GENERAL CONCLUSION
This Thesis sharpened its focus by
examining the Australian Extreme Right through the prism of its
inter-relationship with the State and the dominant liberal capitalist
ideology. This allowed the placement of
the Extreme Right within an historical process and permitted the construction
of a new paradigm for Australian Right politics.
Because this study examined an
essentially ‘new’ field, it is appropriate to refer first to means which can
overcome the deficiencies of the current scholarship.
First: future analysis of the Australian Right would benefit from
academic studies centred on framework construction. These should include:
·
a
political dictionary of organizations and individuals for the ready reference
of both academics and students;
·
a
reader of Australian Right texts to set core themes;
·
academic
encouragement of B.A. (Hons.) and postgraduate work on the various facets of
Right politics;
·
scholarship
to describe and define Australian Right politics 1945-75 as essential groundwork to
contemporary analysis;
·
continual
applications to Australian Archives for ASIO and other records, and to the New
South Wales Police for the crucial Special Branch files compiled over its
fifty-year history;
·
a university
library-based archive of the basic primary documents issued by Right
organizations.
Second: this Thesis criticized misdirected academic assessments and false
and/or malicious journalistic commentary.
Some Australian researchers have neither applied strict rules of
objectivity nor relied upon direct witness testimony and thorough literature
examination. An objective spirit is required.
Third: this Thesis repudiated those marxist theories which portrayed the
Extreme Right as the ‘agent’ of capitalism.
Given that during the 1975-95 period the Extreme Right clashed
with State ideological and political interest, and occasionally spoke for the
economically disenfranchised, it was clear there were weaknesses in Australian
marxist analysis. Such problems were
connected to the satellitization of the Left by the anti-racist State.
Even so, there were useful marxist
insights into the inter-war imperial Right and the anti-communist Right and its
‘thirty years war’ against the Left during 1945-75.
The following general conclusions
are advanced both from the sum of the respective Chapter conclusions and upon
the entire evidence.
The two Chapters of Part One
constructed the historical framework for examination of the contemporary
Extreme Right.
Chapter One developed the tripartite
paradigm which partitioned the Right into Fascist, Extreme Right and
Conservative Right typologies. The
extensive Australian literature which examined the 1920’s/1930’s paramilitary
organizations and allied structures, was remiss in not applying this
paradigm. The recent scholarship of
fascism guided the conclusion that these inter-war Right movements were not
fascist, but either Conservative Right or Extreme Right in substance. Central forces, such as the Conservative Old
Guard and Extreme Right New Guard, were defined qualitatively by their degree
of independence or otherwise from the conservative-imperial State’s agents and
ideology.
The State would tolerate, manipulate
and eventually restrain, such independent Right forces whose ‘extremism’ was
manifested in the defence of that political order, by more modern or
thorough-going means. The auxiliary
function, placed into reserve after 1935, was critical for the Australian
State’s management of crisis in the 1930’s.
The Chapter also defined native-fascism as an abortive attempt to
mobilize the palingenetic spirit from the organized residue of the Australian
nationalist, labour and cultural-nativist heritage. The native-fascism developed by P.R. Stephensen was anti-State,
and, through its critique of British imperialism in Australia, an
anti-Establishment current itself capable of subsequent palingenetic use. The historical ‘long view’ showed the
workings of the rough beast State: its
British-Imperial ideology, a determined ruling class acting through
conservative government, an army, a secret police and auxiliary forces. This Thesis concludes that the State form
evolved from this essential foundation.
Chapter Two applied the tripartite
paradigm to Right politics throughout the Cold War period until the triumph of
Fraser’s Liberals in 1975. The revived
auxiliary system which buttressed the Liberal Party’s 1945-9 bid for power did not involve
violence (though the threat existed), as much as propaganda-activist organizations. After 1949, this Thesis detected a new
Satellite Right in those independently organized conservative structures, loyal
to the legal and historic symbols of the British-Australian State and which
were the outer defences of the America-loyal Liberal-Country party government. The satellites revolved around a new State
power core: a strong conservative government armed with modern para-State
organs, (ASIO and police Special Branches), mechanisms of ideological coercion
(Royal Commissions into Communism and Espionage) and new social props, such as the
Catholic anti-communist working class and Eastern European migrant groups. Anti-communism was the dynamo of the
Satellite Right. Chapter Two concluded
that the Australian Nazi phenomenon (1963-75) was within the conservative
typology, as a potemkin-fascism linked to para-State operations which targeted
the resurgent Left, particularly in the period 1970-73.
