LABOR’S Member for Hunter, Dan Rapacholi, has quite a CV. A former Olympic shooter, he has won gold and bronze at various Commonwealth Games. In 2020, the ex-miner and small businessman, 44, was inducted into the Cessnock Hall of Fame (established 2006) for his contributions to the sport. He sits alongside a roll-call of names known to nobody outside of wine country. Anthony Albanese and his thuggish mates from the CFMEU helped shoo-in this “special envoy for men’s health” to his seat at the 2022 election, putting offside the longtime rank-and-file, who objected both to the favouritism and his endorsement of coal mining.

Yet, he has another achievement, and its’ not wholly political but part sporting — in that he recently kicked an own goal that’s left nationalists collapsing with laughter.

Rapacholi recently came out blazing and thundering in indignation over a witty patriotic flyer letterboxed in Cessnock by the young heroes of the Eureka Youth League (EYL). The Australian reported:

‘A leaflet which urges locals to keep “curry” out of Kurri Kurri, a town in the NSW Hunter Region, has been spotted in letterboxes all over town according to Member for Hunter Dan Repacholi, who denounced the claims of a need for “remigration” and “preserving culture” as nothing but “disgusting and racist”.

“Let me be absolutely clear. Racism is not welcome in Kurri, it is not welcome in the Hunter. And it will not go unchallenged.”

The leaflets, which appear to have been produced by the far right “Australia First” party, advocate for white nationalist causes like remigration, which is the idea of a country maintaining racial homogeneity through the expulsion of immigrants.’

Many other national news outlets picked up the story, including a curious online publication called The Australia Today, which is an Indian propaganda mouthpiece for south-Asian invaders.

While Repacholi got to play the passionate anti-racist for a news cycle, his past comments on India came back to bite him hard on X. In 2010, after competing at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, he posted: “Just got back from Delhi. Thank God we live in Australia. Delhi is a shithole.”

Not only that, but he also copped blowback for publishing on his Instagram account pictures of naked sheilas posing with automatic weapons. He was forced to nuke his account and publicly apologise.

Therefore, he proves what nationalists have known all along, that currently, if you aren’t fully committed to the ethnic erasure of the Australian people, you have zero opportunities to get on in this corporate-political system.

As we say, he kicked an ‘own goal’ — or, given his shooting prowess, shot himself in the foot. 

Nick Griffin Reunites with Australia First President Jim Saleam & host Nathan Sykes for a hard-hitting discussion on the dead-end electoral road, the betrayal of White Working Class England, Starmer’s fall, migrant chaos, and why politics alone won’t stop replacement.

No punches pulled. No illusions left.

Listen to the podcast now — the truth Western elites fear.

This article was written by a former One Nation insider. It has been edited by Australia First writers to disguise those trivial details that would give away the identity of the author, while still allowing him to write in a personal, authentic voice. We shall hear from ‘Stalking Horse’ again.

Readers must know that I was a loyal One Nation person. It gives me no sneaky pleasure to speak about those I once served. However, I came to understand that One Nation is not a challenge to our political order — it is part of it. I know how bitter I felt about that, and how angry I was, but all that is nothing compared to how millions of voters and tens of thousands of members will feel not long into the future. That anger could forge a real politics — a radical politics — and I am a radical now. I want to see the One Nation rank and file radicalise, search for a new ideology, and find a politics that truly supplies that spirit. That is why I speak out, and why I am pleased to write for Australia First.

THE RISE OF ONE NATION

Opinion polls suggest One Nation has surged to become Australia’s largest party. Yes, this could be clawed back a little by the time of the next Federal election in 2028, and Pauline Hanson may never become Prime Minister. But we can be confident that One Nation will likely form part of either a formal or informal three-party Coalition with the Liberals and the Nationals. In effect, One Nation could enter government.

I note that Australia First said recently: “We do not seek to be, as some might have it, a sour competitor to One Nation. Quite the contrary. It is only through ON’s development that conservatism as a system can work itself out and play itself out. If over the next two to three years we comment upon One Nation, it is not to stymie it, but to demonstrate the contradictions of organised conservatism to its voters and members — and to prepare our own supporters and members for the dramatic events now rapidly approaching.”

