Who Makes the Far Right? Exploring Membership Application Data of the National Front of Australia

Abstract

This paper addresses a problem for scholars examining the question of who supports far right political parties or movements. Due to the semi-clandestine or oppositional nature of far right groups, historians, as well as those in adjacent disciplines, have often been unable to gain access to sufficient records or data to conduct analysis of who supports such groups, particularly accurate membership data. While this is a phenomenon experienced by scholars in many countries, it is especially difficult when examining the far right in Australia, where it has largely been considered a fringe movement. This paper engages with this problem by using membership application forms, copied by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, of the small far right political party in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the National Front of Australia. Drawing upon the demographic data provided by these forms, the paper attempts to build a picture of who supported the NFA, in terms of occupation, age, gender and location. As the NFA was associated with the much larger National Front in Britain, a comparison can also be made between the limited data on NF membership in the 1970s and its corresponding sister organisation in the antipodes.