Neither the auxiliary forces of Special Branch Nazism, nor the peculiar
post-millenarian politics of the satellite League Of Rights, engendered the new
Extreme Right which progressively mobilized around circumstances caused by the
abandonment of the White Australia Policy in 1966.
Chapter Two refocused the definition
of the ‘Extreme Right’ as given in Chapter One. Previously, it was used to illuminate an independent mobilization
to defend the conservative State and ideology by modern means. Hereafter, it would mean politics independent
of the State, and this independence involved: a delegitimization of politicians
and parties but not the State’s historical basis; independent party-political and agitational action; an ambivalence as to whether the Australian Identity
should be understood as Anglo-Celtic (“British”) or native-European; a challenge to dominant capitalist economic
principles for a populist order which protected property and initiative.
The emergence of an Extreme Right
unconcerned by the communist danger occurred as the State itself was abandoning
a conservative underpinning in favour of liberal-internationalist
perspective. This revolution meant also
that the Extreme Right category might further radicalize ideologically and
politically and the Conservative Right would inevitably receive independence
from the State, via the severance of the satellite relationship. Chapter Two showed that the hesitancy of the
Extreme Right (1966-75) derived from its leaderships’ uncertainty
as to self-definition - as witnessed by its co-optation by
conservative Liberals in 1975.
The use of this historical
perspective demonstrated the utter marginality of ‘Radical-Nationalist’ movements in the period to 1975 and showed
that a core issue of the subsequent Extreme Right would be race, an issue the
State could not accommodate.
This Thesis although entitled an
inquiry into ‘The Extreme Right’, had to examine the Radical-Nationalist
typology - the
substitute for the fascist typology of the earlier period. This was because it was related to
Stephensen’s movement, and because it represented a deeper radicalization of
the contemporary Extreme Right’s independent, if inconsistent, politics. It shared much of the Extreme Right’s
populist programme. The Radical-Nationalists
moved towards confrontation with State authority, and espoused
cultural-nativism, ‘White Australia nationalism’ and republicanism. This discourse was beyond the Extreme Right
boundary throughout of the study period.
This Thesis also referred to the
developments in Conservative Right politics in order to explain the gestation
of some Extreme Right movements. It
concluded that, with changes in the State policy after 1975, the Right
satellites only found a role for themselves in the exceptionalist
Bjelke-Petersen National Party regime in Queensland, where developmentalism had
married conservative cultural mores.
This relationship collapsed after 1987, permitting a radicalization
amongst some conservative activists and voters, creating the Confederate Action
Party in Queensland in 1990, and spurring other groups in other states. However, the relationship between the
Conservative Right and the Extreme Right was more complex than common personnel
and voter-clients and involved a radicalization and creative adaptation of
ideas about conspiracy, direct democracy and debt-free finance.
The Australian Extreme Right has
been a political failure, if ‘success’ is measured by the standard of the
1980’s/1990’s European national-populist parties. It had not produced lasting or numerous parliamentary mandates, a
mass party, or altered State policy towards its accommodation. Yet, by the counter-responses of State and
para-State organs, and the continual incitement against Extreme Right opinions
by the liberal ideological apparatus, the phenomenon enjoyed a strong negative
impact. The Extreme Right’s failure to
escape the effects of legal, extra-legal and illegal management by State and
para-State did not mean issues for mobilization were not available and substantial
efforts not attempted. National
Action’s ‘political-guerilla warfare’, the ANM’s violence campaign and the
rural and urban electoral breakthroughs achieved by the CAP and Australians
Against Further Immigration, were all ‘achievements’ based upon the
availability of political space and/or the requisite determination.
The structural flaws in the Extreme
Right appear historically based, limiting its potential.
First, the Extreme Right waxed and
waned in waves which occasioned broken organizational-ideological continuities:
·
The
anti-immigration groups 1975-82 rose and fell. Between 1976 and 1980, the Immigration Control
Association/Progressive Conservative Party vociferously opposed the Vietnamese
Refugee influx and increasing non-European immigration. The electoral defeat of PCP in 1980 broke an
organization which counted adherents from the earliest structures opposed to
the abandonment of White Australia in 1966.
