In Part 1, we examined how Australian media venerates religious identity. Now we explore how that veneration becomes weaponised, and reveal the deeper economic forces that make extremism predictable. Part 3 will examine how post-capitalist alienation, inequality, and corporate capture create the conditions for radicalisation that our institutions refuse to confront.
The Bondi tragedy provides vital clues to understanding how institutional power shields itself through strategic framing. The deeper blind spot is not about respecting faith; it is about which religious violence gets counted, whose suffering registers, and how media and political elites use fear to distract from systemic failures.
A Blind Spot: The Australian We Disowned
On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, drove to Christchurch, New Zealand, and massacred 51 Muslim worshippers at prayer. Born and raised in Grafton, NSW, where he displayed racist behaviour from a young age, radicalised in Australia through online far-right networks, and financed by Australian wealth, according to Part 4 of the New Zealand Government’s Royal Commission of Inquiry.
Yet Australian political discourse has largely excised from our national consciousness, this loner who dwelt in extremist online echo chambers. Repugnant as it may be, we must confront the evidence: in crucial ways, Australia helped make this mass-murderer.
Tarrant was not a cipher or an anomaly. Between 2014 and 2017, he was actively engaged with Australian far-right online communities. He made over thirty Facebook comments on the United Patriots Front (UPF) pages, praising its leader Blair Cottrell as his “Emperor” and a “true leader of the nationalist movement in Australia.” He was Facebook friends with Thomas Sewell, leader of the Lads Society, an Australian neo-Nazi group that explicitly promoted “white genocide” conspiracies and National Socialism. In 2017, Sewell attempted to recruit Tarrant to the Lads Society; Tarrant declined only because he was preparing to move to New Zealand. However, he continued supporting their online activities until April 2018.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch attacks found that Tarrant had been radicalised primarily through YouTube and Facebook, mainstream platforms hosting Australian-based far-right content creators and communities. Between 2015 and March 2019, Tarrant posted publicly on 4chan and 8chan’s bulletin boards calling for attacks against Muslims in places of worship. These posts were visible. They were not on the dark web. They were on publicly accessible forums where all could see them. He posted these overt threats for four years without detection by any security agency.
The “mystery” of his not being detected is that there are so many like him. In 2016, Tarrant sends a Facebook message threatening to kill a man who had publicly opposed an anti-immigrant rally organised by the UPF. This threat is reported to Melbourne police, who dismiss it and take no action. The man targeted by Tarrant has done nothing wrong except object to racist activism on Australian soil.
More damning still: in March and August 2018, nearly a year before his attack, Tarrant posted publicly that he planned to carry out mass shootings. These statements have only recently been identified by researchers.
For months before the massacre, he was announcing his intentions online while Australian far-right figures, mainstream politicians, and security agencies remained either unwilling or unable to see what was in plain sight. Was it a conspiracy or a stuff-up?
Former shearer and Labor hero, Mick Young would say take the stuff-up every time.
The links between Tarrant and the Australian far-right extended beyond online activity. The Lads Society operated openly in Sydney and Melbourne as a “men’s fitness club” while pushing Nazi ideology. Its Fuehrer, Thomas Sewell, wants to create “Anglo-European” enclaves and orchestrate a “race war.”
Yet despite this, despite Tarrant’s visible threats, despite his documented connections to these groups, he remained unknown to ASIO and the AFP until he had already murdered 51 people in another country.
What emerged after the attack is instructive. When security agencies belatedly interviewed Sewell and the Lads Society, they framed the inquiry as seeking the group’s “assistance” in “preventing further isolation and radicalization.” The state response was not to prosecute or try to disable the network, even if that were possible, that had nurtured Tarrant, but to ask whether these neo-Nazi organisations could help prevent others from becoming “isolated”, as if the problem was insufficient community belonging.
