If the Coalition doesn’t like Twitter Nazis, stop legitimising them

While hypocrisy is the coin of the realm in politics, occasionally it becomes so egregious that even its most assiduous practitioners risk looking exposed.

So it is with James Paterson, the Coalition’s shadow minister for home affairs. Paterson is one of Peter Dutton’s most effective attack dogs, despite being unable to get even the simplest facts about his portfolio correct. Paterson has been front and centre in the opposition leader’s campaign to exploit the welfare of Australian Jews as part of his campaign of demonisation of migrants. As Crikey pointed out last week, to call this campaign out for what it is risks being the target of a right-wing smear campaign, as Sarah Schwartz has discovered.

But on the weekend, Paterson exposed the grubby underpinnings of this campaign when he complained about neo-Nazis on Twitter, lamenting “Neo-Nazis are clearly emboldened in Australia right now in real life and online. There has been a noticeable uptick in their activity, especially on X in recent months.”

An uptick? Twitter is now a sewer of open fascism. Last week, an anodyne post by South Australian police on road closures was inundated with abuse and Nazi symbols by neo-Nazis who were enraged that 16 of them had been arrested for demonstrating in Adelaide on Australia Day. Police had to pull the post down to remove the dozens of vile responses, including pictures of gallows and death threats.

Under Elon Musk, Twitter has abandoned any pretence of content moderation and has re-platformed antisemites, Holocaust deniers and accounts calling for the killing of Jews. The Coalition’s response has been to back Musk against the government’s efforts to subject social media platforms to the same light-touch co-regulatory framework that broadcasters are subject to, in relation to misinformation.

If Paterson wants to complain about Nazis on Twitter, he ought to have a word with his shadow cabinet colleagues who framed Labor’s bill as some sort of onslaught on free speech of the kind that neo-Nazis are so readily taking advantage of on the platform.

But the bigger problem is that Peter Dutton routinely legitimises the kind of hatred of foreigners espoused by malignant actors like neo-Nazis. He has attacked foreign students as the “modern version of boat arrivals” (despite refusing to back any efforts to reduce the level of foreign students at Australian universities) and has linked foreign students to sexual assault, domestic violence and drug trafficking, without evidence.

That’s on top of his history of racism toward African refugees and Lebanese migrants, his lies about the role of the Muslim community in terror incidents, and his insistence Muslim MPs would be a “disaster”, as well as his white supremacist championing of white South African refugees while demanding Palestinian refugees be blocked from entering Australia.

For Dutton, migration has never been merely an economic issue about access to housing or services in our increasingly crowded cities. He has always made race a factor: Africans, Muslims, Palestinians, foreign students are criminals, rapists, terrorists — whereas white people, in Dutton’s words, “work hard, they integrate well into Australian society, they contribute to make us a better country”.

So what’s the Coalition’s problem with the core message of neo-Nazis? Copyright infringement? Dutton has made demonisation of non-white migrants and fostering social division staples of his political playbook for years, providing legitimate political cover for other figures outside politics to push the same agendas. Every traducing of non-white migrants by mainstream political leaders opens the window of what is acceptable discourse further to extremist groups outside politics. Piously denouncing the very people whose message your political tactics are legitimising doesn’t cut it.

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