Kate Emery: Why Perth’s anti-immigration rallies were drowned out by tiny neo-nazi presence

If you’ve ever drunk a smoothie containing banana, what I’m about to tell you won’t come as a surprise. It doesn’t much matter what else goes into that smoothie — Strawberries! Raspberries! Dragon tears! — the final product will taste overwhelmingly of banana. It’s not in your head: bananas truly do overwhelm a drink or a dish thanks to their unusual chemistry. I’ll spare you the science lesson (mostly because I’d have to ask a scientist to explain it to me with a series of diagrams and that would be embarrassing) but it comes down to the presence of a chemical compound called isoamyl acetate. And here’s a sentence you probably didn’t expect to read in your lifetime: nazis are the bananas of the political world. If you’re holding a rally, it doesn’t really matter what your cause is, how legitimate your grievances might be or how many reasonably-minded people are in attendance: once the nazis arrive, it’s really very hard to take in anything but the nazis. That was the case at Sunday’s March for Australia rallies in Perth and around the country, where cries of “heil Australia” surely horrified not only those of us who only heard them on the news but many of those in attendance. Most of the 10,000 people who marched in Perth would have been disgusted by the presence of a tiny minority of neo-nazis. But that tiny presence was still enough to drown out any legitimate debate about the country’s levels of immigration and the effects of immigration on things like house prices. If this sounds like I’m saying the true victims of these black-clad losers, cosplaying Hitler’s lackies, were the thousands of right-minded people who turned out for Sunday’s rallies and had their excellent talking points overshadowed by the far-right, I’m not. I don’t think the rallies represented a popular uprising reflecting the beliefs of mainstream Australia. Ten thousand people turned out to the Perth rally — that’s the WA Police estimate, not mine. That’s a significant number. But it’s still only about one-third of the number of people who took part in the City to Surf Perth run on the same day. When a whole lot more people want to slog their guts out for a small piece of metal, a free bottle of water and an hour long journey to get home than turn up to your rally, I’m not sure you can be said to be speaking for the silent majority. The rise of far-right forces in Australia is a serious cause for concern (exhibit a: Dezi Freeman). But I don’t think the anti-migration rallies were full of far-right extremists so much as bulging with largely misinformed, angry people, who may have justified grievances but are looking for an easy solution to a complex problem. Which is to say: there’s plenty of good reasons to be mad that the Australian dream of homeownership is increasingly out of many people’s reach. But while the laws of supply and demand dictate that immigration adds to the pressure on housing supply, those looking for the real culprits might find a few more rational targets before they get to the average migrant. They could blame Australian property investors. About 15 per cent of taxpayers have investment properties. Maybe that is one reason, according to the Australia Institute, housing supply has grown faster than population growth over the past 10 years even as house prices have risen. The number of dwellings is up 19 per cent while the population is up 16 per cent. They could definitely blame the tax breaks brought in and retained by successive governments that enables those investors. Capital gains tax discounts and negative gearing should have been scaled back or done away with a long time ago and the only reason they haven’t is down to politics — not economics. You could also blame the Australian Government for a lack of transparency around its migration program. As of September we do not know how many immigrants are expected in the financial year we’re currently in. Into that information void have leapt the misinformed, the wilfully misinforming and, yes, the nazis, to tell Australians that the reason their kids have no hope of owning a home is down to people who look different to them, that it’s immigrants who are taking their houses and that their frustration and anger has a simple cause and a simpler solution. And much like the banana in the smoothie, that pretty quickly becomes the only message they can hear.