Category: Australia

‘Keen to do a sticker run’

Well before neo-Nazi propaganda began appearing this year at sites around the city of Wollongong and in Sydney’s CBD, the man calling himself Underland had started networking online across Australia’s extremist scene. Records of his communications from him obtained by this masthead reveal Telegram served as the perfect platform. It allowed him to mask his identity as he sought counsel and new introductions from entrenched extremist figures.

After Underland had been directed towards the Melbourne-based European Australian Movement on a Telegram-hosted neo-Nazi channel, Underland began communicating. His contact with him uses the alias “Aussie Meditations”. In February, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald identified the user of this alias as Stefan Eracleous, a former young Liberal member turned neo-Nazi from Victoria. Eracleous was responsible for a January 19 propaganda video depicting three masked neo-Nazis burning an Aboriginal flag, reciting a white supremacist manifesto and attacking Greens senator Lidia Thorpe.

In May, Underland asked Eracleous what “stickers have you got an [sic] how much are they… Me and a few of the boys are keen to do a sticker run.”

Eracleous responded swiftly, offering extremist stickers and posters that were “very cheap and good designs.”

It is unclear if Eracleous helped Underland obtain neo-Nazi material, but it seems likely. After the pair’s exchange of messages, Underland embarked on a propaganda campaign around Wollongong, placing stickers and posters up at several sites.

One of Underland’s aims appears to have been recruited. Posters encouraged people to connect with his new neo-Nazi cell, the Illawarra Active, via its dedicated Telegram page. Young Australians were particular targets, with graffiti, stickers and posters posted on walls and signs at the University of Wollongong. Underland and a small number of others also targeted local migrant communities. One Telegram post uploaded by the group shows it placing “Islamists not welcome” posters at Wollongong’s Omar mosque.

Budding racists who responded to the request to follow Illawarra Active’s Telegram account were confronted online with material that became increasingly disturbing. On May 21, the account shared a video promoting the European Australia Movement and urged supporters to help “free” one of its leaders. The man is on bail in Melbourne while facing charges relating to an assault allegation. His case of him has been turned into a rallying point by neo-Nazi groups across Australia.

On June 2, the Illawarra Active account shared material created by a group that is proscribed as a terrorist organization in Australia, the overseas-based National Socialist Order. It included a video outlining the core beliefs set out in a white supremacist book, siegewhich has been used as inspiration by terrorist actors across the world and which champions violent conflict with mainstream society.

‘Terrorgram’

The New Zealand Royal Commission called after the Christchurch massacre noted the Australian terrorist who committed the atrocity was an adherent to the views espoused in siegeparticularly the idea that violent action should be embraced to accelerate the reach and power of white nationalism.

The number of Australians who responded to the propaganda drive by following the Illawarra Active’s Telegram account appears to have been no more than about 50 at any time, even after the group gained a publicity bounce from an Illawarra Mercury story on June 6 headlined “Police investigate the ‘white supremacy, neo-Nazi’ flyers found at University of Wollongong campus”.

But while the group remains small, its Telegram channel reveals devoted followers using the encrypted platform to communicate, publicize events and liaise with other neo-Nazi cells across Australia.

Researchers from the US’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism recently described how Telegram had enabled the formation of a so-called “Terrorgram” community, which uses the encrypted platform as “the main point of online organizing, identity building, propaganda distribution, and more”.

The researchers analyzed thousands of Telegram messages from two new militant neo-Nazi networks to form insights into their “diffuse networks” and how they relate to the “threats of real-world violence they pose”.

The report warns that even small online cells may pose a tangible terror risk, citing the June 2021 warning of a terror plot in Texas by a member of one of the two networks analyzed in the report.

“Telegram is in many ways an ideal platform for dangerous actors. It has good functionality, communications are encrypted, its user base is expanding and content moderation is practically non-existent,” says Lydia Khalil, a Lowy Institute research fellow and author of the upcoming book Rise of the Extreme Right.

Evident in Underland’s Telegram history is a hunger to move off the internet and into the real world. In one message thread with the Adelaide terror suspect, Eracleous and several EAM members, Underland discusses buying a large block of land to “set up a decent community” and creating a White Australia political party. Political or racist violence is a deliberate theme in many posts.

Unintended consequences

But Underland’s online activity also has an unintended consequence, revealing a series of clues about his true identity. Three years of his internet posting of him, reviewed by anti-fascist researchers from The White Rose Society, reveals a job (arborist), a first name (Adrian) and a middle initial (J), all pointing to a 34-year-old old Wollongong man called Adrian John Carr.

More online digging shows that Carr used his real email and name to set up a Skype account. Its profile photo displays the name Underland. An archived Twitter account reveals a similar link between Carr and the alias Underland.

