Neo-Nazis staged a disruption at Melbourne’s Anzac Day dawn service, interrupting the Welcome to Country ceremony with boos and jeers. I’m sure you already know this, as it’s been all over the news – and that’s exactly what we need to talk about.

The corporate mainstream media outlets were predictably, and performatively, outraged. Here are some of the headlines of the reporting from 7News, the Herald Sun, News-dot-com, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. 

But these same media outlets helped this happen. They amplify and normalise fascist and white supremacist ideas and people frequently. 

On Anzac Day, while News-dot-com (owned by News Corp) was running headlines like “Neo-Nazi condemned for booing Anzac Day Dawn Service”, it was also running ads by Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots party with the slogan “Sick of being welcomed to our country”.

The same Clive Palmer ad ran on the front page of the The Age newspaper on the same day, despite the headlines in their online live blog focusing on how leaders “slammed” and “condemned” the Neo-Nazis, calling them “disgusting”.

Channel 7 had Sunrise co-host Nat Barr “blasting” the extremist disrupters – so decent of her – but don’t forget that this is the very same Seven Network was all too happy to help Pauline Hanson improve her image by having her as a contestant on Dancing With the Stars. This is the same woman who has said Australia was being swamped by Asians, and then swamped by Muslims, that African immigrants are diseased, and has been convicted of racial discrimination. Channel 7 was more than happy to make her more likeable by putting her on a prime time, family reality show. Then again, Dancing With The Stars is hosted by racist and Gold Logie winner Sonia Kruger. So I guess that tracks.

But easily the worst example I saw on the day was this awful piece of ‘analysis’ on The Age, which originally had the headline: Welcome to Country hecklers did more harm than good to their culture war cause. (They have since changed the headline.)

The article attempts to explain how neo-Nazis and extremists hijack the culture war topics that politicians use to score points against each other – in this case, literal Nazis have co-opted Peter Dutton and the Coalition’s (stupid) policy to cut funding for Welcome to Country ceremonies. But it completely ignores journalists and the media’s role in helping Nazis do this!

The article says: “The far-right hecklers who disrupted the Welcome to Country ceremonies at Friday morning’s Anzac Day services in Melbourne and Perth were quickly condemned as fringe actors. But what they shouted – “We don’t need to be welcomed,” according to reports – has become a common refrain. It is repeated with rising frequency in conservative debates about Welcomes to Country on social media, in Sky News segments and even the Senate.”

The grievance with Welcome to Country ceremonies is a niche grievance. The vast majority of people have no issue; at the Melbourne Dawn Service attended by 50,000 people only a handful booed – the rest drowned them out with applause for Uncle Mark Brown, who was delivering the ceremony.

When The Age journalist writes that hate for welcome ceremonies is increasing, here is what they conveniently left out:

“‘We don’t need to be welcomed,’ according to reports – has become a common refrain.” The ‘reports’ that insist this is a common sentiment are written by journalists, who have full control over what they report on, who they interview, and what quotes they include. It’s a circular argument: the media interviews people who hate welcome ceremonies; reports that many people hate welcome ceremonies; and then later refers back to those same reports as evidence that many people hate welcome ceremonies.

“It is repeated with rising frequency in conservative debates about Welcomes to Country on social media…” Social media comments expressing hate for welcome ceremonies would be very common… on Facebook posts of news articles that focus on the hate for welcome ceremonies. Again, this is a cyclical argument – these media outlets create the rage bait, post it to social media, and then point to the rage that they helped manufacture as ‘evidence’. This line also weirdly assumes that ‘conservative debates’ are the only relevant debates, but I digress…

“...in Sky News segments and even the Senate.” I mean, this is just mask-off stuff. Is Sky News, an explicitly hard-right pay TV channel, representative of the majority view? Sky News spends a lot of time on topics that the general public doesn’t really care about; their obsessions are not automatically evidence of a legitimate trend.

