August 31, 2004
A nationalist group targeting university campuses with anti-foreigner propaganda is linked to the local branch of an American neo-Nazi organisation।
The Patriotic Youth League's "Australian unis for Australian students" campaign at the University of Newcastle has coincided with racist incidents against African students and the posting of US neo-Nazi leaflets on campus।
The group's founder, Stuart McBeth, 23, who has been running the Patriotic Youth League while working at a Salvation Army crisis centre in Newcastle, has denied responsibility for the white supremacist posters। He issued a statement saying only people with a "lack of mental capacity" could accuse the league of involvement with American racist organisations.
However, the Herald has uncovered that the league shares a Newcastle postal address with the Australian branch of the US neo-Nazi organisation Volksfront - a group that denies the Holocaust, is buying land for an "Aryan" homeland in the US and warns of a coming "One World Zionist Police State"।
Mr McBeth yesterday said he did not know why the postal addresses were identical and denied any link to Volksfront - assertions contradicted by the league's Sydney representative, Andrew Wilson।
Mr Wilson, from Epping, said Mr McBeth was behind Volksfront Australia, which is "in the early stages of development"।
"It's a cultural kind of movement, whereas the Patriotic Youth League is more political and youth-orientated," he said।
Mr McBeth said there were about 50 members in the league, which began a campaign this year against foreign students।
He said he believed overseas students should be restricted to "exchange programs" so they did not displace local students।
Universities and the Federal Government say that because international students pay full fees they displace no one, and instead inject much-needed cash into the higher education system।
League members appear to have recently posted messages on the Australian section of the Stormfront website (a "white nationalist community discussion forum") about plans to "visit Sydney University with our stickers and posters in the coming weeks".
Nationalists boast of their role on the beach
By Ewin Hannan and Richard Baker
December 13, 2005
WHITE nationalist groups involved in the Cronulla riots have predicted further racial violence, naming the Melbourne suburbs of Heidelberg, Preston, Reservoir and Springvale as potential "hot spots".
The Patriotic Youth League, whose members handed out "Aussies Fighting Back" pamphlets at Cronulla, said it had been inundated with callers wanting to riot in Melbourne.
"If it wasn't for the massive police presence there already, and the fact that it's mainly confined to a peninsula, we really could have had a Paris situation on our hands (in Cronulla)," league spokesman Luke Connors said.
"I have had people calling me all through yesterday, and today, and all through the night, just asking me when Melbourne is going to erupt in riots because they want to go and join in." Founded in 2002 by former One Nation activist Stuart McBeth, the league requires members to be "radical nationalists" and strongly opposed to "non-discriminatory immigration".
While modelled on the youth wing of the extremist British National Party, Australian members are "expected to take regular exercise and to play some form of sport frequently".
The group is aligned with the Sydney-based academic Jim Saleam, who was jailed for three years in 1991 for organising the shotgun attack on the home of African National Congress representative in Australia Eddie Funde.
Dr Saleam, the NSW secretary of the ultra-nationalist Australia First Party, said yesterday the party was responsible for mobilising dozens of people to the Cronulla rally, with members distributing anti-immigration literature. "I'd say we'd be responsible for one in 45 or one in 50 of those who actually turned up," Dr Saleam said.
"But what happened was independent of any real political organisation. This is a people's rebellion, a civil uprising of a very significant number of the local population."
In the week leading up to Sunday's rally, Australia First — formed by former federal Labor MP Graeme Campbell in 1996 — had been encouraging members to go to Cronulla. A statement on its website called for patriots to attend the protest to demonstrate solidarity with the victims of "anti-Australian race and hate and violence".
Mr Connors said about 15 league members handed out literature to the Cronulla crowd, as well as buying drinks for some participants.
He said the league had 100 members nationally, with chapters in Ascot Vale and Eltham.
Mr McBeth lost his job with the Salvation Army after it was revealed he was an organiser of an anti-immigration rally in Newcastle earlier this year.
Dr Saleam denied neo-Nazi groups had been involved in the violence. But NSW Police Minister Carl Scully said a small number of white supremacists were involved in the riots.
Dr Saleam said the trigger for Sunday's riot was the frustration that "local Australians" felt about the lack of response from police and politicians to a "two-year campaign" of abuse and hate directed at Cronulla locals by Middle Eastern men from Sydney's western suburbs.
He described the Middle Eastern gangs as the "most extreme racists you can imagine".