I say that Australia First would not — indeed, no patriot or nationalist party could — win a direct confrontation with One Nation on the ground over the next couple of years. It is a matter of resources. Even since those words were written, One Nation has grown further in the polls, in membership, and in financing. Australia First wisely looks at the big picture and declines a fight it would not win. Smart. The secret to winning the long struggle is to let One Nation grow organisationally, because it will not grow ideologically — its politics is to work for others. I shall come to that, because I perceive One Nation from first principles: its ideology is conservatism, and it seeks to work with conservatives. Its membership might increase and its coffers may swell, but it is hamstrung by what it is. It is bound to an establishment it pretends to fight. It then serves that establishment. That is its politics. A couple of fault lines reveal this situation clearly.

FAULT LINES

There is a set of deep contradictions inside One Nation. I do not expect the mass of people flocking to it right now will see them — but that is for us to highlight.

Consider one big one. One Nation says it is there to get rid of a “bad” Labor government. They are running a “fire the liar” campaign. Big deal. So, what if Albanese is a lying rat and Labor is a “bad” government? What were the Liberal-National governments? What have all governments been, in one way or another, going back to Bob Menzies and many before him? What is One Nation saying that places it outside the corrupt system? All that is being urged is that voters remove Labor — perhaps keep it out for decades — while a conservative bloc of the Liberal-Nationals and One Nation keeps the ship steady. Our country has been there before, so you must believe that is the model to follow. But keeping Labor out does not mean evil is not done. That is what I learned from the advent of John Howard’s government in 1996. Then came high immigration, foreign wars, and economic Asianisation.

One Nation has said many times that it wishes to help the Liberal-National parties live up to their core mission of non- “left wing” government. ON will direct its preferences to them. It will vote supply to the next LNP government. Yet if One Nation says here and there that Liberal and Labor are really a “uniparty”, then why favour one over the other?

So, One Nation plays the old system game of uniting the Right against the Left. That means working with the establishment. I think people will see that — but only after the damage is done.

Consider another big one — perhaps the biggest one. One Nation touts itself as the anti-immigration party. That is one reason the mass of people is rallying to it. The holes in this position are legion. Maybe I always knew it. But I certainly understood the lie when Pauline “returned” in 2016, and it was that Australia was in “danger” of being swamped by Muslims. What happened to the Asians — the earlier claim of being “swamped by Asians”? That is when I understood that if the problem could morph so easily, Pauline was never serious about Asian immigration either. I intend to ride this one with you over the next couple of years.

For now, think about Dave Farley, the newly minted One Nation Member for Farrer. He ran a cheap labour enterprise in the Northern Territory. He says lots of Muslims live in his electorate and they are “assimilating” well. Pauline has agreed with that, even claiming that while the kids are radicalising, the parents are becoming “assimilated”! Then the Honourable Mr Farley chatted up Sikhs and attended a Riverina Sikh games festival. Of course, One Nation has had Sikh candidates too, as the illustration here shows. Yes — “Sikh and you shall find – One Nation” — the new slogan I hope will become posters and slogans on walls!

I suppose the bomb finally dropped on many true believers when Pauline Hanson announced that the party’s immigration program involved 130,000 migrants per year, chosen on “values” and not by ethnicity. She did not even call for a cessation of migration like Clive Palmer is pushing in newspaper ads every day.

Finally, Pauline Hanson appeared at the National Press Club on June 17 and said she was opposed to multiculturalism and that Australia should be monocultural — but that “Australia is a multiracial society”. We know what that means: the destruction of the real Australian identity.

Long ago, I recall people telling me that was the party’s true position. I knew it, but I told myself “No” — that it was all some sort of trick. It isn’t. This is the great cleavage which, in a couple of years, will rip One Nation apart. Explode it, perhaps, is a better term.

As the political heat rises and people take to the activist and patriotic road, they will discover that One Nation would wipe Australian identity away. The recipe is there for some real dissension.