·
The
Australian National Action not only regrouped some survivors of the ICA/PCP
milieu and took the limelight from other small ‘anti-immigration’ survivors of
the 1975-82
period, but it gave full expression to the new Radical-Nationalist
current. It was aggressive, but
isolated from the remainder of the Right.
It built upon the 1977-80 experience of Australian National Alliance
and used the labour-nationalist-republican heritage as propaganda motif. Its strategic-tactical method (political
guerilla warfare) drew a para-State reaction which hampered the organization
after 1989-91. Although rebuilt by 1994-5, it was sidelined by new anti-immigration
competitors with softer methods.
·
The
1980’s saw the emergence of an internationally-inspired neo-nazism, a
disruptive trend which included Skinhead underclass violence, occult circles,
and the provocations of fantasizers.
Its one star was the political violence campaign of the Perth-based
Australian Nationalists Movement, which in 1988-90 damaged Asian trade and
investment. With the para-State’s
elimination of ANM, some neo-nazis served State interest in discrediting or
harassing other Right forces. Skinhead
youth meantime took the path of racist violence without even the saving grace
of political formation. Neo-nazism was
exhausted by 1995.
·
In the
period 1987-90,
under the pressure of Queensland’s desatellitization of the Right, the
Confederate Action Party was born. In
1992, it achieved the first electoral breakthrough of an Extreme Right
party. Broken into pieces after 1993,
it festered in country Queensland and in some other states, as an
undercurrent. Its political elimination
as a locomotive for Extreme Right unification, was a lost opportunity. Yet its recruitment of truckies, rural
workers, gun owners and small business people showed the potential of populist
politics; it mobilized some of the
National Party’s electoral constituency, but could not deconstruct its power
bloc. The latter achievement pointed to
a possibility, part-actualized later, by One Nation.
·
New
points of genesis for Extreme Right mobilization emerged in the 1980’s under
the pressure of New Right rural restructuring.
Anti-bank groups and farmers’ action groups prefigured the birth of
Enterprise Freedom And Family and the Inverell Forum in 1988, and the Australian
Community Movement in 1989. Taken in
tandem with the crisis of the National Party both in Queensland and nationally,
these radical-populist forces symbolised country-side resistance to
internationalization. They represented
with the CAP, an electoral and physical potential. Countryside movements acted separately from the urban Extreme
Right.
·
The
urban environment, rich on ethnic diversity and ideologically dominated by the
liberal elite, engendered a new enviro-cultural-nationalism grouped chiefly
around the Australians Against Further Immigration after 1988. The AAFI presented surface moderation in the
immigration debate. The activism of
AAFI inspired Labor parliamentarian Graeme Campbell, who from 1991-2, resuscitated Labor’s populist
heritage to speak against internationalism.
Other groups like the Rex Connor (Snr) Labor Party, responded to Labor’s
abandonment of traditional protectionist policy.
New points of potential support for Extreme Right politics were thus
available. With different points of
gestation (historical, political and circumstantial), different target-markets
and leaderships, the Extreme Right lost continuities and remained fragmented.
Second, the evidence showed that the
Extreme Right was typologically divided.
This Thesis, by articulating these typologies as Radical-Nationalism,
Neo-Nazism, Populist-Monarchism and Radical-Populism, created a framework to
explain organizational division:
·
The
Radical-Nationalists appeared on the tripartite paradigm (explained
above). They were also players within
the international neo-fascist movement.
Ideas reminiscent of historical Australian racial-nationalism were taken
on board and applied; these visions of
European cultural-racial rebirth with an Australian role in this process, set
an historical mission for a local movement.
Marked otherwise by a nativist style and ultra-nationalist programme,
this family required the submission of the Extreme Right populists to radical
organization.
