizations. Pash’s courtship of Libya was original. He had outmanoeuvred the pro-Libyan Socialist Labour League and Bill Hartley’s Australian Libyan Friendship Society and despite Tribune’s suggestion that he had “conned” Libya[70] and Hartley’s denunciation as a “provocateur”,[71] he led various “delegations” to Libya and retained a Libyan stipend.[72]

Whatever Pash’s organizational initiatives, his contorted personality wrecked the enterprise. In 1984, he had infiltrated the Queensland Nuclear Disarmament Party, acquired its mailing list and passed it to Special Branch.[73] Pash organized 1985 ‘Green Book Reading Nights’ in the Brisbane rooms of the League Of Rights and printed a 1987 ‘Joh For Canberra’ magazine,[74] while also simultaneously working with the Socialist Workers’ Party. Saunders – who received a Libyan trip – argued that Pash was a “fraud” and “chameleon” whose political machinations implied multiple personalities.[75] Remarkedly, Pash could assimilate conflicting programmes and had a compulsive desire to explain his activities to Intelligence operatives. Not surprisingly, the organization became lost in its contradictions. In 1987, ANV became the Australian People’s Congress, and after arranging a 1988 Libyan trip for the British NF leadership[76] (and then the Australian SWP leaders), Pash became less of an activist and more a Libyan information agent (1988–91), surrounded by a heterogeneous circle. He went on to found New Dawn magazine.

The projected syntheses of Australian labour-nationalism, Third Universal Theory and Maoism required a nimble ideologue and a real base of support. The less than 100 recruits (1984–8) were not a cadre. Despite similarities to British NF and 1970’s Italian revolutionary-nationalist schemes, Pash either mismanaged or under-exploited the potential for foreign funding and developed little structure.

It is concluded that various doctrinal innovations-cum-initiatives of NA, APM and ANV were intellectually energetic, but foreign ideological inputs incited leadership ruptures as cadres searched for winning strategies. As the other groups faded, only National Action turned some ideas to profit.

3. The Strategic–Tactical Perspectives Of National Action 1985–90

Fractionalization amongst Radical-Nationalists brought a new ideological energy in National Action and a serious effort was made to codify strategic–tactical principles. A synthesized rationale for militant activism was formulated which governed practice until 1990:

(i) Australia was portrayed as a capitalist dictatorship with business organizations, courts, police, media and education integrated as a machine.[77] Illusions of a neutral State, arising from good-society “corruption in our own minds”, delayed this realization.[78] State power did not reside in parliament but was diffused throughout State organs and connected repressive and intellectual/cultural apparatuses.[79] Electoralism, lobbyism, terrorism and the infiltration of existing party structures were condemned as ineffective, enervating options. The alternative was the ‘combat party’.[80]

(ii) The combat model was neutrally adopted from the Leninist vanguard literature. No faith was placed in the Australian people being able to freely choose against the consumer order; nor was it expected a mass party could emerge under normal conditions.[81] The combat party would wage war against liberalism.[82]

(iii) The political struggle was conceived as a friend/enemy discourse and in Maoist style partitioned into antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions.[83] The antagonistic oppositions were the repressive and ideological State apparatuses and those aspects of the civil society where the writ of State power ran, where people were well integrated into structures conducive to the maintenance of liberal-capitalism.[84] Consequently, the marxist Left became a secondary non-antagonistic opponent. Capitalism would receive the main blow.[85]

(iv) The organization practised an unchristened Democratic Centralism. Membership was carefully divided into supporters and (cadre) members. The latter had voting rights.[86] Secrecy became obsessive and the authority of the committees absolute.[87] While no organization was immune to disruption or penetration, announcements of political police interest in destabilization were to encourage discipline.[88]

(v) In sectarian fashion, National Action was described as the party of Australian nationalism. It refused to treat equally with ostensible-nationalist groups, neo-nazis or conservatives, but intolerantly proclaimed its special character and mission.[89] It would win the best of useful formations and not permit territorial competition. This implicit threat brought counter-criticism from the League Of Rights, the Anglo-Saxon Keltic Society, the Constitutional Heritage Protection Society and the ANM. The LOR referred to “a number of psychopaths and misfits who can be exploited to foment extremism … a power movement.”[90] Rightist whispering campaigns centring on NA’s “republicanism” and “violence” – unfolded.[91] The sectarian method demanded sacrifice in the ‘competitive’ struggle and zealous political campaigning.

