Case Explained:This article breaks down the legal background, charges, and implications of Case Explained: Will Australian Blindness Towards Rising Domestic White Terrorism Continue? – Legal Perspective
Two white Australian men were recently charged with terrorism offences in Western Australia. This marks a significant shift in how authorities are willing to categorise white nationalist violence, and this may be seismic, depending on not only the outcomes of the alleged culprits’ trials, but more so on whether decisions being made now are treated as the precedents they represent into the future.
The initial incident charged as terror in WA was telling, as it involved 32-year-old Liam Hall throwing a homemade bomb into the crowd at a First Nation’s 26 January 2026 Invasion Day rally. At first WA authorities hardly batted an eyelid, which is the traditional Australian response to white violence against First Peoples. However, this time recent events and outcry appear to have led to a change.
The proximity of the 14 December 2025 Bondi Beach massacre, which was immediately declared terrorism, to the failed Invasion Day attack, along with the ongoing response to the killing of 15 people at a Jewish festival on Gadigal land, appears to have given more credence to the outcry around the downplaying of the WA incident, which, as it was the usual, had kicked in like clockwork.
WA authorities were on a roll by the time 20-year-old white supremacist Jayson Michaels was charged with planning an act of terrorism on 27 February. Michaels’ proposed targets were WA parliament, WA police headquarters and Muslim places of worship. And again, this marks a second rare charging of a white man, whereas the trend has long been to charge Muslims over terrorism.
But as senators Lidia Thorpe, Mehreen Faruqi and Fatima Payman were last week highlighting the need to eradicate racism in their own workplace, each senator has too been raising that the government-funded whole-of-society National Anti-Racism Framework, which seeks to broadly tackle racism, has been set aside, whilst a plan to combat antisemitism is being given the royal treatment.
A precedent set
White Australian terrorism suspect Liam Hall tossed a homemade bomb at the crowd at the Boorloo-Perth 26 January First Nations protest. And this charging of a white Australian with terrorism against First Peoples is of heightened significance, due to the fact that the violent invasion, dispossessing and genociding of First Peoples was once state-sanctioned behaviour, and this idea still lingers.
Following the charging of Michaels, the WA Counter Terrorism Team confirmed it had been surveilling his online activity. On raiding his residence, WA police located weapons and a notebook detailing attacks against the state and the Muslim community. And again, this marks a shift, as in the past lone white men undertaking violent acts were considered mentally ill and charged accordingly.
Not only did the climate surrounding the Bondi attack appear to push WA authorities to revise and set a precedent that in the future such acts mirroring Hall’s attempted attack will be investigated as terrorism, but the lack of an adequate approach to the 31 August 2025 neo-Nazi attack on First Peoples sacred site Camp Sovereignty appeared to weigh heavily on WA charging decisions as well.
The assault upon Camp Sovereignty located in Naarm-Melbourne involved the since disbanded National Socialist Network raiding it, with the sight of these white men storming the camp evoking scenes from the violent frontier past, involving attacks by European settlers upon Aboriginal communities, as part of the settler colonial project now referred to as Australia.
The Camp Sovereignty attack was a further sign that a rising far right movement, which is ostensibly focused on ending mass migration but is targeting all non-European migrants, that mobilised under the banner ‘March for Australia for the first time that same day, is further concerned with asserting white supremacy over all nonwhite peoples, including First Peoples.
White people can’t terrorise
The Howard government enacted terrorism offences into Australian federal law in 2002, which was in direct response to 28 September 2001 UN Security Council resolution 1373, which called on all member states to insert terrorism offences, with accompanying steep penalties, into their domestic laws, in the wake of the 2001 9/11 New York terror attacks.
The current reluctance of authorities to press terrorism charges against white Australians reveals that ministers in 2002 weren’t contemplating white Australians being prosecuted over terrorism. Indeed, this was when the ‘Muslim as terrorist’ trope first took root in the national psyche. And that violence reflecting the nation’s foundational violence could be charged as terrorism wasn’t yet on the horizon.
A 24 April 2024 Australian Muslim Advocacy Network briefing note on how these terrorism laws have been applied since 2002 enactment is telling. At the time of writing, AMAN was able to explain that only one white Australian had ever been convicted in relation to terrorism in this country, whilst the vast majority of terror charges and convictions have been made against Muslim Australians.
So, since the turn of the century, Muslim individuals have been charged with terrorism in relation to violent acts or intentions, while white Australians have often been taken as lone wolf actors with a mental illness. And those charged with terrorism face penalties like life imprisonment, while those with a mental illness are charged with regular crimes with much reduced penalties in comparison.
Rising white nationalism
A commemorative gathering was held last week held on Wurundjeri land at the State Library of Victoria in Naarm-Melbourne to mark seven years since the 15 March 2019 Christchurch massacre took place. That terror incident involved white Australian man Brenton Tarrant gunning down 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in the Aotearoa-New Zealand city.
The rally led by Free Palestine Coalition Naarm highlighted the lack of any national grabbling with the fact a white Australian man, who grew up on Bundjalung, Gumbaynggirr, and Yaegl land in the New South Wales town of Grafton, went overseas and committed mass murder. Tarrant is the most significant local terrorist globally, and yet no official acknowledgement has ever been made of this.
A spate of white Australian terrorism events occurred in NSW over the space of four weeks in mid-2024, which involved one young man entering a Labor MP’s office in Newcastle in a failed attempt to behead the politician, followed by a teen stabbing a Chinese man in the back at Sydney University, and the final incident saw a young man setting off homemade bombs in the toilets at a mall.
ASIO director general Mike Burgess then noted at a press conference in early August 2024 that over the past four months, there had been “eight attacks or disruptions” that had either involved alleged terrorism or incidents that had been investigated “as potential acts of terrorism”, and at least half of those involved were influenced by far right ideologies.
NSW police officers, and Burgess after them, however, suggested that two of the NSW assailants were influenced by “mixed ideologies”, which means that the white nationalists held some ideas popular on the left of politics and therefore, couldn’t be deemed far right. But this new category again appears like the establishment seeking to prevent the far right from being classed as terrorists.
The rising white supremacist issue appears to be intimately linked to ongoing pro-Palestinians protests against the Gaza genocide of the last two years. However, Australian authorities have more so been focused on responding to suggested spiking antisemitism in the community, in the wake of the Bondi attack.
And while senators Thorpe, Faruqi and Payman took a moment last week to highlight the rising racism they’ve been subjected to in their place of work, which is the Australian Senate, each of these politicians has too been raising the fact the government-funded National Anti-Racism Framework, that has a focus on First Nations and constituents from diverse backgrounds, has been neglected.
And whilst designating the Bondi attack as terror appears to have spurred the WA terror charges, the understanding that federal Labor is implementing antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s whole-of-society Plan to Combat Antisemitism in the wake of Bondi, whilst an all-pervasive racism strategy has been shelved, this clear disparity has not led to any recommitment to tackle racism more broadly.