Note this too. One Nation will try to recruit non-Europeans like Indians and Chinese, and they will get a few. However, the great bulk of these immigrants do not buy monoculturalism any more than they bought the old multiculturalism. Their numbers are such that they live in enclaves and they will not take kindly to monoculturalism. Basically, they don’t need us anyway. As they behave as colonists, One Nation will stumble — and worse, be infected by those who have joined — and not know how to respond. It makes for a mess, and an opportunity for the nationalists reading this to start recruiting!

SELF-DECEPTION RUNS RIOT

I am acquainted with a lot of folks across different movements, and many still inside One Nation, who are saying that Pauline is the first step — that she is opening the door to a great new patriotic mobilisation and doing the true job for all of us. No! That is not her intention, and not what she is doing. What One Nation is really doing is making chaos in place of certainties. From my point of view that is better, but One Nation will not be the beneficiary. Of course, changing parties in parliament isn’t revolutionary, but when old parties with long histories founder, break, and are replaced by others, there is a shift in the public mood. People think there is change. So, One Nation rises and becomes the main conservative party. The system is the same, but it looks different. It is that which creates the political gap in the public mind for other arguments and new forces. If one new force can rise, why not another? That is what some will start to think.

There are some people too who imagine that One Nation offers potential to be a type of vanguard force which will allow nationalists and other patriots to work within it, grow within it, and come out later to change the party’s direction. Good luck with that. That strategy is called entryism, and I know enough of One Nation to know that the spotters will be out in force to identify anyone trying it. Basically, the party is now big enough to lose a few infiltrators without decrying a membership loss. But I think the real problem for anyone who joins with a hidden plan is that One Nation would grind them into paste and render them into servants. After a while, they wouldn’t realise they had become de facto loyalists.

Again, no! If you don’t agree with One Nation, or you are a nationalist, or you have some other agenda — do your own thing. Best of all, join the nationalist party.

The Long Hard Road is the Surest Road

So, what should Australia First nationalists do? The One Nation steamroller is coming down the road, and you can’t stop it. It will go where it will go. Just stand out of the way. I want to see One Nation expand to its full limits. So, prepare. Start building your networks, your publications, your structures, and your local presence. This is the hardest road, but the surest road for those who don’t want to merely change governments — but change the system itself. That is what it has come to, and this is what we must fight for.

Until next time,

Stalking Horse

Whenever Australia’s rich throw their support behind a ‘future leader,’ you can rest assured they tend to get their way. That is because that ‘leader’ is their political proxy, who will commit to policies favourable to their interests. It is also why Gina Rinehart is throwing so much ‘benefaction’ Pauline Hanson’s way.

Pauline is the ‘populist’ candidate. The term ‘populist’ is frequently used as a pejorative to discredit candidates or positions that command substantial public support, particularly when those positions challenge the prevailing views of political, media, or bureaucratic elites. This usage is in tension with a basic democratic premise: that legitimacy ultimately derives from the ability of the political system to reflect, however imperfectly, the preferences of the larger number of citizens. When the label is applied primarily to movements that succeed in mobilising widespread discontent rather than to a specific ideological structure, it functions less as analysis and more as a rhetorical device for delegitimising popular challenge to elite consensus.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks. Anyone who thinks that Pauline Hanson would augur a regeneration of the erstwhile ‘Aussie Spirit,’ tackle the ghettoisation of Australia’s major cities by prospering non-white immigrants, and put ‘Australia First’ in all things is obviously planning to vote for her. They will look past the evidence right before them and lap up the ‘populist’ rhetoric, imagining those sentiments constitute the woman’s totality — the positions that consistently and single-mindedly motivate her. And they’ll be wrong. But that is the whole point of ‘populism’ and where it derives its contemptible essence.

When Samuel Johnson coined the phrase ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,’ he spoke of someone sheltering their true objectives behind noble causes. To investigate Pauline Hanson’s genuine motives wouldn’t help much because she doesn’t have any beyond acquiring wealth and status. But that is exactly what the typical punter won’t be looking out for. They will forget that she was once a small businesswoman who joined the Liberal Party as a representative of the aspirational class. Her ‘Swamped by Asians’ maiden speech reflected the worksheet that she had appropriated from the late Perry Jewell and his Confederate Action Party (CAP). Before he died, Jewell lamented ever handing her their mailing list and platform because she saw it — not in the radical sense that Perry did — but as a good way to get the plebs onboard.

