Police in the Australian city of Melbourne have deployed pepper spray and baton rounds following “violent clashes” between protesters rallying against immigration and counter-demonstrators, according to local media.
The violence on Sunday took place as thousands of people rallied across major cities in Australia, including Sydney, Perth, Canberra and Brisbane, to demand an end to what they called “mass immigration”.
The Australian government has condemned the rallies, which took place under the banner of “March for Australia”, as racist, while Minister of Multicultural Affairs Anne Aly said the gatherings were “organised by Nazis”.
About 5,000 protesters, some draped in the Australian flag, and counter-protesters turned up in Melbourne, the SBS Network reported, citing the police.
The network said violent clashes between the two groups erupted “multiple times”, prompting the police to deploy the riot squad who used pepper spray and baton rounds to keep the groups apart.
At least six people were arrested in the city for charges including assault, according to SBS.
The Australian Associated Press news agency also reported on the violence in Melbourne.
The group behind “March for Australia” said on its website and social media that “mass migration has torn at the bonds that held our communities together” and that its rallies aimed to do “what the mainstream politicians never have the courage to do: demand an end to mass immigration”.
Critics denounced the claim, expressing concern over a rise in right-wing extremism in Australia, where one in two people is either born overseas or has a parent born overseas.
“Let’s not be coy about this. They weren’t protesting immigration from white Western countries,” said Aly, the multicultural affairs minister.
“I would say to those who marched, and who argued that they have those legitimate concerns, that they were organised by Nazis, the very purpose of them was anti-immigration,” Aly told ABC News.
There was no official comment from “March for Australia” about the Nazi allegations.
The speakers at the rally in Melbourne included prominent Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell, The Age newspaper reported. He was among a group of men wearing black who later attacked an Indigenous protest camp in Melbourne, called Camp Sovereignty, the ABC reported.
Organisers of Camp Sovereignty said in a statement that four people were injured, including a woman who was taken to hospital. The organisers also said that police did not arrive until after the men had left and made no arrests.
In Sydney, police estimated that between 5,000 to 8,000 people joined the anti-immigration protest, while the Refugee Action Coalition, a community activist organisation, held a counter-rally.
March for Australia protester Glenn Allchin told the Reuters news agency that he wanted a “slowdown” in immigration.
“It’s about our country bursting at the seams and our government bringing more and more people in,” Allchin said. “Our kids struggling to get homes, our hospitals – we have to wait seven hours – our roads, the lack of roads.”
Counter-protesters in Sydney, meanwhile, held signs pointing out that outside of Indigenous people, the vast majority of Australia’s population are immigrants. “Our event shows the depth of disgust and anger about the far right agenda of March For Australia”, a spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition said in a statement.
Far-right Australian Senator Pauline Hanson joined a few hundred people protesting in the capital, Canberra, while Bob Katter, the leader of a small populist party, attended a “March for Australia” rally in Queensland, a party spokesperson said. In the lead-up to the rally, the veteran lawmaker had threatened a reporter for mentioning Katter’s Lebanese heritage at a news conference when the topic of his attendance at a “March for Australia” event was being discussed.
“Don’t say that, because that irritates me, and I punch blokes in the mouth for saying that,” Katter had shouted at the reporter, according to SBS.
Australia’s Greens deputy leader and spokesperson for antiracism, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, said in a statement that “these rallies must be called out for what they are: acts of racist fear mongering and hate”.
Faruqi also criticised the Labor government, saying it “must end its racist dog-whistling on migrants and refugees and its crack down on pro-Palestine protesters and instead focus on the urgent implementation of the National Anti-Racism Framework”.
Australia’s spy agency has previously warned that far-right groups are on the rise in Australia and that they had become more organised and visible.
Laws banning the Nazi salute and the display or sale of symbols associated with terror groups came into effect in Australia this year, in response to a string of anti-Semitic attacks on synagogues, buildings and cars since the beginning of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023.
An Australian-born white supremacist murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in a Christchurch mosque in New Zealand in 2019.
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