Why Did NSW Authorities Simply Wave the Anti-immigration March Through?

Thousands of mainly white Australians gathered on Gadigal land in Sydney’s Belmore Park on Sunday, 31 August 2025 to call for an end to immigration, and the fact that neo-Nazis would be taking part was known prior. Yet, when the NSW police congratulated itself on its handling of the freedom fighters afterwards, it failed to explain why this expression of hate towards much of the population was unproblematic.

Everybody has a right to protest. But constituents also have a right against being targeted with racism. The NSW premier Chris Minns rushed to pass hate crime offences earlier in the year, in an apparent effort to curb violent incidents targeting Jewish people. But there were no such concerns about the various ethnicities copping it in an exceedingly public manner prior to the 31 August 2025 rally.

Successive NSW police commissioners have attempted to shut down various protests, via the courts, that they considered should not go ahead. Most recently, they sought to prevent the history-making 3 August 2025 mass antigenocide march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, they attempted to close down a climate protest last year, while in mid-2022, they tried to end a huge Black Lives Matter rally.

Posts spruiking the March for Australia started appearing anonymously on social media in early August. These posts were attributed to the far-right Freedom movement that sprung up over the COVID period, while the involvement of neo-Nazis known as the National Socialist Network (NSN), became clear soon afterwards, when they claimed the march as their own.

And during a press conference in relation to an incident on Tuesday, 2 August 2025 that involved Palestinian men being attacked by antiimmigration protesters on a train following the rally for racism, NSW Green MLC Sue Higginson and Palestine Action Group’s Josh Lees decried the premier for simply waving the Southern Cross flag-wrapped white supremacist march through the multicultural city.

The red-carpet treatment

“Where is Chris Minns and the leadership here in NSW?” asked Higginson, before reporters on 2 September. “What he said before this rally that took place on Sunday was, ‘I don’t want to unnecessarily alarm anyone. Everyone is okay to go out and the police have got this in hand.’”

“He knew these rallies, like all of us knew, these rallies were organised by Nazis and far-right extremists. It is just unfathomable that a premier of this state would not have stood before this rally took place and condemned it and condemned the organisers,” the Greens justice spokesperson clarified. “We need to wake up to the far-right that has now risen and shown its form.”

Higginson added that the state has now experienced hate crimes as a result of the white supremacist march emboldening far-right actors and she stressed that the wholesale “impunity” that the white horde had on full display on Sunday, was the sort of impunity that “only comes when you believe you have the state on your side”.

Condemning the NSW premier for not having taken action in the face of a mass white supremacist rally targeting migrants is all the more jarring when considering the Labor leader has been charged by parts of parliament with having been too enthusiastic in having passed hate crime legislation earlier this year, when he was potentially aware the incidents warranting the laws were being staged.

“It is time for Chris Minns to take a proper stand here in NSW against far-right extremism,” Higginson continued. “He told NSW when there was a march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge for peace, a pro-Palestine rally, calling out Israel’s brutal genocide on the Palestinian people in Gaza, he said, “We are going to fall into chaos.” That is not what happened.”

Drunk with impunity

Two Palestinian brothers, Shamikh and Majed Dadra, were on the train on their way home from the regular Palestine Action Group rallies that have been going on for close to two years on Gadigal land in Sydney city, when the pair were accosted by four men, who’d just been to the white supremacist festival in the city and were drunk on racism. The brothers have made a clip about the incident.

The Dadras were called out because one of them was wearing a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian scarf, and one of their assailants said, “If you want to fight for Palestine, go back to Palestine and fight there.” The man then demanded that the scarf be taken off. Then they shouted, as they started shoving, “Get the fuck out of Australia. We don’t want you in our country.”

The brothers make clear that this was a targeted hate crime, of which they tried to deescalate, via moving to another part of the train, but when they did so, the aggressive racist men followed them, as they screamed, gestured and sized them up. Then the white men started pushing and shoving the brothers, accusing them of “getting free money”.

“This was anti-Palestinian racism: a racially and politically motivated assault. No one should ever be attacked for their identity. Hate speech fuels hate crimes. When safety and justice are in jeopardy, we all are at risk,” wrote Shamikh and Majed in ending their short video clip, and the former brother was present at Tuesday’s press conference.

In light of the nationwide antiimmigration protest, UNSW Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law Scientia Professor Jane McAdam wrote in the Conversation on Monday, that the paranoid and false impressions that many of these white supremacists have about migrants are due to decades of government misinformation and demonisation of refugees and immigrants, and it’s time for change.

Marching Nazis make us all unsafe

“Before this far-right extremist rally took place on Sunday, he told people not to be unnecessarily bothered. Before the march across the Harbour Bridge ‘for humanity’, he sent the police to the Supreme Court to try to stop it,” Higginson continued, in respect of premier Minns’ responses. “Something is going dreadfully wrong in the premier’s mind about what leadership looks like.”

“NSW, right now, is not a safe state, and it is not a safe place for people and Chris Minns needs to take hold of the reins and show leadership and lead on what it looks like to be a state free of racism and far-right extremism.”

Lees suggested, in relation to the antiimmigration protests and the attack on the train, that years of demonising the pro-Palestinian movement has helped fuel the flames of racism and violence that erupted across city streets continentwide. The suggestion has been that those calling for an end to the most devastating mass killing in Gaza have been racist and hateful for calling out the murderers.

Livestreamed genocide going on close to two years is going to lead to violence elsewhere. The dehumanisation of the Palestinian people on display via the commission of such unbridled violence means that such callous and base attitudes are easier to come by and hold true to, and that’s why these crimes are taken to be against the whole of humanity: we are all less safe because of Gaza.

“This has helped to give confidence to the kinds of far-right racists, who have organised and led this protest on Sunday, and attacked our friend Shamikh here,” Lees told the press. “We need to hold the media to account and our politicians to account that have helped to fuel this kind of sentiment in society. We are a movement that has been trying to peacefully protest to stop a genocide.”

“The other shocking thing that we have seen over the last few days since the Nazi rally is that many politicians have had much harsher words to say about our peaceful Palestine movement than they have about an open Nazi rally calling for mass deportation of all nonwhite people in this country,” said the Palestine activist, and he named the PM and the premier as having been particularly soft.