Far-Right Movements in Contemporary Australia: An Introduction

Abstract

The introduction gives a short overview of the various far-right groups and actions in Australia over the past decades, arguing that far-right movements have not been as visible in Australia as they have been in Europe and North America. The contemporary era, however, has witnessed a rising moral panic around the place of Islam in Australia, which has created a fertile environment for the emergence of new far-right groups. The resurgence of an emboldened far-right in Australia has been a development that has taken communities and policymakers by surprise. Australian scholarship was also ill-prepared, with research on the Australian far-right remaining conceptually and empirically underdeveloped. This introduction outlines how the individual chapters seek to address these academic knowledge gaps and contribute to making sense of the far-right in Australia.