When called by this masthead, Carr denied he was Underland, claiming his various social media accounts had been hacked. “I got defrauded, my identity got stolen,” he said. He did confirm, however, that he was the author of a since-deleted post from his Facebook page that described Jews as “scum”.

Carr’s fellow cell members include Wollongong man Ben Thomas, 36, whose identity is given away by the distinctive hand tattoos that appear both on his Facebook page and on the Illawarra Active’s Telegram page. Thomas’s hands can be seen on some of the cell’s propaganda videos plastering neo-Nazi propaganda around Wollongong. He could not be reached for comment.

Another cell member, 30-year-old Geoff Abel, shares with Carr and Thomas a history of police attention for alleged criminal activity, with Abel spending several stints in jail.

A NSW man who had been approached to join the group described Carr as its key actor and noted its members had nearly all experienced family and mental instability and trauma as younger men. The man, who asked to remain confidential, blamed “people on the internet” for radicalizing Carr.

“I don’t like what AJ [Adrian] is doing. I don’t like the hate that is being spread. But you need to ask, ‘why is Adrian the way he is? What is causing these young men in the regions to slip through the cracks?’”

A global challenge

The young men in Illawarra Active appear to relish the brotherhood formed first in the Telegram neo-Nazi community and then in person, as they urge each other on to become more radical.

As overseas researchers have observed of European and American Telegram neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, the Australian “terrorgram” community is also notable not only for its extremist camaraderie, but its resilience.

The chats involving Carr and his fellow cell members appear to observe the recent arrest of like-minded Australians by the federal police counter-terror teams as reason to continue their fight, rather than to rethink their views.

It also shows how quickly a small band of disorganized and disillusioned men from regional Australia can fall into the orbit of highly organized international extremist groups. The National Socialist Order is banned in Australia as a terror group, but Illawarra Active has freely shared its propaganda online.

Terror watcher Khalil says local extremist groups are increasingly reaching over state and international borders.

“Right-wing groups are increasingly convinced they must organize globally to meet global challenges,” she says.

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That’s why the most important economic event of recent times is not the latest rise in interest rates, it’s last month’s State of the Environment report – whose release was delayed until we found a government with the courage to break the bad news.

The report’s significance is not only its roll call of how much damage we’ve done so far, but its account of the way that damage is damaging the humans who’ve done it.

We’ve been damaging the environment in many ways – loss of habitat and species, introduction of invasive animals and plants, pollution and waste disposal, salinity and other damage to soil and waterways, overfishing – but the greatest single source of damage, of course , is climate change.

The five-yearly report brings the bad news that climate change is compounding all the other problems. And whereas previous reports warned of future damage from climate change, this one shows it’s already happening – and getting worse.

It documents the extreme floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms and bushfires that have occurred across Australia in the past five years. The immediate effects have been millions of animals killed and habitats burned, enormous areas of reef bleached, and people’s livelihoods and homes lost.

But there are many longer-term effects still to play out. Extreme conditions put immense stress on species already threatened by habitat loss and invasive species. An extreme heatwave in 2018, for example, killed 23,000 spectacled flying foxes, making them an endangered species.

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Many of our ecosystems have evolved to rebound from bushfires. But now that the fires are coming more often and are more intense, the bush doesn’t have enough time to recover, which scientists expect will make it weedy – only those species that live fast and reproduce quickly will thrive.

But enough about plants and animals, what about us? While cyclones, floods and bushfires directly destroy our homes and landscapes, Professor Emma Johnston, of Sydney University and an author of the report, writes that heatwaves kill more people in Australia than any other extreme event.

Heatwave intensity has increased by a third over the past two decades. And climate change worsens air quality through dust, smoke and emissions. The Black Summer of 2019-20 exposed more than 80 per cent of our population to smoke, killing about 420 people.

As Liz Hanna and Mark Howden, of the Australian National University, remind us, clean air is just one of the “ecosystem services” the environment provides to you and me in the economy. Another is clean food. A lot of our recent complaints about the cost of living – the high cost of meat and vegetables, the mythical $10 iceberg lettuce – come from the delayed effect of the drought and the recent effect of the floods.

Yet another service is clean water. But many country towns had to truck in water during the last drought. Land clearing affects water quality. Run-off from agriculture damages water ecosystems and encourages algal bloom and species loss. More than 4 million people depend on the Murray-Darling rivers for their water, but the catchments are rated as poor or very poor.

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Finally, the report reminds us that contact with (healthy) nature is associated with mental health benefits, promotes physical activity and contributes to overall wellbeing. Biodiversity and green and blue spaces in cities are linked to stress reduction and mood improvement, increased respiratory health, and lower rates of depression and blood pressure. Enjoy ’em while they last.

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