National Action (Australia)

National Action (founded Anzac Day, 1982) is an Australian nationalist political party. It has no representatives in any Australian parliament, at either state or national level. Its ideology dictates that it remain outside the "political system".

Its policies include the deportation of asylum seekers and the termination of Aboriginal native title. National Action espouses theories that a New World Order is taking over the world and must be stopped. The party has been accused of being a neo-nazi party, as its former "chairman", James Saleam, Ph.D., was a member of the Australian Nazi party during the 1970s. National Action claims, however, that it was a "National Bolshevik" party. Saleam claimed that the party was led collectively.

After the electoral successes of the New Right in Europe, during the early 1990s, the local leaderships "adopted some of the recruiting policies of their European counterparts, trying to attract angry young people into their ranks."^[1] This long-term strategy is the likely reason National Action remained a fringe group throughout the recession (1993–94). They never obtained a popular following as their members matured, for a number of possible reasons:

• its use of terrorism and intimidation against perceived enemies and rival "racial-nationalists";
• Saleam's conviction for insurance fraud in 1988;
• the public perception that it was a criminal gang; and
• its plans to fire-bomb a political rival's home and to murder anti-Apartheid activist Eddie Funde.

Saleam was imprisoned in 1991 for the plot against Funde.

In the mid-1990s, the success of the nationalist One Nation Party led many National Action members to join One Nation to promote a broad anti-immigration agenda within the party. The subsequent implosion of One Nation (which was partially due to Saleam's machinations to take over One Nation) stymied this plan.

Michael Brander, a rival of Saleam, has attempted to resurrect the party. These plans have had little impact due to the loss of Saleam's credibility amongst ex-members and other "racial-nationalists", many of whom had been attacked physically or slandered by Saleam. Saleam is often said by rivals to be of part Lebanese origin, an allegation which he has denied on many occasions. Brander, who was convicted and fined $3000 for assaulting an Asian opponent with a flagpole in 1995,^[2] caused renewed controversy in 2005 when his work was published in the government-funded monthly magazine Quadrant. Brander's appearance there was denounced by federal Labor parliamentarian Michael Danby (Danby's condemnation was quoted by Australian Jewish News on 18 March 2005). Meanwhile Saleam has published online his doctoral thesis,^[3] an elaborate coverage of the alliances and enmities within extreme-rightist Australian movements over recent decades.

National Action co-founder David Greason's book, I was a Teenage Fascist, tells of Greason's own time within the Australian neo-Nazi movement and the events behind the founding of National Action.

National Acton continues to exist with a branch in Brisbane and a branch in the Southern Downs and Scenic Rim (January issue of the Storm).

The Brisbane Branch publishes a newsletter called Storm and the Southern Downs-Scenic Rim Branch publishes a newsletter called the Spearhead.

References

Further reading

• "The Tale of Jack and Jim", by Matthew Collins, The Review, November 2002. (Hostile account of Saleam, Brander, and others involved in NA)