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January 26, 2026 — 8:51pm
Undercover neo-Nazis led crowds at an anti-immigration rally through Melbourne’s CBD on Australia Day, breaking into racist chants and small skirmishes as a larger group of protesters gathered for an Invasion Day rally nearby.
One Nation candidates joined associates of recently disbanded neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Network on the steps of Parliament House to give speeches at the March for Australia rally, at times railing against Australia’s immigration policy from a podium built by a neo-Nazi.
But the crowd, estimated by police to number about 2000, was substantially outnumbered by the annual Invasion Day protest, at which police say about 17,000 people gathered to call for Australia’s national day of celebration to also be acknowledged as a day of mourning for Indigenous Australians.
Before the Invasion Day march, a guard of protesters arrived at Camp Sovereignty in Kings Domain, the Indigenous camp that was stormed by neo-Nazis following the first March for Australia rallies in August.
“January 26 is not a neutral date,” crowds were told in a statement read out from Uncle Mark Brown, a Bunurong elder whose Welcome to Country ceremony on Anzac Day last year was interrupted by booing neo-Nazis.
“It marks the beginning of invasion, violence, theft of land and the attempted destruction of our people. This country was built on stolen land, and the wealth of this nation still sits on that theft today.”
At the same time, March for Australia crowds gathered beneath the clocks of Flinders Street Station. Though the National Socialist Network may have disbanded on paper this month to escape a new extremism crackdown, former members still came out as planned for the march this masthead previously revealed they had helped organise.
On Monday, many March for Australia speakers were known associates of the NSN, including organiser Hugo Lennon, a wealthy far-right influencer who has not denied the group’s involvement in the marches but promised they would not incite violence.
This masthead identified at least a dozen neo-Nazis in the crowd, wearing plain clothes rather than their usual black-shirts uniform, and often roving in groups of less than a dozen. Some were draped in Australian flags; others were heard hurling abuse at people of colour and at one point, an Asian restaurant. Small pockets in the march shouted racist chants, including those connected to the neo-Nazi white replacement conspiracy.
Police blocked off streets with barricades as both rallies marched through the city at once, but kept the two mostly apart .
While the day was largely non-violent, far-right groups were observed clashing with Invasion Day protesters in several tense stand-offs, both sides heckling the other as crowds dispersed into the summer afternoon.
Near parliament, police detained and appeared to arrest a man from the March for Australia crowd after an apparent clash with another man. Footage posted online shows a man wearing a face covering emblazoned with the Australian flag alongside a known neo-Nazi, both involved in a scuffle with other men.
Police said they were investigating three other incidents during the protests – including a man “allegedly sprayed in the face with an unknown substance by a man wearing an Australian flag as a cape”.
In another case, police said a man and woman were chased and racially abused by four men, who then smashed their car window with “a stolen, broken boom gate”, before one man allegedly performed the outlawed Nazi salute.
At times, parts of the crowd took up a chant of “Free Joel Davis”, to support an NSN figure held on remand for allegedly threatening a female politician.
Similar chants rang out at March for Australia rallies around the country where neo-Nazis were also spotted. In Sydney, a former senior member of the NSN was escorted by police from the rally and a 31-year-old rally speaker was arrested under NSW hate speech laws after he made antisemitic remarks to the crowd and shouted “Heil white Australia” and “Heil Thomas Sewell” – referring to the leader of the NSN.
In Melbourne, on the steps of state parliament, march organiser Lennon addressed the crowd from a podium built by a known neo-Nazi, as he and other March for Australia speakers called to keep Australia for white Australians.
Two young men of African appearance, one holding a camera and the other a microphone, were at the centre of sustained racist abuse when they tried to mingle and interview protesters. As the rally erupted into chants of “Send them back”, police eventually stepped in to remove the pair from the danger zone.
“We are not sorry for being white. And we are not sorry for being proud of this country,” Lennon told rallygoers. Lennon, who goes by the moniker “auspill”, asked followers to “remain unforgiving” and stand up “against the media and the politicians who hate us … otherwise they will literally take this country from us, as they are currently doing ... And to continue to fight for this country.”
Local candidates from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation also spoke, as an Australian flag emblazoned with Hanson’s face blew in the wind behind them. Former Senate candidate Warren Pickering read a poem he had written, and candidate for Bruce Bianca Colecchia courted the crowd’s displeasure by announcing she herself was an immigrant from Italy, as Hanson spoke at the March for Australia in Brisbane.
Last year, Pickering told this masthead that “politicians hadn’t been allowed to speak” at the rallies previously but added that the party wanted nothing to do with neo-Nazis.
When questioned about his involvement on Monday afternoon, Pickering said he was furious at “the lack of transparency” from organisers.
“I had specifically asked if they’d be neo-Nazis there because of last time,” he said. “And I was assured there wouldn’t be any troublemakers. Suddenly, there’s guys at the podium in black masks, causing trouble. We knew our base were going, and we wanted to support those salt of the earth Australians.”
Monday’s Invasion Day rally was the first after the Victorian government signed off on a historic treaty with First Nations last year. Some Indigenous speakers expressed fears that their work would be lost if the Coalition won at the state election in November.
Last week, this masthead revealed that a string of threats uncovered in a secret chatroom run by March for Australia organisers and NSN members, including a $10,000 plot to kidnap Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, had led to at least two police raids in the lead up to Monday’s rallies.
Albanese has since acknowledged the threats and called for protesters to “turn down the temperature of political debate”.
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