"The other deep-seated factor that we struck among the crowd was a realisation that something has gone askew with Australia's immigration policies," he said.
"We haven't got an immigration policy. It's a population policy designed to change the internal make-up of Australia to resemble the nations of our so-called region."
Mr Connors said that "we have been warning people about this for ages and they just called us cranks".
"We said it's time to start to thinking about multiculturalism and they called us nazis," he said. "Well, hey, we were right and we wish we weren't because it will happen again. It will happen again and it will happen sooner."
Mr Connors predicted further outbreaks.
"'When you have areas which are majority Muslim, because they don't tend to adapt that well, or majority African or Middle Eastern extraction, and right next door you have an area which is 90 per cent Anglo-Saxon, or Anglo-Celtic, there is going to be friction," he said.
"West Heidelberg is a big one because you have a very large black working-class community next to a white middle-working-class community. That would be my best guess actually if it was going to start up in Melbourne.
"Also, out past Springvale, along the train line, there is that same sort of segregation going on, in working-class areas where they are competing for the same jobs and there is a high unemployment rate."
Dr Saleam predicted an increasing number of young Australians would become involved in "independent nationalistic activity".
White supremacist website Stormfront yesterday featured messages from people in the US, Britain and Canada supporting the Cronulla attacks।
Foreign students exploited as slaves
Nick O'Malley, Heath Gilmore and Erik JensenJuly 15, 2009
THOUSANDS of overseas students are being made to work free - or even to pay to work - by businesses exploiting loopholes in immigration and education laws in what experts describe as a system of economic slavery।
The vast pool of unpaid labour was created in 2005 when vocational students were required to do 900 hours' work experience. There was no requirement that they be paid.
Overseas students remained bound to the system as completion of such courses became a near-guaranteed pathway to permanent residency।
Since then the number of foreign students enrolled in the vocational training sector has leapt from 65,120 to 173,432 last year - about half of all our overseas students.
The changes have created a $15 billion industry - comparable countries do not offer residency - but experts, teachers and students say many of the private college courses are little more than visa mills। Since 2001 the number of private colleges has leapt from 664 to 4892।
One university-educated overseas student told the Herald she spent $22,000 and two years doing a hairdressing course she will never use, to secure her residency. She did her 900 hours' work experience in a salon linked to the college, where students were required to pay a $1000 non-refundable bond to use the equipment.
Other colleges charge students thousands of dollars in "placement fees" only to advertise their supply of free labour to local business। A black market has sprung up in fraudulent letters of completion।
"If you wanted to make a corrupt system, this is absolutely how you would do it," said an immigration agent, Karl Konrad।
He said the system began to go bad when the requirement for 900 hours' work was introduced। "You've got the agents and the proprietors realising there is a flood of free labour, but of course the demand for placements outstrips the supply - so even if they wanted to take all that free labour, they can't use it all," said Mr Konrad, a former Victorian police officer known for his exposure of corruption among fellow officers in that state.
He said a trade in fraudulent documents had evolved with employers and agents selling students verification that they had completed their 900 hours।
One agent told the Herald he charged $15,000-$20,000 for such paperwork। "They are slaves," he said. "They work for free from 11 o'clock to 11 o'clock - no breaks, no nothing. They have to pay the owner for the paperwork. They want to stay here. They will do anything."
He said the entire industry was a racket। "They work with no workers' compensation, no insurance. If they are injured at work, bad luck."
Mr Konrad said the colleges and employers had a dangerous amount of power over their students, who faced deportation if their enrolment was cancelled।
Even the pretence of education has been abandoned at many colleges, say students and teachers। One cooking trainer said if he did not keep passing students, migration agents would stop sending them to the college where he worked and his job would disappear.
"As for this 900 hours' work experience, at least 60 per cent of my students were paying for it। It made a lot of Indian restaurant owners very rich," he said.
"Two years ago a student would shudder if you asked them if they were here for PR [permanent residency]। Now it's blatant. You ask a student why they don't have an employer for work experience and they say they're just here for PR. It is only about the dollars."
Mr Konrad said many students had taken out loans or mortgages at home to pay the fees। "There is nothing more important to these students. If they stuff it up, they stuff up their whole lives.
"If you have taken a loan in Indian dollars of $20,000 to study here, that is going to take you nearly 20 years to pay off in India. Parents can be kicked out of their homes."
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