The NSW Young Nationals, the youth wing of the National Party, has expelled one member, suspended two others and temporarily halted recruitment after supporters of the far right got one of their own elected to its national executive.

The group, the New Guard, identify as fascists and share the name with the Australian Depression era fascist organisation. They are also members of the Lads Society, a fight club founded by a prominent neo-Nazi.

The fascist infiltration shouldn’t come as a shock. The Nationals and the Liberals have long been home to various shades of fascists, from Nazi cranks to white supremacists, even though their membership has created unease among the parties’ more outwardly respectable establishment patrons. 

The youth wings of these parties have been even more open to such filth. In March last year, Kurt Tucker, president of the University of Queensland Liberal National Club, let slip that, had he been born in the early 20th century, he would have been a member of the Nazis. 

In 2014, the vice-president of the Swinburne University Liberal Club posted a homophobic rant questioning the gender of “butchy lesbians” and claiming that the possibility of gay marriage was “ruining” the social fabric of Australia. That year, Facebook posts also surfaced of University of Melbourne Liberal Club members describing women as “sluts” and Muslims as “degenerates”.

In recent years, the space for the far right within the mainstream conservative parties has grown. 

Within the Nationals and the Liberals there has been a shift to the right, spurred by similar developments within conservative parties across the world and the rise of One Nation here. Hostility to non-European immigration, Islamophobia, constant attacks on feminism and “cultural Marxism” have been a feature of the right wing of the Coalition. The “moderate” wing has often been all too willing to go along with it. 

The far right has also been emboldened by the shift to the right in mainstream politics and by the success of Trump in the US and right wing nationalist movements in Europe. The strategy of infiltrating broader conservative organisations is advocated by the US far right, which has attempted to take control of Young Republican clubs and intervene in the party’s primaries. 

While the far right has not reached that level of organisation and support in Australia, the example of the Young Nationals shows the need to oppose the far right and the parties whose reactionary politics encourages them.