They don't trust Muslims or anyone who threatens their view of "the Australian way of life". And in recent times, hate groups have become more visible, powerful and militant. In this special report, PAUL TOOHEY goes behind the lines of the extremists to try to understand their hard-wired ideology.
AT THE Bush Pig Inn, a rustic Aussie-themed drinking hole in bush just out of Bendigo in central Victoria, the inner-circle of the United Patriots Front, the public face of Australia's most far-Right "racialists" are holding court.
Some 40 people, mostly men decked out in black with nationalist insignia, have come from around the state and beyond to hear today's seminar on the white genocide facing Australia.
The UPF claim to feel a deeper love and concern for this country than most. Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb plays in the background, summing up their view of Australia.
The main man is Blair Cottrell, 27, leader of the UPF and its so-called political wing, Fortitude. He was sentenced to four months jail in 2012 for torching a man's garage in a jealous rage, and has convictions for burglary and trafficking testosterone.
Tall, well-built and V-shaped, bringing to mind the guy from Despicable Me, he's a holocaust denier who thinks Hitler took a principled stand against Jews. Cottrell talks with scrupulously controlled diction, to convey the impression that he is intelligent - which he is.
Even Cottrell's many detractors admit he has charisma. He offers tea, because though the bar is open and some guests have started drinking, this is no piss-up: frivolity is frowned upon by these intense men.
At his side is today's speaker, Chris Shortis, 45, of English-Irish descent and raised Seventh-Day Adventist. Shortis found an outlet for his thoughts when he discovered like-minded people on Facebook, in late 2014. Prior to that, he thought he was alone.
And there's Thomas Sewell, early 20s, taciturn, watchful and mildly seething. The best guess is that he's adviser and tactician. A former Australian soldier, he decides after two minutes that enough photos have been taken. Sewell can be seen on video, brawling at a UPF rally from last year.
The UPF rejects Islam, but also Christianity. They especially despise multiculturalism. "We're modern-day heretics," says Cottrell, who once said a portrait of Hitler should hang in every Australian classroom.
It is likely, according to a reformed white supremacist source who once planned to hit the streets of Sydney with a small army to gun down Asians but these days assists authorities infiltrating Right-wing extremist groups, that someone in the crowd is reporting back to federal agents.
This group is proudly public, but far-Right groups are everywhere and hiding behind the anonymity of social media. Unchecked, the fear is they could attract exactly the same sort of disaffected young man who, on the extremist scale, is no different from those they despise most: the loose-wheeled young Muslim.
The concern is that the UPF, which six months ago broke away to take a harder line from the more mainstream "mums and dads" anti-Islamic group, Reclaim Australia, has begun engaging some angry young minds.
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UP IN Sydney, Ralph Cerminara, who predicts, "There will be another Cronulla II", encourages people to take and post video of lone Muslims to show "how out of place they look". He says he's currently on a court order that prevents him badmouthing Muslims after a dust-up in Lakemba. None of it slows him down.
"I should be able to walk down here in a bikini and eat a bacon sandwich and not be attacked," he says.
Cerminara has also been savaging the current UPF leadership, accusing it of associating with skinheads, which he says damages the anti-Islam brand.
"There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim, just as there is no such thing as a moderate neo-nazi," Cerminara, 37, an IT worker, says.
This is a distraction from rolling battles with the far-Right's enemy, Antifa, the masked anti-fascist movement of the extreme Left who confront them in street battles.
Cerminara, who was allegedly slashed while shooting video of an anarchist bookstore in Newtown earlier this year, says anti-fascists have published his address and made home visits - where he lives with an Asian wife.
A machine gun response for every question, he pauses only when pressed on what his wife thinks of his 24/7 obsession: Muslims and the extreme Left. "She wants me to stop it," he says. "She knows it's right, but she wants someone else to do it." Melbourne man Neil Erikson, 31, a UPF founder who has since left the organisation for what he sees as a shift to neo-nazism, says his mother-in-law recently received a cut-up photo of a foetus in the mail, which he thinks was meant to represent his young son.
That letter came from the far-Right, he guesses, but two weeks earlier he was bashed by Antifa activists who'd spotted him heading to a meeting of the Australian Liberty Alliance, fielding anti-Islam candidates in the election.
It's tough out there being anti-Muslim.
"I originally started out in the neo-nazi movement when I was about 16, until about four years ago," Erikson says. "If you wanted to show pride in Australia, there was no other place to go.
"In hindsight, it's appealing to join something like that. But there are darker sides to neo-nazis - lost kids, lost people. Until this patriotic rise of Reclaim last year, there was no one to hang out with apart from neo-nazis." His neo-nazi mates were "in and out of prison all the time, for bashing some random Asian on the street." Like the 21-year-old Vietnamese student from Pascoe Vale in Melbourne, severely beaten in an unprovoked attack by skinheads while walking home from work, in Moonee Ponds, in 2012.
"I was there that night, just before," says Erikson, who saw young neo-nazis shaving their heads in anticipation of the attack.
"That's when I started turning off that Nazi stuff. It's not his fault he's here," Erikson says of the Vietnamese man. "He's come here for a better life. It's our government's fault for letting him in." He wants the public to march against Islam, but people are too scared after the first Reclaim Australia rally at Federation Square, in   April last year, fell to violence, with a grandma - among others - getting hurt.
The Reclaim movement "woke everyone up and got them out of their houses," Erikson says.
