A contributed commentary by Elias Priestly.
It’s been an interesting and eventful start of the year for nationalism in Australia, and one notable event has been the passing of hate speech legislation by the Federal Labor government. One aspect of the hate-speech legislation that was originally proposed caught my eye, and that was the penalties for espousing racial supremacy. As such, it seems like an opportune time to address the question as to whether the espousal of “racial supremacy” is the correct stance for Australian Nationalists, and my answer is, and as a matter of fact always has been, that it is not
The relevant proposed amendment to the Criminal Code Act 1995 involved the insertion of Section 80.2BF on publicly promoting or inciting racial hatred as proposed in the Draft Combatting Antisemitism, Hate, and Extremism Bill 2026. Within this section, part 1b (i) and (ii) read as follows:
(b) the person engages in the conduct intending to:
(i) promote or incite hatred of another person (the target), or a group of persons (the target group), because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the target or target group; or
(ii) disseminate ideas of superiority over or hatred of another person (the target), or a group of persons (the target group), because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the target or target group;
While this legislation may capture some forms of nationalist advocacy based on ideologies of supremacy, I believe that on the whole it does not have to affect Australian Nationalism because Australian Nationalism does not require us to hate anyone, nor does it require us to maintain that Australians are superior over other groups. The topic of hatred has been addressed clearly by our National Governor, Matthew Grant, many times and it is well documented in the output of the association that we stand against hatred and vilification of other ethnic groups, while unapologetically maintaining our principled political defence of a White Australia on cultural, economic, and ecological grounds. This is an extension of our praxis which is focused upon building up our own people and defending their interests out of an ethic of love.
Now I’m sure that having read this far, some people on the right will already be scrambling to accuse me of being a “cuck” or “cuckservative” who is cowardly attempting to avert the government’s ire by disavowing positions that should, in fact, be held. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is the position that I have always held since I became a committed nationalist, and I have held to this position based upon the argument that I now make.
The main argument against the idea of “racial supremacy” being a necessary component of nationalism is the problem of the metric. A metric is a “standard of measurement,” and any form of discriminating between a superior and inferior type requires some such standard in order to decide relative position. The key difficulty for racial or ethnic supremacism as an ideology is that there is no racially or ethnically neutral standard. Standards are generally based on group preference and preference is subjective.
Let’s look at two of the most common ways that people who accept nationalism measure superiority: intelligence and crime statistics. Just a note before I dive in: I fully accept that there are group differences in intelligence and crime in our society and that these differences are most likely largely, if not totally, based in biological differences. But the concept of difference is not the same as the concept of superiority. Generally, people believe that higher intelligence is better than lower intelligence as measured by IQ. Let’s ask the question, though, better for what? Intelligence may help with creating complex technologies and forms of social organisation, but it can also help people rationalise degenerate ideologies or overthink things like having children, resulting in lower birthrates. A complex system is not necessarily better than a simple system, it all depends on whether one prefers complexity or simplicity. We can keep a preference for high intelligence and complex social structures without maintaining that these two things are indicators of superiority relative to low intelligence and simple social structures. In terms of social structure, this is already a mainstream position in the social sciences. We can also see this point manifesting in discussions of traditional Aboriginal lifestyles relative to modern European Australian lifestyles. I personally prefer the latter due to my own cultural and ethnic heritage and personality, but I feel no need to maintain that my lifestyle is objectively superior to living a hunter-gatherer life according to Aboriginal lore and Dreamings.
What about the infamous crime statistics, though? Surely everyone would admit that criminality is bad and, therefore, that groups with higher criminality are inferior to those with lower criminality? While I think that all people have a natural aversion to criminality and would agree that it is objectively bad, we need to acknowledge that what is considered criminal is generally relative to a group and its values. A society without firm notions of private property will not look at the theft in the same way as a society with those notions. This was part of the reason for the unfortunate early clashes between Aboriginal tribes and British settlers in the establishment of Australia. The settlers considered their livestock to be their own property, while in many cases Aboriginals likely saw them as belonging to the land and free to be hunted as with what we consider wild game. Furthermore, some criminal acts in our society are motivated by genetic factors such as a higher propensity for aggressive and risk-taking behaviours, or cultural factors such as using violence to establish hierarchies or engaging in honour-based conflicts. Hopefully, at this point it has become obvious that the value of these factors is relative to a particular society and its norms. To use an analogy from science fiction’s Star Trek, aggressive and honour-based behaviour along with a disdain for science is good for a Klingon, but bad for a Vulcan.
To summarise what has been said so far, all discrimination of superiority and inferiority between groups requires an objective metric, and no such metric exists; therefore, it is not possible to discern whether one group is superior to another. This does not require us to “cuck” politically, because rejection of the concept of superiority does not require rejection of the concepts of difference and preference. Australian Nationalists should maintain that our ethnic group and culture are different to those of other groups, and that we have a preference for living with those who are like us rather than with those who are different. This should hardly be a controversial position, and generally it is the case that where free-association is permitted people will live among their own without having to rationalise their preference or base it upon a complex ideology. To annoy those who hate this favourite term of mine, I maintain that difference and preference is basically pre-ideological in the manner in which it plays out in social formations.
Now, this position has both domestic and international implications. Without any hatred or feeling of superiority, we can maintain that the continued destruction of our homogenous ethnic society in Australia will have bad social effects because incompatible value systems will continue to brush up against each other and result in uncomfortable and tense situations. Difference and preference alone are sufficient to cause conflict in a zero sum game. In international relations, holding to difference and preference without superiority leads to the idea of civilisational multipolarity. Civilisational Multipolarity is the position that there can be different and equally valid forms of civilisation without having to create a hierarchy of value among them. Indian and Chinese civilisation can be different from Australian civilisation without being better or worse than it. The ideal is that we can all peacefully improve our own civilisations in line with our own internal value systems. Nonetheless, this is an ideal only, and preference for our own civilisation and its interests can result in conflict which does require us to maintain a certain geopolitical realism alongside and in partial tension with a position of multipolarity. Such is life in an imperfect world.
Finally, some may wish to point out that at this stage it seems like I have set us adrift in the sea of relativistic postmodernism. While there may be deep differences between civilisations and ethnic groups, I believe that there is a level on which these differences can be reconciled, and that is the level of religion or the philosophy of the Absolute. As René Guénon wrote in his The Crisis of the Modern World:
It is true that there have always been many and varied civilizations, each of which has developed in a manner natural to it and in conformity with the aptitudes of this or that people or race; but distinction does not mean opposition, and there can be equivalence of a sort between civilizations with very different forms, so long as they are all based on the same fundamental principles-of which they only represent applications varying in accordance with varied circumstances.
This, however, is to take us beyond the scope of ANA as a non-sectarian association, and beyond the scope of the power of the Commonwealth of Australia to legislate.
We summarily conclude therefore that generally speaking, despite how much we love and prefer our own unique culture and civilisation: concepts of supremacy are inherently relativistic and not a necessary or core ingredient of Australian Nationalism.