(vi) The propagandistic use of the national-republican-labour tradition was developed. First, NA sought an effective reply to the ‘fascist’ name-calling of media and the Left. It was said:

It is interesting to note that Nationalists are attacked in the media as ‘fascists’ … The good values of the old ALP flow into … [our] … stream … If we are to be characterized as alien fascists … then Australia’s greatest Prime Minister was a fascist. Good company?[92]

Second, NA proceeded to absorb the tradition into its everyday work.[93] It struggled to acquire legitimacy for its anti-immigration, republican and ultra-nationalist perspectives and provide a framework for energetic propaganda against New Right liberal-capitalism then hegemonic over the Liberal and Labor parties.[94] In language reminiscent of Lawson and Lane, NA claimed that the State:

… denounced the eighty percent of Australians who question Asian/coloured immigration as “racists”. This dictatorial attitude matches up with … ‘master race theories’. The ideal race for Australia is supposed to be mixed from Asian and Australian; he is supposed to ‘work hard’, never join a trade union, follow the ‘future’ as laid out by Big Business blindly and consume the products of industry. This mindless herd is to be ruled over by a ‘master class’ of local traitors and Asian businessmen. The Australian People reject this reverse-Nazism …[95]

National Action wanted a working class following by occupying the position the Left once possessed. The Left was proclaimed the bully-boy of capitalism given its anti-protectionist open-immigration principles, the old national-Left superceded by liberals.[96] The nationalist labour position could challenge the Conservative Right over its links with Bjelke-Petersen and anti-union ‘Asianizers’; old style anti-communists would be criticized as ‘anti-Australian independence’ through subservience to U.S. imperialism.[97] An umbilical chord was said to exist between the Conservative Right and the free marketeers, albeit through conduits.[98]

(vii) Youth and “inner-city and outer-suburban working people of the big cities” were the targets for recruitment.[99] Regrouped cadre from other organizations and some professionals and business people would provide direction and financing. Those unintegrated into bourgeois life would become the political soldiers (cadres) for change.[100]

(viii) The new strategic-tactical method was dubbed ‘Political Guerilla Warfare’, an application of a military technique to civil society, against a state stronger in physical and intellectual-cultural power.[101] While other Extreme-Right groups were ‘lost’ in generalist public education campaigns and self-advertizing, NA noted its limited resources and chose to ‘cut off the tentacles’ of the State in civil society, to cause disruption in important areas.[102]

Political Guerilla Warfare involved: creating ‘tension’ around targetted individuals and persons, developing mass slogans around specific issues, utilizing defamatory and intimidatory propaganda to destabilize ‘targets’, developing an intelligence capability to sustain propaganda, creating an atmosphere of ‘struggle’ within NA so that its independence and initiative would be maintained.[103]

This method implied ‘psychological action’ designed to engender an impression of strength and power, to intimidate ‘weak’ liberal opponents.[104] The atmosphere of soft violence was to be educative of militants who were to visualize success and assimilate ideology ‘on the job’. Metcalfe observed of such ‘terror’ within organizations:

A terror is the enforcement of a pledge. The insistence anyone disloyal is an enemy … terror closes the group. It involves sanctions against both enemies and members of a group and the sanctions are commonly but not necessarily violent …[105]

The new dispensation made political change conditional upon a Gramscian battle of position fought against dominant ideas and representative persons, a political bloodsport with enemies humbled by visceral attack.[106]

