When it comes to neo-Nazis, we can’t legislate our way to safety

What sort of legislation do we need to stop neo-Nazis marching through our streets and threatening our social cohesion?

It certainly makes sense to consider incremental changes such as banning the Nazi swastika and the wearing of full-face masks when protesting.

But really, the question is not what sort of legislation we need. The question is what sort of legislature - sort of parliament - will keep us safe?

It is reasonable to adjust laws to respond to changing threats, but we need to recognise we can’t legislate our way to safety. Australia already has some of the most extensive counterterrorism legislation in the world. Any changes we make now will bring – at best – incremental gains. And nothing we do is without cost and risk. If we succumb to the temptation to broaden the meaning of terrorism in the law, we will almost certainly weaken our counterterrorism apparatus and discredit it in the process.

Lessons from Germany

Instead of focusing on improving legislation, our focus needs to be on strengthening democracy. The experience of two leading Western democracies serve as salient reminders of the challenge we’re facing.

Probably no Western democracy has done more to counter Nazi and neo-Nazi ideas and their expression than modern Germany. If ever tighter legislation was going to keep us safe from the rise of fascism, it would have done so in Germany.

Sadly, that is not the case. Germany faces a massive problem of neo-Nazi recruitment in the ranks of the uniformed services and across German society, despite all the carefully constructed barriers against it.

Even more worrying is the rise of support for far-right politics in Germany. Every year the extremist Alternative Für Deutschland (AfD) party steadily gains ground, and were it not for the “firewall” designed to keep parties such as the AfD out of governing coalitions, the strength of its popular support would surely have earned it a place in government by now.

In fact, it is looking increasingly difficult to see how AfD can be kept out of power in Germany. And while it denies its clear neo-Nazi heritage, the party openly campaigns on ideas associated with white supremacists and “Germany for Germans”.

An alternative: strengthening democracy

Even more worrying than the case of Germany is that of the United States and the great Republican elephant in the room. In his first term as president, Donald Trump’s administration was divided and reluctant to implement his radical agenda. But in his second presidency, a very different administration team is working with a worrying sense of sycophantic purpose to bring about a radical reinvention of US politics and the end of US democracy as we have known it.

The Republican Party in Congress no longer works to block the president’s radical agenda. Instead, we are witnessing the implementation at scale and at a rapid pace of the radical Project 2025 plans that were carefully drawn up before Trump’s remarkable electoral victory.

The fact that court after court has declared his actions illegal does little to impede the project. The flood-the-zone strategy is clearly working and the guardrails of tradition and public expectation have shown themselves to be disturbingly weak or non-existent.

The nature of this radical agenda is seen most sharply in the ideas, and now fully implemented policy, of Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller. He has been behind the expansion and aggressive implementation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) campaign of arrest and deportation. It may not be legal for unidentified, masked ICE officers to profile Latino and other brown Americans then violently apprehend them and bundle them into unmarked vans, and disappear them to remote detention sites for weeks at a time. But that is exactly what ICE is doing.

It would be inaccurate to call Miller a neo-Nazi. But what is not debatable is that he is openly supporting, and implementing, white supremacist “great replacement” ideas without any sense of shame or any level of accountability. Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill expanded the ICE budget to the point it is larger than all but a few of the world’s national militaries.

The campaigning ahead of the 2025 federal elections in Australia saw some political actors promoting a narrative based on the politics of fear. They were spectacularly unsuccessful, and that that should give us confidence in our democratic system.

But we cannot afford to take it for granted that we will not quickly face the sort of problems currently seen in Germany and the US. Australia has a long history of institutionalised racism, from the frontier wars through the decades of the white Australia policy, and the demonising of asylum seekers arriving by boat.

At the same time our social cohesion holds strong. Each week, thousands take to the street to protest peacefully. So far, the extremist elements who would seek to take advantage of this have gained little traction.

As ugly and pathetic as the sight of neo-Nazis grandstanding in public places is, we must not let their attention-seeking define our framing of the problem. In an open society, there will always be fringe elements saying and doing things that lie on the very edge of the law and that challenge mainstream sensibilities.

In the weeks before the recent anti-immigration marches, Australians of colour experienced the chilling fear that can come from these kinds of political stunts.

But the real risk in Australia comes not from the shrill voices of fascist extremists prancing in public places. Rather, it comes from a slide into the wholesale demonising of migrants in our public discourse. If we can address this, not only will we see fewer Australians drawn to the ugly intolerance and open racism of neo-Nazism, we will be doing the one thing that can really make us safer: strengthening our democracy.

Greg Barton receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is engaged in a range of projects funded by the Australian government that aim to understand and counter violent extremism in Australia and in Southeast Asia and Africa.