·
The
neo-nazi phenomenon was characterized in terms of an internationally applicable
typology. The appreciation of
neo-nazism’s core as an occult doctrine of neo-ariosophical inspiration,
signalled why the phenomenon was persistent but alienated from ordinary
political discourse. The typology was based
on a fused group of interests:
Indo-Aryan pre-history, white race internationalism, Rudolf Hess’s
martyrdom, Holocaust-denial, Jewish-conspiracy ideology, Second World War
revision and a Hitler cult. Its
Australian application was innovative to the politics of immigration: Neo-Nazis sought the control of ‘racist’
organizations, or to engage in political violence pending redeeming
revolution. Neo-nazism typified the politics
of delusion.
·
The
populist-monarchists radicalized the idea that the 1986 Australia Act created a
republican-humanist dictatorship; they
asserted the populist dimension of the social-contract and invoked the
depersonalized Monarchy as the ultimate defence of the citizens’ rights. With Citizens’ Initiated Referenda, a protected
economy, and an armed people acting through a mass people’s party, Australian
independence and prosperity would be restored.
Because this family radicalized Conservative Right commitments to
Monarchy, Constitution, Common Law and Flag, there was a ‘tension’ between the
two which restrained further radicalization in both families.
·
The
radical-populist family was characterized by a set of commitments: to CIR,
gun-ownership, cheap credit, and industrial protection, an end to immigration,
and grassroots activism.
Radical-populism could mobilize at different points (rural and urban),
and mobilize across social boundaries.
After 1988, the trend became permanent and when summed with the
populist-monarchists, represented a national populism of some potential. The conditions of rural decline and racial
displacement were in the 1990’s, ignored by consensus politics.
Different typologies
represented generalized weakness. There
was competition and contention.
Third, a fundamental cleavage in the
Right involved the British question. It
divided the Extreme Right from the Conservative Right; it engendered
inconsistency in Extreme Right politics, particularly in those groups which
generated from the ex-satellite milieu.
The British question concerned identity, government, heritage and
political method and was therefore a constant problem for Extreme Right
mobilization. These historical dilemmas
probably sharpened tensions with the defensive Conservative Right which
traditionally favoured non-political-party activism. Only after the end of the study period, despite previous efforts
by the National Front of Australia, the ANM and others to draw in the
Conservative Right, did it embark on independent political action. Historically, it was a block against the
widening of Extreme Right mobilization, counselling against militancy, and
restraining its ranks from moving into electoral work.
Fourth, although failure was linked
to the inability of any single movement to focus the Extreme Right into a
melded form, accidentalist failure complemented historical problems. Infirmities of leadership and structure and
those internal dissensions which traditionally plague political sub-cultures,
operated in Extreme Right politics.
The questions of Extreme Right
typology and the points of its gestation appear linked to developments in
Australian capitalism.
The capitalist revolution was of the
‘permanent’ character - and State driven. As the process of change accelerated, and widened from Fraser’s
putsch and through the 1980’s, opposition was encouraged from forces which
would lose economically, culturally or politically in the new order. The State enforced the internationalization
of Australian capitalism, forcing rural restructuring, reducing industrial
protection thereby increasing unemployment, breaking trade unions and raising
immigration from non-European sources.
The ‘loser’ groups, initially working class and youth sectors (targetted
for recruitment by Radical-Nationalists), broadened to include farmers and
country small-business groups, small-town workers and older urban middle class
people. As new forces progressively
became available to the Extreme Right, specific organizations appeared based
upon the different social groups. This
factor perpetuated division - particularly the ideological-political
division between country-rural and urban groups.
This Thesis defined the Australian
State after 1975 as an ‘International Capitalist State’. This State established a new power core
centred on the transnational capitalist class.
It won allies amongst new-class intellectuals, intrusive migrant groups
and other articulators of a liberal ideological hegemony. It located clients in new social movements
such as the feminist movement, and alternate-sexuality groups, and used
satellite structures which enforced New Right economic principles and
anti-racism. The inversion of the political
discourse in favour of internationalism and social liberalization altered the
position of Left and Right in Australian politics. The evidence showed the Left drained away in stages after
Fraser’s offensive, then through the internationalizing 1980’s, and finally
after the collapse of Soviet communism.
This Thesis established that the marxist Left was satellitized as a
conditional ally of the ‘anti-racist’ State.
It was available for auxiliary action against the Right. It also followed that a new Extreme Right
could (and did) occupy ground previously held by the Left. It followed that historical Left or labour
movement ideals passed to the Right (CIR, Voters’ Veto and Recall, National
Credit, Fortress Australia, tariff barriers).