"It's now lost support. The neo-nazi movement has scared people away. If Reclaim were to hold a rally now, they'd be lucky to get 20 people. It's all gone online. They're safer at home."
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WORLDWIDE, says Andre Oboler, Australia ranks third or fourth for supporters of anti-Islam, anti-Semitic and pro-white sites.
"When we consider the size of Australia's population we see that a far larger portion of Australian Facebook users are actively joining such hate groups online than occurs in other countries," the chief executive of Online Hate Prevention Institute says.
Oboler tracks the rise of hate in Australia to the English Defence League, which began in 2009 with football supporters fighting anti-war Islamists on the streets of Luton. It became controlled by white supremacists.
The EDL's argument was original and appealing: they weren't racists because Islam is a religion, not a race.
Oboler says the distinction is not legitimate. "No. It's like saying, 'I'm not racist, I'm just homophobic.' Well, you're still a bigot." It caught on in Australia, taking the far Right further than it had under the founding anti-multicultural matriarch, Pauline Hanson, who appeared in 1996.
First came the Australian Defence League, "F--- Off, We're Full" bumper stickers, anti-Halal and anti-Sharia movements, and then Reclaim Australia - formed partly in response to a belief that the Lindt siege was created by immigration policies favourable to Muslims.
Then came the street clashes.
There are up to 50 anti-Islam Senate candidates standing on   July 2, but most - possibly with the exception of Hanson, who is running in Queensland - will have a hard time gaining preferences to win spots.
Daniel Nalliah's Rise Up Australia has 11 Senate candidates. The Sri Lankan-born Victorian developed his antipathy for Islam while living with his Asian wife in Saudi Arabia, before coming to Australia as a migrant in 1997.
Nalliah wants a 10-year moratorium on all Islamic migration to Australia. "They can't call me a racist because I'm black," Nalliah says. "People laugh. It's taken a blackfella to stand up for Australian culture." Oboler says anti-Islam political groups should be allowed their voice. Australia has limited constitutional free-speech rights, but the High Court says we have the right to open political communication to enable the democratic process.
"There should be leeway for political parties," Oboler says. "If you force them to code what they're saying, people might vote for them accidentally." The Bendigo mosque was this week cleared to be built, but Cerminara tells me plans are afoot to block it: "It will not be built. The Greens tie themselves to trees. We will do it as well."
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THE UPF leadership group sticks close to each other at the Bush Pig Inn, scanning faces, not sure of who is who among those who have arrived in response to its Facebook invitation.
They won't let us take crowd photos, because "some of these people have jobs". They nevertheless extend politeness. The UPF expects bad press, so doesn't have much to lose.
Asked to explain core beliefs, Cottrell says: "It is essentially racialism, but it's not what you think it is. It's not supremacist. We actually advocate for an exclusive existence for all the races of the world - not this blending, multiculturalism, egalitarianism nonsense.
"We want to encourage different cultures to stay who they are to remain as they have always been. Every culture, every race, must have exclusive existence. Anyone who tries to take that away is an enemy." Cottrell's language sounds like white supremacy. He proposes that one race - the white one - controls Australia.
The problem, says the former neo-nazi source, is that UPF leadership - even if they are not themselves advocating terror - will attract kids, just as ISIS does.
"If you're an ISIS guy, the majority are not even believers in Islam," he says. "Most of it is attachment problems, being bullied at school and mental illness. They get disaffected and have got to find somewhere where they belong.
"It's the same with white extremists. They don't really believe in racial segregation, but they go along with it because they need something." This man, himself a master indoctrinator, built a far-Right army of 150 people to attack Asians (whom he later went back to and tried to de-radicalise), explains how it works.
"You say to the guy, 'Come here, we're your mates. Who was it who bashed you? We'll get them'." Then they're hooked. But the real threat comes from those who are too unmanageable even for the white extremists.
"The danger is the people on the fringes who might get rejected," says the ex-supremacist. "They're going to be your lone wolves." He says of the far-Right groups: "They want chaos in order to rebuild the nation. And they're inviting everyone to join them. If Muslim kids look at this, how will they feel?" He says that the federals and state police are watching closely.
Shortis makes the extraordinary claim that Australia's constitution is a "nationalist" document, setting out a formula for a nation to be ruled on separatist lines. This is news. The Australian constitution does not use the words "nation", "national" and especially not "nationalist".
The constitution creates a federation. Nothing in the document mentions race or exclusion. That is why Aborigines are fighting to get a brief mention in the preamble.
"Israel has laws to preserve Israel as a Jewish state," Shortis says. "Because they want to preserve their racial and cultural identity. I ask the question to the far-Left: why are we called white supremacists?
"It's far from the case. If anything, the white race is the most disgusting, self-loathing race on the face of the earth. How long does the white man have to pay for the perceived evils of our colonial history?" There is nostalgia here for a time before they were born.
"Our freedoms have diminished in the last 40 years," Shortis says. "But do you diminish the freedoms of others?" I ask.
"This lie that we go out looking for Muslims to seek them out, I don't know who invented that," he replies.
We take our leave. There's a game on back in Melbourne at Etihad I'd like to see. Shortis says something about my "poor priorities". But I'm not so sure.
Later that day, departing the stadium with 28,000 people, mostly white but a whole lot more, you can't help look at the little Asian and Indian kids at the game with mum and dad.
Do they want to hear bad things about who they are, or where they come from? Do we want to make them feel hated?We do not. That is why most of us refuse to do it.