The Economic Dimension
But Tarrant’s radicalisation was not merely ideological. After his father’s suicide in 2010, Tarrant inherited $457,000. He stopped working, travelled the world, and drifted. By 2017, when Sewell tried to recruit him, Tarrant had been unemployed for years, living off inherited wealth while consuming far-right content online. This is a pattern we will explore more fully in Part 3: economic precarity or aimlessness, combined with online ecosystems that offer purpose through hatred, creates the conditions for extremism.
Australia’s post-capitalist crisis: where trust in government has collapsed to 49 per cent, where 62 per cent of Australians believe the system is rigged, where wage theft costs workers $1.35 billion annually—creates fertile ground for radicalisation.
When young men inherit money but no purpose, when they see a system rewarding billionaires while punishing workers, when online communities offer belonging through scapegoating, violence becomes predictable. Part 3 will examine how this economic violence helps create a petri dish for terrorism.
Political Complicity
The political establishment’s response to Tarrant was to cast him as an aberration, a “lone wolf,” a “monster”, anything but what he was: the logical endpoint of years of anti-Muslim sentiment circulating in mainstream Australian discourse. The same lazy reflex is in play with the Bondi murderers. Prime Minister Scott Morrison called him a “right-wing violent terrorist” and expressed “relief” he would never be released. Yet Morrison’s own government, in October 2018, five months before the attack, had voted in favour of a motion declaring “It’s OK to be white,” one of the core slogans of the alt-right, before backtracking and claiming an “administrative error” when public outcry erupted.
Fraser Anning, a senator installed by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, responded to Tarrant’s massacre by blaming Muslims for “the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate,” and invoked a “final solution” to the “immigration problem”, invoking the Nazi euphemism for the Holocaust.
Tellingly, we excised Tarrant from our consciousness precisely because examining him closely would require examining the political culture that helped produce him. It would require asking uncomfortable questions about mainstream politicians echoing the same white replacement ideology Tarrant held. It would require acknowledging that YouTube’s algorithm, Facebook’s far-right groups, and Australia’s tolerance for Nazi organising on the streets of Melbourne had all played a role in radicalising him.
It would require confronting the fact that our domestic spy agencies prioritised Islamist terrorism while allowing neo-Nazi networks to organise openly.
Above all, it would require asking why, six years later, when discussing religious violence in Australia, media platforms remain incurious about how our own political culture manufactures extremists. And even less curious about the failures of punitive justice and the economic roots of violence.
Institutional Capture and the Special Envoy Case
The deeper failures merit treatment on their own. Yet there is another institutional dimension worth examining directly, one that connects media framing, religious community leadership, and political power in ways that warrant scrutiny. Follow the money, and the pattern becomes clear.
In July 2024, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appointed Jillian Segal AO as Australia’s inaugural Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism. Segal brought substantial credentials: a prominent lawyer, former chair of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, and an experienced corporate board member. The appointment followed documented rises in antisemitic incidents and sustained advocacy from Jewish communal organisations.
The issue is not the appointment itself, nor Segal’s qualifications. The issue is what emerged months later. In July 2025, the Klaxon website reported that the Henroth Discretionary Trust, controlled by Segal’s husband John Roth and his brother, donated $50,000 to Advance Australia during 2023-24.
This prompted calls for Segal’s resignation from civil society groups and the progressive Jewish Council of Australia.
Advance Australia is Australia’s most prominent right-wing digital campaigning group, raising $15.7 million in 2023-24. The organisation campaigns against renewable energy, immigration, and Indigenous rights while making unqualified support for Israel central to its platform, framing criticism of Israeli policy as “woke” progressivism. This creates structural alignment between right-wing domestic politics and particular framings of Israel advocacy.
The question is not individual corruption but institutional alignment. When family networks of a government-appointed Special Envoy fund a right-wing lobby group that shares ideological ground with that envoy’s policy domain, democratic accountability becomes complicated. When that envoy’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism recommends government “monitoring” of media to discourage “false or distorted narratives,” the stakes shift further.