If the Radical-Nationalists used the tradition as motif and historical
self-definitional placement, other Extreme Right groups could take on the
programmatic points.
The Extreme Right was the new
radicalism in Australian politics. This
Thesis concludes that the Extreme Right was to be managed-into-marginalization. The evidence showed that para-State methods
were pursued; the experience of the anti-Left struggles was applied, with
disruptionism, informers, dirty-tricks, show trials and criminal-conspiracy,
affected to frustrate or break chosen targets.
These methods were effective.
The State also employed anti-racial vilification legislation, Star
Chamber inquiries and sponsored an ‘ideological state apparatus’ (in
journalism, education and policy development) which imposed the liberal
ideological hegemony. Taken in tandem,
the international capitalist State successfully fended off the Extreme Right
campaign against the process of internationalization. While State policy produced resistance, it constructed new defences limiting available
political space.
This Thesis conceived Extreme Right
ideology as a central set of core principles and mythic references. This alternate system of belief could not be
impugned as recidivist neo-nazism, or otherwise coloured with propagandist
reference to the ideology and politics of either the inter-war paramilitary
Right or the anti-communist Satellite Right 1945-75.
Shared perhaps with more intensity
by the Radical-Nationalists these beliefs were defined as: denial of Aboriginal
ownership of Australia; the existence
of a crisis which threatened national identity and freedom; the sovereignty of the people to define
government; acceptance of race and
nationality as realities for the conduct of immigration and social policy; the validity of ‘nationalism’ with
opposition to internationalization; a
sense of fault in the evolution of the Australian identity or community in the
twentieth century requiring a re-ordering;
ambivalence towards the British past;
a moral order to develop a New Citizen;
an economic order, of sustainable growth, ‘protected’, supporting the
productive classes, and operating outside of the global system.
This programme was anathema to the
State and its liberal culture; but it was the inspiration for a cluster of
organizations which acted as a noisy political sub-culture. By the close of the study period, which
marked the end of the Hawke-Keating Labor era, there were signs that the
conservative sector was mobilizing older-generation Liberal-National party
voters. This group was nostalgic for
the Menzies era, and stressed by gun-control, multiculturalism, rural decline,
and Land Rights; it was dissatisfied
with its traditional allegiance.
While the activities of Campbell’s
Australia First Party and Hanson’s One Nation Party were outside the scope of
this study, this Thesis concludes that these two forces symbolised the tension
between Extreme Right and Conservative Right politics, resolved
organizationally. The rise of the ONP
does not invalidate the model advanced in this Thesis; indeed at the time this
General Conclusion was composed, there were indications that ONP’s powers of
assimilation had receded and the Extreme Right had removed itself from the
ONP’s shadow. The ONP’s disruptive and
failed course was re-encouraging the Extreme Right.
Andrew Moore concluded his doctoral
thesis with a warning:
… if the United States
was to replicate the pattern of political control used in the Third World, it
is not inconceivable that the white armies of Australia’s past could become the
death squads of the future.[1]
In the 1975-95 period, the Left withered and the
Extreme Right became an internal enemy of the State, although hardly a threat
which demanded murderous action. Only
during the height of the Hanson/One Nation Party furore in 1998, and in subtle
response to it, no less a figure than
U.S. President William Clinton in his address to the Federal Parliament,
affirmed that the superpower policeman state of the New World Order sought the
preservation of Australia’s multi-ethnic/ multicultural/open-market society. Australia’s transnational capitalist class
was assured of external support against any internal ‘nationalist’ challenge.
The future cannot be
crystal-balled. But should any Extreme
Right movement ever destabilize the State, Moore’s notion of responsive
State-terrorism would be conceivable, but this time aimed at the Right. D.H. Lawrence’s perception of Australian
unfreedom could return in its reptilian form to mock the democratic pretense of
the Australian polity. Lawson’s grim
refrain -
They needn’t say the
fault is ours if blood should stain the wattle[2]
-
would gather moral power, if not inspire the human resources for victory over the Australian State.
[1] Andrew Moore, “Send Lawyers, Guns And Money!”, p. 469.
[1] Henry Lawson, “Freedom On The Wallaby”, A Camp-Fire Yarn, p. 146.