Pauline wraps herself in other people’s patriotism: she cloaks herself in the disguise of nationalism in the rudimentary manner of the garden-variety reactionary. When tested, she proclaimed, “You don’t have to be White to be Australian,” while petting two female pickaninnies on the One Nation stage. She meant it, too, because Pauline is from the dinosaur breed of multiracialists who accepted non-Whites but on the basis that they ‘assimilate.’ She belongs to those who lost the battle against multiculturalism in the early 1970s, alongside the integrationists — the assimilationists! Eventually, they would all be replaced by the ‘anti-racists.’

Nationalism is a radical ideology and has no place for compromise, and ‘assimilation’ is the acceptance of the absorption of extraneous races into the national gene pool so long as ‘they’ walk, talk, and act as we do. Without debouching into a screed about the origins of multiculturalism, let’s say that assimilation was the post-WW2 expectation of the Australian government as it looked to broken Europe to replace our fallen and build the nation. By the 1970s, when the mafia-associated Labor Immigration Minister Al Grassby declared, “A multicultural society for the future!” this new attitude to immigrants, and from whence they were sourced, had politically bipartisan support, save for a few holdouts.

Among those who most objected were the rural working class — the very people that Perry Jewell turned to in the mid-1990s when he heeded the call of political reform. Now, pay attention to that, because — from England, to America, to down under in Australia — the most maligned section of society are the so-called working class, or the poor. In England, for example, Keir Starmer’s entire regime is built upon a visceral disgust of the native working class. While Anthony Albanese comes from the former working-class foundations of the Labor Party, he joined at a time that they left behind those roots and values in favour of progressive causes. He was a product of the new anti-racist left, which needed union money, yet despised the sweaty lumpen that provided it. They set about re-educating those union rank-and-file to the new identity-based causes.

The vision splendid of our nationalist forebears was an egalitarian, uniquely Australian style of socialism (for want of a better name) wherein opportunity availed itself to all, without hindrance from the obdurate exploiter class. A monocultural, White Australia was mandatory to that vision, for reasons now making themselves clear in the age of mass migration. The long labourist struggle for worker’s rights and social equality attests to that vision defeated by the two wars. But, to cut a long story short, nationalism splits at the level of the business owners. What, did you say? The business owners?

The primary goal of any business owner, large or small, is to make and increase profit. In practice, this requires a functional colour-blindness: you sell to, buy from, hire, or partner with whoever can deliver value. The horticulture and fruit-picking industries are a perfect example. Many smaller growers and packers in regions like Shepparton, Stanthorpe, or Wide Bay rely heavily on temporary foreign labour — backpackers on Working Holiday visas and Pacific workers under the PALM scheme — to get perishable crops harvested and packed during peak seasons. Without that flexible, low-cost workforce, a lot of these operations would struggle or fold. Exclusivity based on race or ethnicity is a luxury few of them can afford. It remains largely the preserve of a fringe, even within traditionally Anglo-Australian small-business communities. The rest operate on commercial realism: markets and labour pools are what they are.

This is the outlook that Pauline Hanson reasonably represents — only dressed up in Australia Day bunting. Having run a fish-and-chip shop herself, she embodies the pragmatic conservatism of the aspirational small-business class rather than radical nationalism. Hanson is opposed to Islam. That’s because she’s a Zionist. She has no critical skills where Israel is concerned. Neither do those who are throwing money at her. But, at the end of the day, it’s the working class who get uprooted, crowded, and undercut by immigration. Pauline has no intention of ending immigration, nor from any specific countries; she just wants to slow down the numbers. She wants them to wave flags and say ‘G’day.’

The tragedy is that the greater proletariat affected by immigration — who are too guttersnipe to appreciate the progressive social agenda — could potentially raise them on their shoulders. They will do so through the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Put simply, this is when voters with limited policy knowledge confidently assess complex proposals based on superficial understanding — seeking simplistic solutions to multifaceted problems. ‘Remigration’ is one of the simplest of these, not that Pauline is even touting that as a policy.

