Australian neo-Nazi group included women bashers, stalkers, drug dealers and accused paedophile

The Australian neo-Nazi group which held an anti-Jewish rally outside NSW Parliament last year and continues to harbour ambitions to form a political party, included serious domestic violence offenders, drug dealers, stalkers and an accused paedophile.

The National Socialist Network formally disbanded in January to avoid designation as a hate group under new laws passed following the Bondi mass shooting.

However, its former members have remained active in Australia’s far-right ecosystem and the group has played a prominent role in the anti-immigration March for Australia protests.

The NSN’s leadership has said it continues to harbour ambitions of forming a political party, and the criminal records of its members and associates provide an insight into the likely core membership of any future party.

In a statement, Jack Eltis, who headed the NSW chapter of the NSN, downplayed the criminal records of its members — saying he had not personally witnessed criminal behaviour and was “honoured” to be associated with them — while also claiming “involvement in criminality was always immediate grounds for removal” from the group.

But while the NSN and its various offshoots used slick online propaganda to leverage racist tropes about migrant crime to gain mainstream attention, while painting itself as a group of “honourable” men, a months-long investigation by this masthead has found it was a beacon for criminals.

Among the 60-odd black-clad members of the NSN who held an anti-Jewish rally outside parliament in October was serial domestic violence offender Jamie McGowan.

Four years ago, in December 2021, McGowan came home from work and got into an argument with his partner over a sandwich.

Her young son had, he believed, eaten ham he’d left in the fridge. He began shouting at the child and when his partner intervened, they started arguing.

McGowan hit her in the face multiple times, choked her and dragged her around their house by the arm as her two young children watched on. He headbutted the fridge and broke a door in the apartment.

McGowan initially denied the assault, claiming the bruises on his partner were caused by self-harm.

But police obtained a 27-minute audio recording of the violent rampage. In it, McGowan could be heard telling his partner: “I’m about to rip your head off your fucking shoulders c---” and “I’m going to snap your f---ing neck c---″⁣.

The recording, transcribed in police documents tendered in court and obtained by this masthead, captured what police described as his partner “struggling to breathe” while McGowan told her to “shut up c---“. At another point, she screamed at him to “get off me” while her two children could be heard screaming and crying.

“I felt terrified,” she said in a police interview. “I thought I was going to die with my daughter in my arms and my son on the bed”.

Court records show McGowan, who also appeared in photographs at other NSN gatherings and was an active member of the group’s NSW chapter, has an extensive history of apprehended violence orders.

Dating back to 2015, police have applied for AVOs against him on behalf of at least six different women.

McGowan was not the only member of the NSW chapter of the NSN with a history of AVOs. Senior member Chris Birmingham as well as Dwayne Bullen, Daniel Sharp, Adam Carrig and Gavin Begbie have all had restraining orders taken out against them by women or family members.

He is also not the only member to have served time in prison. Adrian John Carr, a Wollongong-based NSN member who helped to start a Nazi cell in that city in 2021 previously served prison time over a grievous bodily harm conviction in 2015. He was also sentenced to a community corrections order in 2023 for firearms and drug possession charges.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Carr, who Eltis said left the group in August 2025, recorded himself yelling at Centrelink staff and customers and shouting “Sieg Heil” while wearing a costume sheep’s head, apparently in protest to social distancing measures.

Another criminal Nazi, Benjamin Jacob Thomas, was not a member of the NSN — he was in prison for much of the organisation’s existence — but was previously part of the same Illawarra Nazi cell, Activ88, as Carr.

Thomas, who has had the words “Mein Kampf” tattooed on his forehead, was already in jail in 2022 over a separate matter when he was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for paying a child to set fire to one of his Nazi associates new $90,000 Ford Ranger Raptor because of a dispute over a woman.

The same associate was subsequently convicted and jailed for assault and intimidation after he repeatedly punched and kicked a woman while she was pregnant.

