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That doesn’t wash with Josh Roose, associate professor of politics at Deakin University. He says the black-clad group that assembled in Sydney on Saturday is effectively a branch of the National Socialist Network, a national network that espouses a hate-filled ideology and was behind the violent assault on an Indigenous encampment in Melbourne several weeks ago. He wants to know if NSW Police bothered to pick up the phone to their Victorian counterparts. “This all comes back to basic intelligence on how this group works,” he says. “It’s a national group that exploits jurisdictional faultlines, and they exploit grey areas in the law – that’s what they do.” He also points out that NSW Police successfully dispersed a similar gathering and prevented it from moving into central Sydney on Australia Day last year on the grounds of a threat to public safety. Regardless of the state of the law, Lanyon should have had this shameful piece of political theatre brought to his attention before it happened. He acknowledges this.