The common voter will not see that the one thing all major parties (and we’re going to now include ON in that league for the sake of argument) have in common is the notion of ‘status’. The entirety of capitalist western society is founded on the idea of status and improving it all the way to the top of the pyramid. You can see this chauvinism everywhere — from the elitism of the progressives to the air of superiority that abounds in the extreme right. None of them wants to be ordinary, none of them wishes for a humble existence. Everyone wants power.

Pauline will betray the working class — those who have limited skills to trade and whose lifestyle expectations don’t involve three-storey mansions in Vaucluse — just as those fools in England who abandoned the National Front to vote for Maggie Thatcher instead found out. Pauline sees herself as an occidental Maggie, and she’ll be groomed for that appearance. But when the crunch comes, she’ll be working for the industrialists like Gina, who’d have us working for two-dollars a day. 

There is a nationalist—a good man—but who seems to epitomise the very definition of madness: repeating the same behaviour in the expectation of a different result. Perhaps that is too harsh. Yet it is precisely that pattern we must examine, sympathetically, because it lies at the root of what continually confounds him.

He likes to point at the news whenever an event starkly demonstrates how multiracialists, liberals, and globalists have betrayed our society. It usually takes a serious outrage: a terrorist attack by militant Islamists, or the random killing of a native Australian by a so-called refugee. These preventable crimes, born of policies of multiculturalism, diversity, tolerance, and inclusion, inflame his ire. Above all, it is the “tolerance” that is tested until it frays beyond recognition.

When such incidents occur—whether here or across Europe—he springs into action, firing off links to his friends. The recipients are usually already aware of the story. He channels his disturbance into rapid articles and letters that, if nothing else, help him direct his anger. He takes it all rather personally. The trouble is that, in his indignation, he remains oblivious to how his missives ricochet around an echo-chamber, reaching only the already converted. They add to the noise rather than breaking it.

One can point a withering finger at these incidents for only so long. The years roll on, new and ever more outrageous events appear, and the same cycle repeats. Encoded in the outrage of nationalists like our friend is the deep frustration that nobody in power is doing anything about what is plainly visible to all. Yet he overlooks what sits directly before his own eyes. He has watched the pattern play out countless times: a person of colour commits an atrocity, the legacy media stays silent as long as possible, and when coverage can no longer be avoided, the wording is carefully sanitised.

Political leaders call for calm, so the perpetrator’s “community” does not suffer. They stress that “not all” are to blame. When ordinary people express their legitimate anger, that sentiment is immediately labelled as being fomented by the “far-right” seeking to “capitalise” on the “tragedy.” This reflexive response only deepens the nationalist’s fury—an understandable reaction. But he is missing an unmissable truth: the political class has no genuine interest in fixing the problem. Quite the reverse. They typically press the accelerator, inviting in even more disparate peoples and cultures.

How often have parliamentarians from these communities risen to denounce the “far-right” while shielding their own? The liberals watch approvingly, silent on the predictable results of their policies, and reserve their condemnation solely for the “rabble” who dare take to the streets in protest.

Take, for example, the case of Henry Nowak’s killer. It took six months to convict Vikram Digwa, yet less than two weeks to convict those who protested the killing. The message could not be clearer.

If our friend’s essays and shared articles are an attempt to appeal to reason, whose reason? Those who already know the score are not the ones who need convincing, while those on the other side appear untroubled—even content—that too few of us are being killed. Does he truly believe they lack intelligence on the matter? That authorities have no statistics (however euphemistically phrased) showing the correlation between the populations they import and the rising toll on the pre-existing native community?

The point is they are fully aware. Once we resign ourselves to this inescapable conclusion, the question becomes: what next? Continuing to fire off essays and news links in the hope that someone with real influence will finally intervene? Or that enough horror stories will eventually spark an electoral revolt and install a party that “will do something”?