Media platforms rarely interrogate these connections. When The Religion and Ethics Report interviews senior religious community figures lobbying for government policies, funding networks and institutional alignments remain invisible. This is not about Segal’s legitimacy or the reality of antisemitism. It is about how power operates through networks that media treats as neutral.
And crucially, the same corporate interests funding Advance Australia profit from the economic inequality that Part 3 will show creates conditions for extremism. Whether the scapegoat is Muslims (Tarrant’s target) or critics of Israeli policy (often targeted by “antisemitism” frameworks), the pattern is identical: use fear of “the other” to consolidate power and distract from economic injustice.
The Pattern Revealed
What emerges is a pattern of how institutional power operates in Australia in 2025. Religious framing, whether of antisemitism, Islamophobia, or “protecting communities”, becomes a vehicle through which elite networks advance political agendas. Media treats these framings as natural, inevitable, and beyond scrutiny. When Tarrant, a visibly radicalised Australian who posted threats online for years, is excised from national consciousness, while Jillian Segal’s institutional connections to a right-wing political organisation generate minimal media attention, we see what the system actually values.
It is not truth-telling about religious violence. It is not protection of vulnerable communities. It is the consolidation of institutional power through selective attention. And distraction. Look over there!
The Segal appointment reveals something crucial: how elite networks use language of religious community and religious protection to advance broader political agendas. When the same money funding right-wing digital activism also funds the spouse of the official government envoy on antisemitism, we have moved beyond media bias into questions of institutional capture.
Yet our public broadcasters continue platforming the official voices these networks produce, treating institutional consensus as natural rather than constructed.
Two Standards, One Pattern
Six years after Christchurch, Australia continues to treat Brenton Tarrant as an inexplicable aberration while simultaneously giving platform and policy influence to networks he ideologically aligned with. This is not contradiction. It is institutional logic.
When a right-wing lobby group explicitly supporting Israel and framing criticism of Israeli policy as progressive extremism has funded the family of the government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, we are not witnessing a coincidence. We are witnessing how institutional power consolidates.
And when The Religion and Ethics Report platforms Jewish communal leaders discussing antisemitism without interrogating their institutional connections to these networks, without examining the fractures within Jewish communities, without asking whether media’s concern for “religious communities” is consistent or selective, we are witnessing how media becomes a vehicle for that consolidation.
The deeper scandal is not that antisemitism exists or that it should be combated. The scandal is that our institutions use “combating antisemitism” as a means to advance right-wing agendas while remaining incurious about how Australian political culture itself manufactures white supremacist terrorists.
The Real Stakes
The real problem is not that religious belief carries special value; many Australians hold sincere faith. The problem is that when religion becomes a vehicle for institutional power, when media treats religious communities as monolithic entities deserving special policy consideration, when official government positions are filled by people whose family networks fund right-wing political organisations, democratic accountability collapses.
We excised Tarrant from our consciousness because examining him would require accountability we are not willing to undertake. We platform Segal and the networks she represents because they serve institutional interests we are unwilling to interrogate.
The question “Who’s got religion?” has an answer, but it is not about faith. It is about power, and about which networks get to decide what counts as violence worth discussing, what communities deserve protection, and what political agendas can be advanced under the banner of “fighting hate.”
That is the real scandal Australian media remains unwilling to examine.
Coming in Part 3
The final instalment will examine what our institutions refuse to confront: how post-capitalist alienation, wage theft, inequality, and corporate capture create the economic conditions that make extremism predictable. When trust in government collapses, when the system rewards billionaires while criminalising poverty, sees Neo-Nazis as a type of Boys’ Brigade; radicalisation is not an aberration. It is a logical outcome. And the same elite networks profiting from economic injustice are the ones who benefit most from keeping us focused on “terrorism” rather than the systemic violence of inequality itself.
Until we confront that, real change will remain out of reach.
This is Part 2 of a 3-part investigation. Read Part 1 here. Part 3 coming soon.
Urban Wronski Writes 