‘Political Guerilla Warfare’ was similar to the method of the CPA(M-L) and the Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF) – which was not accidental. The Australian Maoist method is discernable from various works.[107] The BLF long committed itself after “cold hard political thinking” to “the development of guerilla tactics … most harm to the boss, least harm to ourselves”.[108] A Royal Commission confirmed the BLF’s plan was “to create an image of irresistible power”.[109] Vanguard observed of NA:

One of their leading people tried to associate himself with the Worker-Student Alliance before he openly committed to the Extreme-Right; he was well known for … [taking] … full account of the tactics of the Left in promoting … fascist terrorism …[110]

Saleam “admired” Ted Hill and the CPA(M-L),[111] while Donnini had been an Independence Movement cadre. The interest shown by Extreme Right organizations in Chinese Maoist doctrine and tactics has been noted by researchers.[112] National Action’s 1980’s liaison with the British NF deepened this interest, particularly when the NF drew inspiration from the Italian Terza Posizione, a “revolutionary-nationalist” party (1970’s) [113] indebted to Mao and Gramsci for its organizational model for “counter-power”.

Summed together, these perspectives were an admonition to strife. National Action became unique on the Extreme Right because it desired to answer the hegemony of liberal ideology and the implied threat of State sanction with physical action. ‘Patriotic’ elements would prospectively be attracted and through individual struggles, a ‘mass party’ would be constructed.[114]

National Action had drawn in the palingenetic style upon the old nationalist-labour tradition, and synthesized it with particular Left strategic-tactical doctrines. A further ‘modernizing’ synthesis with the European Third Way ideology was undertaken, as shall be examined.

4. Militant Radical-Nationalist Sect Politics 1985–90

‘Political Guerilla Warfare’ was practised energetically after 1985 upon the supposition that authoritarian-State measures would issue to restrict opposition to economic-political ‘Asianization’. Since NA was neither an electoralist nor educationist nor lobby force, it had more energy to direct at its ‘targets’. With militants encouraged to action collectively and individually, NA desired to “swim as the fish in the sea of the people”.[115]

A chronicle of NA’s activism where relevant is recorded as testimony.

Michael Brander, (born 1961), son of a Spanish migrant, was an occasional university student when he took charge of NA in Adelaide. He commented:

[Paragraph removed. Error of fact located. Paragraph subject to revision.] [116]

Victorian National Action specialized in economic harassments and political stunts. Chairman Andrew Guild recorded:

Our branch leafletted McDonald’s outlets accusing the company of supporting Asianization [1986]. We picketed Myer stores which promoted ‘Asianization through Advertizing’ [1986]. We demanded that one city council permit us to celebrate Eureka Stockade Day and fly the flag in the city centre [1988]. Against chosen targets we used exposure leaflets and flying pickets.[117]

National Action’s propaganda effort was reflected in national office figures for distributed-recruitment items (inclusive of ideological documents and magazines):

Table 5.2 Distributed Recruitment Items, 1985–89[118]

1985 – 169,000

1986 – 149,950

1987 – 254,700

1988 – 228,000

1989 – 123,000

(An understatement by 20 per cent on these figures would allow for specialized local material.)

National Action contested some elections. It chose Labor electorates. In reintroducing voters to nationalist labourism, NA chided the ALP for abandoning its legacy. With leaflets, posters and stickers festooned with Eureka Flags and labour movement ‘icons’ – Lang, Lawson, Lane, Curtin and others – the ALP was condemned for its subservience to international banking capital and as a creature of the business lobby and think tank – the Committee For The Economic Development Of Australia (CEDA).[119] Labor’s deregulationist, rationalisation, and anti-tariff policies were decried as a CEDA conspiracy, and mass immigration as the means to break unionism.[120] National Action’s scores were modest, revealing at best a minimum clientele:

Table 5.3 National Action Election Results 1986-1988[121]