Herein lies the root issue. Has our friend spent as much time and energy thinking about constructive answers to that question as he has stewing on the problem itself? The pointing must eventually give way to building—organising, supporting genuine nationalist institutions, and creating the political and cultural forces capable of reversing the damage. Outrage alone, no matter how righteous, will not save us. The time for pointing is passing. The time for decisive, coordinated action is now. 

W.G. Spence, the grandfather of the Australian union movement — in the days when the union was still an honourable fraternity of righteous working men united to uphold the dignity of the productive classes — contended that “…Where all Unions are associated together as in a Labor Federation, they become a community within society doing good unseen all the time.”

He said this in his 1909 history of the Australian worker’s movement, Australia’s Awakening. In a sense, he was speaking about a similar sort of concept to those poor fools who misread ‘fascism’ in the symbol of its bundled sticks. For, in the latter, the State commands the sticks, in the union bundle, the sticks took care of each other. And that is worth considering in the struggle against Brussels-Zionist demagoguery wreaking misery on White Australians from Canberra.

By the time that Spence came to reflect on the collective achievement of the trade union, he cited how, with each worker in his industry collectivising, they attained a power through their union body. Whereas once the capitalist set the policeman upon the unionist with his truncheon and contrived a litany of crimes to lock him away lest his rhetoric strike a chord with the unrepresented mass of labour, the trade union now held power. And, as an analogy, he alluded, “Man crushes an ant under his heel, but gets out of the way of a bull.”

They had gained political representation through the formation of the Labor Party and forced the ‘employer’ to negotiate.

Then came legislation and an acceptance of union wisdom regarding workers’ happiness, productivity, and dare we say it, greater profit for the shareholder. The vision went far beyond the idea of a sustainable living wage, to a uniquely Australian variety of socialism that foresaw a better, harmonious society — as the Union sought where pertinent to the industry a national standard of an eight-hour working day. While two unnecessary wars intervened to impede that beatific, the concept remains. For regarding the spoils of solidarity, he supplied anecdotes about his time as secretary of the A.M.A. when he learned of workers, non-union men unaware of such things, accepting pay below the union rate.

He fired a letter off to each worker with instructions to take it with them to their paymaster on payday. Upon the said personage reading the note, the workers’ rate was immediately raised to the union standard. Moreover, no retribution was taken upon those men, and no discussion entered throughout this display of deference. Why? Because, as Spence explained, “The Trade Union is a lawmaker, as it sets up a new custom, and the parties concerned are driven to approximate observance of the new law. The law of custom always precedes Statute law.”

As such, “The A.M.A. was like the blue coat of the police constable — the wrongdoer is not afraid of the man in the coat, but of the power behind the uniform.”

In short, the paymaster and his bosses understood that complying with the union rate was easier than battling the powerful entity, in which case, they would certainly have lost. No good could have come of it.

Spence observed, “The union gives courage to its members. It opens a door for the ventilation of each member’s grievance. It provides a Court to which the individual can appeal. He is heard with sympathy, and, if he suffers injustice, his feelings of indignation spread to others who feel his cause to be theirs, and steps are taken to seek a remedy.”

Thereafter he addressed the question of ‘coercion’ by the Union of non-members and opined, “It is too late in the day to object to the principle of coercion. Every municipality enforces payment of rates and taxes. The State does the same, and they justify so doing by the fact that the monies thus collected are utilised for the common good.”

Moreover, where the Union was concerned, that “good” was done “…Without parade, and as [is] prompted by the feeling that all are one family and mutual help should be their guiding principle.”

If those words of yore have resonance, then it is particularly today! If ever the White Australian needs that sense of family and mutual help, that day is now!

But, as with the Union, Spence observed that — although the Union helped to shape the character of each member — that “those outside of Unions are of different classes.”

Now, let us transfer this framework to today’s nationalist struggle. For those of us with vintage, our battle has traversed the trammels of every type of obstacle that those of “…a very low class,” as Spence labelled “the creature who hires himself out to take the place of unionists,” have thrown out, be it due to their ulterior motives, their shadowy alignments or just lack of moral fibre.

