Three members of Australia’s neo-Nazi National Socialist Network (NSN) are to contest charges arising from their disruption of a dawn Anzac Day memorial service in Melbourne last April.
Jacob Hersant, Nathan Bull, and Michael Nelson appeared in court this week and entered not guilty pleas to offences including behaving in an offensive manner in a public place and taking part in a disturbance within the Shrine of Remembrance reserve.
Commemoration
The disruption occurred on 25 April last year, when the group heckled and booed during a ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremony at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, as hundreds of thousands gathered nationally to commemorate Australia’s war dead.
The protesters were heard shouting slogans including “this is our country” and “we don’t have to be welcomed.”
Welcome to Country is a formal ceremony where an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander elder, or a recognised representative of the traditional custodians of the land where an event is taking place, formally welcomes attendees to their country.
It is standard at major public events and official ceremonies including Anzac Day services, but has become a flashpoint for the Australian far right, who regard it as historically illegitimate.
Low cowardice
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned the disruption as “an act of low cowardice on a day when we honour courage and sacrifice,” and called for those responsible to face the full force of the law.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton also condemned the booing, saying Welcome to Country was an important part of official ceremonies that deserved respect.
Hersant is the most prominent of the three defendants. He co-founded the NSN in 2020 alongside Thomas Sewell, building it from earlier far-right cells including the Lads Society and Antipodean Resistance, using provocative public demonstrations, Nazi salutes, and high-visibility stunts to attract attention and recruit members.
British nazi links
As Searchlight has previously reported, the NSN developed close ties with British far-right figures, with Sewell appearing multiple times on Mark Collett’s online Patriotic Weekly Review, and NSN cited as an inspiration by the performative nazis of White Vanguard.
Hersant became the first person charged under new Victorian anti-Nazi laws after performing a Hitler salute on the steps of a Melbourne court.
A County Court judge upheld the conviction on appeal in November, ruling that Hersant had deliberately performed the salute and that it did not constitute protected political expression.
He was sentenced to one month in jail last month.
Violent peak
The NSN’s hostility towards Indigenous Australians reached a violent peak in August 2025, after an anti-immigration rally in Melbourne where Sewell was the principal speaker.
A group of around 30 to 50 black-clad NSN members broke away and stormed Camp Sovereignty, a First Nations protest camp and sacred burial ground in Kings Domain park.
Attackers tore down First Nations flags, trampled the camp’s sacred fire and assaulted men, women, and children indiscriminately, chanting “white power” and racial slurs as they did so.
Sewell was pictured personally leading the charge, telling his followers “let’s get ’em” as they surged into the camp. Four people were injured, two of them hospitalised with severe head wounds.
Dozens of offences
Sewell was subsequently charged with dozens of offences including violent disorder, affray, assault, and discharging a missile. He appeared on Collett’s PWR shortly after being released from custody following the attack, with Collett framing his detention as imprisonment in “the Australian gulag.”
The Anzac Day prosecution adds to a lengthening legal record for the group. On Australia Day 2025, around 40 NSN members marched through Adelaide chanting white supremacist slogans, resulting in 16 arrests on charges including displaying Nazi symbols.
Wind up activity
In January 2026, facing the prospect of new federal hate speech legislation that could criminalise the organisation and its recruitment methods, the NSN announced it would wind up all activity, describing the move as an attempt to limit legal exposure rather than an ideological retreat.
That disbandment is unlikely to affect the trio’s forthcoming trial. A trial date will be set in due course.
