Hollow Applause

The attack on Camp Sovereignty and how ordinary fears are giving cover to extraordinary hate.

Camp Sovereignty

It had all the hallmarks of a massacre apart from the body count. An Aboriginal camp at dusk on the edge of town, most of its custodians elsewhere, only a few left to defend it. Out of the chilled evening gloom, a menace of figures, dressed in black, emerged to commit a planned attack steeped in hate. To claim something that was not theirs by destroying it; an act of terrorism. A scene played out hundreds of times since invasion.

Neo-Nazis, some wrapped in puffer jackets so as not to catch a cold while terrorising others, stormed Camp Sovereignty in King’s Domain; a sacred space of protest and mourning. They stomped on a fire, tore down a flag, swung poles and pipes, and targeted women. Four people were injured, two hospitalised with head wounds. Who knows what would have happened if there were no witnesses, no-one to film their deeds, had it been out in the middle of the bush somewhere.

The applause on the steps of parliament earlier in the day spilled into terror a few blocks away, granting these men the illusion of validation. They mistook noise for meaning and swaggered into violence as if hatred could elevate them. The line between rhetoric and violence dissolved. And with it, the thin veil of civility.

I listen to talkback for my sins. Yesterday morning, a woman called in with a certainty that was impossible to ignore. She said she was going to the anti-immigration rally for her grandchildren, to give them the life she and her husband had enjoyed. She framed it as a generational duty, an act of love. Her voice trembled with conviction, but also with fear: that the Australia she knew was slipping away. Fear can feel like love when you clutch it hard enough.

What she didn’t mention was that on the same stage where she planted her hopes, a different future was being preached. A neo-Nazi was handed the microphone. His words weren’t about family or safety. They were words crafted in hate, aimed at communities that have built and sustained this country for decades and they were met not with silence, but with applause.

That applause lingers, hollow and haunting. What’s being normalised at these rallies is not just frustration with housing or cost-of-living pressures. It is the enthronement of voices that thrive on division, the venom of hate dressed in patriotism. That a woman could speak tenderly of her grandchildren, then stand beside men in black shirts cheering a neo-Nazi, reveals the brutal blur between fear, grievance and extremism. It was always here, flung for a time to the fringes, but in 2025 it has been emboldened and embraced as public discourse, pushed by algorithms, shock jocks, and the cancer of two-sideism that has seeped into newsrooms everywhere.

At the rally, some carried placards about overcrowding and housing costs, others wrapped themselves in the flag. But alongside them stood men whose politics were rooted not in economic anxiety but in racial supremacy. The lines blurred as they chanted together, grievances merging into one. The crowd became a single voice, stripped of nuance, heavy with menace.

Confrontation was inevitable. Counter-protesters, anti-fascists, refugee advocates, the weekly pro-Palestine gathering, assembled across the CBD. Police on horseback, with pepper spray at the ready, formed walls between the groups. The city’s usual hum gave way to sirens, chants, and the acrid sting of capsicum spray. Six arrests, but the real measure was in the atmosphere - anger, fear, defiance colliding in the heart of the city. The air itself felt bruised.

On the airwaves that evening, more callers like the grandmother insisted their attendance was about protecting family. Rarely do they admit, even to themselves, that in standing in those crowds, they lend their presence, their applause, their silence, to movements that openly celebrate hate. That is the story of these rallies: not just the extremists who thrive on attention, but the everyday people who give them cover.

The Attack

These happenings don’t exist in a vacuum. They are the culmination of decades of conditioning, the drip of fearmongering headlines, the nightly talkback outrage cycle, and profit-driven algorithms that feed grievance back to the aggrieved. Anger is engagement, and engagement is revenue. Entire business models are built on keeping people frightened of their neighbours, resentful of their workmates, suspicious of the very communities that make this country whole.

But this is more than media cycles now, so much more. Social media algorithms have rewired brains, dulled empathy, and stripped away nuance. They reward outrage, punish reflection, and train users to seek validation in rage. Whole generations have had their nervous systems hijacked by the constant drip of dopamine tied to grievance and contempt. It is not just the public square that is corroded, but the private self, reshaped by feeds designed to divide. The damage is cellular.

The press has played its part. In the name of “balance,” racism is too often placed on one side of the ledger, human dignity on the other, as though the two were moral equals. This two-sideism masquerades as neutrality, but it is nothing of the sort. By reporting extremes without scrutiny, repeating talking points without interrogating their truth, the media has helped launder hate into something that looks like just another opinion, something to be nodded along to, debated, and eventually normalised.

When hate is normalised, the ground is prepared for escalation.

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that neo-Nazis felt emboldened to march openly yesterday, or that their terror was visited upon Camp Sovereignty. What was once unimaginable; fascists attacking a sacred space of protest and mourning, became, under this steady drip of grievance and indulgence, almost inevitable. Yesterday’s applause for hate speech is not a rupture. It is a continuation and continuations are harder to stop than beginnings.

The human cost is borne by the same people, again and again. By the Aboriginal community whose sovereignty and survival are mocked in chants and defiled in attacks. By migrants and refugees whose lives are reduced to slogans about overcrowding, as though their existence were a problem to be solved rather than a story to be lived. By children who watch their elders booed during a Welcome to Country, inheriting a world where hatred is rebranded as patriotism. These wounds are not metaphorical. They are bruises, gashes, scars on the pscyche of the margianalised, another blight on the history of this place.

What is stripped away is not only safety, though that is urgent. It is also belonging. The sense that this is a place where difference can be lived without fear, where families of all backgrounds can imagine futures free of violence stoked against them. When neo-Nazis are handed microphones and applauded, the message to those already marginalised is unmistakable: you are not safe, you are not wanted. Silence in the face of that message makes it louder still.

In all of this it only occurred to me last night that perhaps the most damaging seven words uttered in the last decade were, “when they go low, we go high.” It means we’re meeting the threat on an imagined battlefield and not a real one. There is a thesis to be written on why, and on the cost of that posture. But what we know is this; if we are to put this vileness back in its box, we must use every measure at our disposal. A first, obvious step would be for our security agencies to classify Nazis and Sovereign citizens as terrorist movements.

The rest is up to the community, holding fast to the truth that violence is never the answer. Courage will be demanded, not requested.

What stands before us now is not just another protest, but a reckoning with who we are willing to become. Hatred once muttered in the shadows now parades through the streets, draped in flags and cheered by those who mistake fear for devotion. It is emboldened and thirsty for the spotlight.

If we fail to act, we risk losing not only safety, but the fragile promise that this country could one day choose care over cruelty, solidarity over suspicion.

The choice is stark. Either we look away, or we stand against the corrosion of our common life before it hardens into permanence. The hour is late, but not yet lost. What we decide now will echo long after the chants have faded, in the kind of country our children inherit, and in the kind of people we dare to be.