Another NSN associate not at the rally was Jonathan Salter, 25, a now-former Australian Defence Force member who was arrested at the Holsworthy barracks in August and is facing multiple charges of accessing, possessing and distributing child abuse and extremist material.

Salter, who has been pictured at NSN training sessions, is currently in custody. He is yet to enter a plea and was last week refused bail in the Supreme Court. Documents obtained by this masthead show prosecutors allege he possessed multiple “exceptionally serious examples” of child abuse material, including children as young as one being horrifically abused.

Investigators also allegedly found “extensive messages and files” showing his support for “white supremacy, Nazi ideology and violent extremism”, including multiple videos of the Christchurch massacre and “various NSN propaganda documents”.

In one online conversation, he allegedly said he had quit the group, complaining the NSN was not moving in a “serious direction”. Eltis told this masthead Salter had attended two NSN training sessions but was “subsequently denied membership on character grounds”.

Another member, Chris Carrig, was convicted in 2024 for harassing and intimidating a Jewish man at a bus stop in Macquarie Park in Sydney’s north-west.

Carrig — who has also been convicted over a vandalism spree at Macquarie University in which he spray-painted slogans such as “Heil Hitler” — taunted and humiliated the man, who was wearing a kippah.

“Jews catching the bus, that’s a bit low,” Carrig said in a video he uploaded online.

“Go call uncle Goldberg, he’ll get you a BMW.”

Eltis said the NSN had only asked “ideological, personal and character” questions of applicants, and had not asked for their surnames. He said any future political party would involve “more extensive background checking”, but also dismissed the criminal histories of its members, saying AVOS, for example, could be “issued frivolously”.

“In any endeavour I may be involved in, people will be held to high character standards for their in-person and online conduct just the same as they were with NSN,” he told this masthead.

Last month Eltis said in a livestreamed conversation with the head of the March For Australia, Bec Walker, who uses the alias Bec Freedom online, that the group would still seek to form a political party if it was unable to avoid new hate speech laws.

“Obviously, it would be a bit different going forward. We wouldn’t continue the same, you know, operations and aesthetics, but, yeah, a political party would be the approach,” he said.

“And people already know who we are … they know the leadership and what we’re about.”

The NSN’s senior leadership also contains criminals. Its national leader, Thomas Sewell has been convicted for multiple assaults, and Joel Davis, one of the organisation’s most prominent members who is currently behind bars after last year telling followers to “rhetorically rape” Wentworth MP Allegra Spender, has previously been convicted for drug supply after he was caught selling ecstasy to an undercover police officer at a music festival in 2013.

This masthead has previously revealed that a senior member of the neo-Nazi group is also a close right hand of misogynist influencer and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate.

Last month, an investigation exposed NSN leadership’s close entanglement with dozens of convicted terrorists and extremist groups overseas, as experts warned the neo-Nazi group is more volatile than ever since its on-paper dissolution.

Other NSN members have convictions that demonstrate the organisation’s dark pull among those with substance abuse and mental health issues. In April 2023, police were called to a busy street in Wollongong to reports that a shirtless man had been punching cars and lying down on the road.

The man, who is now 24-years-old, had been observed by witnesses lying down in the middle of the road yelling “please someone run me over and kill me”.

He was stopped by officers who conducted checks on his identity which revealed he was “well recorded for mental health” issues related to autism. During a search, documents tendered in court state that the man headbutted the rear side window of a police vehicle, causing it to smash. The documents state he “began headbutting the footpath and continued saying he wanted to die”. He was issued a 12-month conditional release order.

Others with a criminal past include Nicholas Williamson, a 34-year-old from Sydney’s northern beaches. Despite attending a prestigious private school and enjoying what a court described as “an ideal childhood”, in 2019 Williamson pleaded guilty to two counts of drug supply after he admitted to storing MDMA at his house in exchange for cash and cocaine.

A university dropout who in the early 2010s played bass in a post punk band called My City Screams, Williamson told the court at the time he had been depressed and anxious after breaking up with his girlfriend.

with Sherryn Groch

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