The Age and this journalist have the power to tell the public that “we don’t need to be welcome” is becoming a more popular view, and have manufactured their own justification to insist on this. That is exactly what neo-Nazis want.

How do I know? Because they literally say that! A few years ago, a manual for an Australian neo-Nazi organisation was leaked, revealing their strategy: “Activists are responsible for bringing the national socialist message to white Australians, staging media provocations to make the organisation itself better known and recruiting suitably committed people into the organisation.”

The man who orchestrated the Anzac Day stunt is the main figurehead of the organisation that manual comes from. They don’t actually care if the coverage is negative or critical, because being amplified as legitimate helps draw people to them anyway.

The final similar-but-unrelated example I want to show you is this ABC profile of Lee Hanson, Pauline Hanson’s daughter who is running for the Senate in Tasmania. The very first line of this article calls Pauline one of Australia’s “most loved” politicians. It describes Lee as a softer, more modern and palatable version of Pauline, but Lee herself says “I have, ultimately, the same values and opinions”.

The language throughout is soft, almost glowing at times. There appears to be no pushback from the journalist at all. And while it does go over Pauline’s extensive history of public racism, hatred and fraud, the subheading for this section is: “A colourful and controversial career”.

Just cool and normal stuff, hey?

– Crystal
& Chief of Everything at Zee Feed
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Smart stuff on the Internet 💭

All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:

‘Worked perfectly’: how wildlife team finally caught Valerie the dachshund after 529 days on the lam on Guardian Australia
I am obsessed with Valerie the sausage dog and her story is a really nice break to the drudgery of the rest of the news. “Exhausted and relieved, the Kangala Wildlife Rescue team have revealed precisely how they finally caught Valerie the dachshund, after 529 days on the run in Kangaroo Island, South Australia. ‘There was no way we were letting that sausage dog run away on us again,’ Jared said in an update posted to social media. Valerie’s owners, Georgia Gardner and Josh Fishlock, are said to be ‘over the moon’.”

The Evolution of the Alpha Male Aesthetic on Bloomberg
Die Workwear is a brilliant men’s fashion commentator who explains the history and politics of men’s fashion and suiting. This piece on why MAGA guys dress like that is long but great! “[Slim-fit clothing] is the uniform of fitness influencers and grindset entrepreneurs, who populate a sprawling online ecosystem shaped by modern anxieties about masculinity … These men may differ in tone, but they share an ideal: masculinity is under siege, and the only way forward is to optimize, aestheticize and dominate. For them, the body is a billboard for self-mastery, and slim-fit clothing is the wrapping that proves it.”

The Ecosystem of Hate on The Spencer Street End substack
Yorta Yorta journalist Daniel James writing far more powerfully than I about the Anzac Day stuff. “This is the ecosystem of hate. From the Parliament to the press to the streets. The disruption at the Shrine didn’t happen in a vacuum. It is, in many ways, a logical outcome of the steady mainstreaming of far-right rhetoric in Australia, made palatable by sanitised political soundbites and monetised by media corporations, traditional and new, all too eager to bank the profits.”

If you’ll indulge me, I want to re-share two articles that I wrote around the time of the 2022 election that are still (unfortunately) very relevant to the 2025 election:

Everything to Consider When Voting For an Independent Candidate in This Election: I am generally supportive of the Climate 200 cause! But when I asked the organisation questions about diversity in 2022, they ignore them (while answering other questions I sent). C200 did not fund any non-white candidates in that election, and they have not done so in this election either – food for thought. “Do these candidates represent a change, or do they represent the existing political elite? This is not a criticism of the individuals, but of the system.”

Hear Me Out: The Liberal Party is Not The Opposition Anymore: This was from 2023, and it’s only become more clear how far gone the Libs are. “But what does it really mean for us that one half of our two-party system is unable to do its job in government? Reframing our understanding of who is playing the Opposition role in parliament might help explain why the Labor government isn’t doing what we thought and hoped it would.”

If you found this email thought-provoking, will you share it with a friend? Sharing helps us grow 🌱 and makes you look really smart.