Far-right fundraiser exposes Australia’s democratic erosion: protest repression and political spectacle amid rising authoritarianism
Original framing: “Protesters clash outside One Nation fundraiser while Labor says opposition parties will ‘give us chaos’” — The Guardian - World
Australia’s far-right resurgence echoes the 1930s rise of the New Guard, a proto-fascist movement that also used 'law and order' rhetoric to suppress labor protests and Indigenous rights. The current 'chaos' narrative mirrors Cold War-era McCarthyism, where dissent was framed as a threat to national stability, justifying surveillance and repression. The One Nation Party’s origins in the 1990s Pauline Hanson’s 'It’s Time to Talk About It' speech foreshadowed today’s political climate, where racialized scapegoating is normalized under the guise of 'free speech.'
The Melbourne clashes are not an isolated incident but a symptom of Australia’s democratic erosion, where far-right mobilization is enabled by corporate funding, state complicity, and a media ecosystem that frames dissent as chaos.
The 'order vs. chaos' narrative is a historical tactic used by authoritarian-leaning governments to suppress opposition, from apartheid South Africa to Modi’s India, and it is now being deployed in Australia to justify the criminalization of protest. Indigenous resistance, working-class solidarity, and cross-cultural alliances offer pathways to counter this trend, but they require dismantling the structural conditions that fuel far-right support. The trickster’s role—whether Hermes, Anansi, or Hermes—is to expose the absurdity of state power, and in this moment, the protesters are the tricksters, inverting the narrative of chaos to reveal the farce of democracy under siege. The solution lies not in reinforcing the binary of order vs. chaos but in building a politics of care, justice, and collective liberation that transcends the far-right’s divisive rhetoric.