Terrorism Threat from White Male Teens Is on the Rise in Australia

A 17-year-old white Australian male was arrested by federal police on Ngunnawal land in Canberra on 5 November 2025, as the teen was allegedly plotting a chemical attack on a local in public in aid of sparking a white “nationalist and racial” revolt. And as law enforcement considered charging him with terrorism, the incident, again, highlights the growing white nationalist threat in this country.

The Age reported on 13 November 2025, that the white teenager was plotting a livestreamed chemical attack in public with likeminded neo-Nazis online, in order to stoke rising white nationalist sentiment. And following the raid a fortnight ago in the ACT, the Australian federal police are now confident that the threat to public safety the white teen posed had been serious.

Unnamed for legal reasons, the boy was in the preparatory stages of planning the attack, as he was gathering intel and equipment to stage it. This included military clothing, an imitation gun and a gas mask. The AFP allege the boy was planning to attack an unspecified nonwhite homeless person with chlorine gas to stoke racial hatred, and he’d been receiving advice from local and overseas actors.

The idea that white Australian teens are considering and perpetrating such politically motivated terrorism attacks in public continues to be a fringe understanding. But the fact of the matter is a significant rise in white male teen incidents has been apparent over the last two years. And ASIO warned of this rising phenomena when raising the terror threat to probable in August 2024.

The white male teen terrorism incident has not made the front page, neither has the other notable incident that occurred earlier this year at Victoria’s Avalon Airport and nor has the trifecta of incidents that transpired in NSW over 2024, been widely acknowledged.

Yet, recent months have seen several white nationalist protests, as well a number of high-profile neo-Nazi turnouts, which have alerted the public to the threat of rising white supremacy.

White terrorism hijacking incident

Another white male teen terrorism incident occurred on 6 March 2025 on Wadawurrung land at Avalon Airport in the northeastern Victorian town of Lara. The 17-year-old boy entered the airport’s runway area via a hole in the fence and attempted to hijack a plane. The boy was carrying a loaded shotgun as he boarded a Jetstar flight, and he told those on board that his bag contained bombs.

The young male was arrested on site, after being tackled by a passenger from the flight. The teenager has been charged with multiple criminal offences, including unlawfully taking control of an aircraft, possessing a firearm, endangering aircraft safety and carrying out a bomb hoax. The boy did not apply for bail, and he has been on remand ever since.

The yet-to-be-named teenager appeared in court again on 15 October, at which point his case was delayed, as his lawyer was awaiting a psychological assessment, which includes examination of brain scans. The presiding judge also determined to extend the suppression order already imposed on the matter, as per an AFP request.

Since the 2001 9/11 attacks and the resulting focus on prosecuting terror laws, Australian authorities have been incapable or reluctant to charge white Australians with terrorism, while charging Middle Eastern people has posed no issue. A 24 April 2024 Australian Muslim Advocacy Network (AMAN) briefing note revealed that only one white Australian had ever been prosecuted on terror charges.

White teen terrorism not so terrifying

The first of three white teen terrorism attacks in New South Wales over 2024 occurred on Awabakal and Worimi land in the NSW town of Newcastle on 26 June, as a 19-year-old teen entered into the electoral office of NSW Labor MP Tim Crakanthorp, while wearing a military uniform and a helmet and carrying a knife that he planned to remove the politician’s head with. But the boy fled at the last minute.

The second incident saw a 14-year-old white male stab a 22-year-old Chinese man in the back at Sydney University on 1 July 2024. The teen had previously been under police scrutiny over favourable comments he’d made about the far-right perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre. And police described him as having a “salad bar of ideologies” and therefore, couldn’t label him rightwing.

White Australian man Sebastian Newman was charged with two terrorism offences in Sutherland Local Court on 1 August 2024, over an incident that occurred the week prior at Westfield Miranda Shopping Centre that involved the 21-year-old setting off homemade bombs in the men’s toilets at the mall. And he was also considered to harbour “mixed and unclear ideological beliefs”.

As reflected in the Newman case, it is expected that with the rise in white nationalists willing to perpetrate terroismr acts, more white Australians will be prosecuted over terrorism moving forward. The recent appearance of the “mixed ideologies” scenario, whereby a far-right actor is deemed to hold some leftist beliefs, is a further sign of the establishment being reluctant to call out white terror.

The young Sydney uni stabber and the Canberra teen plotting a chemical attack were both influenced by Christchurch massacre killer Brenton Tarrant, who was raised on Bundjalung, Gumbaynggirr and Yaegl land in the NSW town of Grafton. And despite the white Australian having gunned down 51 Muslims at worship, the Australian state has continued to resist condemning him as a terrorist.

White men can terrorise

ASIO director general Mike Burgess and Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese stood before the press on 5 August last year, to announce that the country’s National Terrorism Threat Level had been raised from ‘possible’ to ‘probable’ in light of a rising internal threat stemming from “youth radicalisation, online radicalisation and the rise of new mixed ideologies”.

Burgess then noted that there had been eight terrorism incidents over the four months prior to the announcement and he outlined that at least four of them were down to far right or mixed ideologies, which would indicate that four of these suggested terrorism incidents were perpetrated by white Australians.

An announcement such as this, that half of all terrorism incidents in the local setting were being put down to white Australian actors, is an idea that was previously unheard of and would have been regarded as a highly unlikely scenario.

And while the most recent incident involving a Canberra teen plotting to spark a white revolution has occurred quite some time after an alleged white terrorist tried to hijack a plane at Avalon Airport, the threat of rising white nationalism, white supremacist ideology and neo-Nazism has shifted so it now involves potential widespread uptake of these ideologies via a rising protest movement.

Three nationwide white nationalist antiimmigration protests took place over August to October this year, with a fourth such rally occurring later this month. The neo-Nazi umbrella group, the National Socialist Network (NSN), was involved in the first rally on 31 August, which further saw neo-Nazis in Naarm-Melbourne storming First People’s sacred site Camp Sovereignty.

However, somewhat reflecting that Australian authorities are not quite up to adequately dealing with the white nationalist threat simply because of the nation’s white nationalist past, NSN neo-Nazis rallied outside NSW parliament on 8 November this year.

Indeed, despite the rebranded neo-Nazis, now known as the White Australia Party, having noted to NSW police that they were planning on demonstrating against the ‘Jewish lobby’, which they consider includes Zionist and non-Zionist organisations, as well as pro-Jewish groups but not the entire community, state law enforcement left it unchallenged, which resulted in its authorisation.