Australia First
Elected ALP MHR for Kalgoorlie in 1980, Graeme Campbell steadily moved to the extreme right. He was an outspoken champion of the mining industry, in 1988 crossing the floor over Labor's gold tax. He loudly opposed the Keating government's legislation on Mabo and supported open-slather uranium mining and the establishment of a reprocessing facility in Australia. He opposed sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa, called for restrictions on Asian immigration and a return to the white Australia policy, opposed multiculturalism, land rights and affirmative action, and even supported the monarchy.
In 1993, Campbell was first reported to have addressed meetings of the anti-Semitic Australian League of Rights. He describe the ALR as "moving to become a mainstream conservative organisation". In 1994, Campbell urged electors in the Mackellar and Warringah by-elections to vote for the rabidly anti-Asian Australians Against Further Immigration.
Labor's national executive finally expelled him in 1995 over a speech he gave at an AAFI dinner in which he criticised the Labor government's immigration policies and called for a cut in Asian immigration. Campbell successfully recontested his seat as an independent in 1996 and formed his Australia First party soon after (intentionally or not, Australia First shares its name with a pro-Nazi group whose leaders were jailed during World War II).
Australians Against Further Immigration
AAFI in 1991 attempted to exploit the "population debate" within the environment movement. Under the cover of arguments about the environment, AAFI campaigned against immigration, particularly from Asia, and multiculturalism. Addressing the 1991 Sydney Ecopolitics conference, AAFI leader Denis McCormack railed: "The new Australian cultural and racial cringes encouraged from on high hint at gradualist capitulation towards inexorable dilution and absorption into the teeming masses of Asia".
McCormack outlined a conspiracy that bore a striking resemblance to that invoked by most of the ratbag right, minus only a direct reference to Jewish bankers: "Big business, the ethnic multicultural/immigration industry, the churches, and other sundry combinations of internationalists, greenie pinkos and misguided humanitarian anthropocentric zealots, not knowing who they are in bed with".
AAFI's green facade did not last. In 1994, the AAFI was also peddling the claim — still repeated by Hanson and Campbell — that Asians are carriers of serious and fatal diseases.
AAFI founders Rodney and Robyn Spencer admit that they were closely associated with the racist National Reporter newspaper. It has also been reported that McCormack was associated with another racist and anti-Semitic journal, Lock, Stock and Barrel. McCormack was guest speaker in September 1992 for the League of Rights. He is vice-president of Campbell's Australia First.
Australian League of Rights
On the reverse side of a leaflet that reproduces a Hanson speech, the ALR offers for sale tapes of a speech Denis McCormack made in July last year entitled "The Grand Plan to Asianise Australia".
In 1991, a report on racist violence published by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission described the ALR as "undoubtedly the most influential and effective, as well as best organised and most substantially financed, racist organisation in Australia".
Andrew Moore's book, The Right Road (Oxford University Press, 1995), describes how ALR was founded in 1946 by Eric Butler, who has controlled the organisation ever since. In 1935, while active in the Social Credit movement, a section of which aligned itself with the pro-fascist Australia First, Butler said that Hitler was being maligned by those who claimed he was persecuting Jews. In 1938, he toured rural Victoria and NSW in support of Hitler and Mussolini.
From the beginning, anti-Semitism has been central to ALR. Butler's 1946 book, The International Jew, was essentially an annotated and updated version of the notorious anti-Semitic fraud, Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Moore points out, "While the League propaganda now prefers the term 'International High Finance' to 'International Jewish Finance' and 'Zionist' to 'Jewish', anti-Semitic literature remains available through the League's bookshop and mail order service".
The ALR is a big booster of David Irving, the British historian notorious for his efforts to deny the Nazi Holocaust. Irving has toured Australia with the assistance of the ALR. Its WA-based publishing company, Veritas, has produced several of his books.
Over the past 50 years, Butler and his cohorts have woven an intricate conspiracy theory based on anti-Semitism, anticommunism and, lately, anti-Asian racism. The threat is world government by the United Nations, controlled by "International High [Jewish] Finance", communists and other "collectivists". The grand plan involves everything from water fluoridation, drugs, feminism and homosexuality, to the land rights and environmental movements, the republic and, now, Asian immigration.
The ALR is skilled in maintaining front organisations around single issues that strike a chord within depressed rural communities. It controls these groups through a disciplined cell structure. The ALR also targets organisations and clubs such as the RSL, Apex, Lions and Rotary.
At times, the ALR has used its organisational skills to influence or take control of establishment conservative parties. Former Liberal MP Edward St John, according to Moore, claimed that "in the 1960s the League successfully 'white-anted' both the Liberal and Country parties to such an extent that they were 'compelled ... to dance to the tune called by the League'."
Moore believes the ALR has had a significant influence within recent electoral formations such as the Grey Power movement and the ACT's Abolish Self Government Coalition.