A splendid cause lies injured and profaned by a cast of characters and their groups either in league with the eternal Zionist, motivated by a generational desire to be the ‘leader,’ or simply ill-equipped through incurable ignorance. We aren’t interested in naming names, as any experienced nationalist knows of whom we speak. But what if … what if there was an organisation for nationalists that operated on the same basis as the successful trade union of Spence’s day? What if it held the same belief, desires and ambitions, only relevant to our current circumstances and dire age that calls him to action?

Imagine a Union of Australian Nationalists, financed by dues-paying members, policed by the members themselves, all educated and agreed upon its goals, rules, codes and disciplines and thus able to weed out undesirables by the simple unity of agreement on principles?

What if, once established and nurtured, this Union set itself to purpose?

What if? 

IN A TENSE Senate Estimates hearing, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Deputy Director-General Miss Gilmore was subjected to extended questioning by Greens Senator David Shoebridge over Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to ASIO’s headquarters in the Ben Chifley Building. This may be the only instance of a Greens Party’ squid helping Australia.

The nearly 13-minute grilling reflected ongoing unease about foreign influence in Australia’s national security apparatus and the unusual decision to host a foreign head of state inside the country’s principal domestic intelligence agency.

According to Gilmore, President Herzog met with the ASIO Director-General and was briefed by counterterrorism teams on operations following the Bondi stabbing attack. She confirmed she was not personally present.

Senator Shoebridge pressed aggressively for specifics: who else attended the meeting, whether any non-ASIO Australians were present, if US officials were involved, and whether members of Israel’s Mossad accompanied the President. Gilmore took most of these questions on notice, repeatedly stating that operational details and attendee identities could not be disclosed in a public forum.

Shoebridge raised past security incidents involving Israel, including the reported insertion of backdoors into Australian Defence Force battle management software — which required costly remediation at taxpayer expense — and Mossad’s use of forged Australian passports in overseas assassination operations in a Gulf state. He asked whether these events meant Israeli security agencies should be viewed as a risk to Australian national interests. Gilmore declined to answer directly, noting that ASIO’s foreign partnerships are government-approved and overseen by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.

The heart of Shoebridge’s examination focused on the purpose and precedent of the visit. He repeatedly challenged why the head of a foreign state was invited into the heart of Australia’s domestic spy agency. Gilmore responded that Herzog was a guest of the Australian Government and that ASIO maintains essential global intelligence relationships to protect Australians. However, she refused to provide any detailed rationale for the invitation or the briefing provided.

Senator Shoebridge specifically questioned the practice of such invitations, asking whether it had ever been standard procedure for ASIO to host foreign heads of state in its headquarters. Gilmore stated that, to her recollection, this had not occurred before, describing it as an extraordinary precedent in her experience.

The exchange grew testy, with Shoebridge accusing ASIO of offering non-answers and insisting the Australian public deserved transparency about why their national intelligence headquarters was opened to a foreign leader. Gilmore consistently relied on national security protocols, emphasising that such matters are unsuitable for detailed public discussion.

ASIO undertook to provide further information on notice regarding attendees and logistics. Whether those details will be released publicly is yet to be seen.

This episode, driven by Greens Senator David Shoebridge, highlights the persistent scrutiny from elements within Australian politics that often prioritise ideological positions over clear-eyed defence of Australian sovereignty and national security interests. For many concerned with Australia’s independent strategic position, the decision to grant such access to President Herzog inside ASIO’s Canberra offices raises legitimate questions about consistency, risk, and the protection of Australia’s own intelligence capabilities first and foremost. 

THE REAL CRIME WAS THE ANTI-RACIST STATE.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a small group of Australian patriots stood up against the betrayal of their nation. They were met not with debate, but with surveillance, infiltration, harassment, and violence — orchestrated by the very state institutions meant to protect the people.

Shots Fired is the unflinching account of how the Australian state crushed patriotic resistance. Drawing on primary documents, ASIO files, police records, and eyewitness testimony, Nathan Sykes exposes the machinery of suppression: Special Branch, ASIO, compliant media, and a political class determined to enforce multiculturalism at any cost.

This is the story they tried to bury. Raw. Documented. Essential.

The year’s most important book you will not find in the mainstream.

Available now on Amazon.com.au