August 13, 2025

Flash Report: August is Active Month for Australian Far-Right

TLDR

An anti-immigration “March for Australia” is being organized for August 31. The protest is being promoted on Telegram, TikTok, X, and other social media, and various Australian far-right groups have voiced support. This comes on the heels of an August 9, 2025, neo-Nazi rally in Melbourne.

Organizing

Plans for an August 31, 2025, anti-immigration rally dubbed the March for Australia are being circulated online. Demonstrations are being organized in nearly every Australian capital city.

Image of plans for an August 31 rally in Australia are shared over an image of an Australian flag. — *News of the August 31 protest is posted in an NSN-linked Telegram channel.*

News of the rally has been shared in various far-right and neo-Nazi spaces online, including in Telegram channels for known Australian neo-Nazi groups such as the National Socialist Network (NSN) and the European Australian Movement (EAM).¹ High profile leaders of the extreme right have also boosted this call, including Joel Davis and Thomas Sewell.²

The organizers for March for Australia, who have not publicly affiliated themselves with any movement, have publicly distanced themselves from Sewell.³ ⁴

This all comes on the back of an active weekend for the NSN in the state of Victoria, where the group hosted their “winter national” summit. The weekend kicked off with a march through Melbourne’s Central Business District (CBD) on Saturday August 9 at 1 am.⁵ The rally, which saw individuals dressed in black with their faces covered and carrying a banner that read “white man fight back,” was the largest of its kind according to its organizers.

Following this, members of the NSN gathered in the Victorian countryside for a weekend-long event⁶ that included a powerlifting competition, music, and speeches.

Context

According to The Noticer, a far-right Australian news outlet that we have previously reported on, the August 31 rally is in response to the burning of an Australian flag at a pro-Palestine protest in Melbourne on August 3.⁷⁸ Flag burning is legal in Australia.⁹

Open Measures researchers consulted the WHOIS data for the March for Australia website (marchforaustralia[.]org), which revealed that the site was created on August 8, 2025, just days after the flag burning incident.¹⁰ In the website’s “About” section, there is a picture someone holding a burning Australian flag, though they do not address it directly.

Screenshot from the March for Australia website's About section, which includes a picture of an Australian flag burning. — *The “About” section on the March for Australia website calls for an “end to mass migration” and features a picture of a masked individual holding a burning Australian flag.*

Why We’re Tracking

While the politics of the organizers of March for Australia are unknown, it is clear that the action has excited those on the Australian extreme right.

Some events with NSN members present have led to violence in the past. At the August 9 rally in the Melbourne CBD, one man who confronted the marchers was allegedly assaulted, while over the weekend two members of the press who sought to report on the group’s weekend summit were likewise allegedly attacked.¹¹

The former Telegram channel for the NSN was banned around February 21, 2025,¹² nearly a month after a January 26 incident in which over a dozen NSN members were arrested on Australia Day for offenses such as failure to cease loitering and the display of Nazi symbols. The latest NSN Telegram channel was created on March 10.

Open Measures researchers will continue to monitor the NSN and other extremist movements.

“Identify disinformation and extremism with the Open Measures platform.

Organizations use Open Measures’ tooling every day to track trends related to networks of influence, coordinated harassment campaigns, and state-backed info ops. Click here to book a demo.”