Comment: While the Queensland Times ran a disgusting cartoon
(right) on Thursday 3rd June and followed this up with a biased editorial
by Mark Hinchliffe the next day which included the remarkable statement that
One Nation could only blame itself for having a member of the KKK in its
ranks and that it had quote, "extremist sometimes downright loopy policies"
the Courier-Mail's McKenna brought some semblance of balance back into the
discussion.
Quote from article below:
Certainly, in Queensland the rise of One Nation could not be blamed for spawning far-right extremist groups.
The Courier-Mail, 5th June 1999
The Ku Klux Klan burst into the spotlight this week when it claimed it had established branches in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
Michael McKenna reports
Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan Ron Edwards is no pointyhead when it comes to his knowledge of Australia.
But the leader of the Imperial Klans of America knows he likes the look of the sunburnt country, although not its more tanned inhabitants, after having seen the film "Quigley down under."
A Hollywood made Outback tale of Aboriginal persecution, it was a movie he enjoyed immensely and, by his own admission, was the basis of his familiarisation with Australia - and its indigenous people.
The Kentucky-based white supremacist says he has learned much more about Australia, particularly its political climate, although little else about the Aborigines.
But after seeing the movie, "I know what they look like".
The international leader of the Imperial Klans could be forgiven for lacking native knowledge.
After all, Edwards has been busy.
Over the past years, he has been co-ordinating the expansion of the splinter group he formed after "breaking off" his friendship with the former KKK leader and, more recently, US political candidate David Duke.
Edwards claims to have dotted the world, including Australia, with his group's "klaverns" - all from the comfort of a "farmhouse" (his words) - a "compound" (the "feds" description) - he shares with his family and Klan members in the US Southern states.
Asked for the number of his followers Edwards responds enigmatically: "There are many more than you think and less than you imagine."
And if it wasn't for a small inconvenience - in fighting allegations of plotting to bomb US government buildings - he would have been on his way to visit "like-minded" friends in Australia.
Among Edwards' ceremonial duties would have been to oversee the ascension of the Imperial Klan's Australian leader "Exalted Cyclops" Peter Coleman to the rank of "Grand Titan" and then on to "Grand Dragon".
Edward's message is still getting through to Australia, though, via the Internet, newsletters and phone calls. His message? Read the Bible, and protect and teach your children about the dangers of racial integration.
Whether the Imperial Wizard would have been allowed into Australia is another story after the seemingly contrived unmasking of Coleman's activities in Australia over the past 18 months.
The Sydney-based Coleman, who runs a mail-order business selling military regalia, last week went public, saying he had established a 70 strong Klan membership throughout Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
Coleman, the former deputy leader of the Australian Nationalist Movement, a group responsible for several race-hate attacks including the firebombing of Asian restaurants in Perth, said he had done much of his KKK recruiting at One Nation branch meetings.
Moves by Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock to block the planned promotional visits of Edwards and fellow American KKK leader Barry Black won unanimous political partisan support.
Confirmation of the KKK's existence in Australia was, for some, decisive.
Coleman and his Klan mates' membership of One Nation was the "final proof" to a number of politicians, Aboriginal and ethnic groups that Pauline Hanson's movement had links, perhaps financial ones, to extremist organisations like the KKK.
But, to Hanson, the conspiracy theory lay solely at Coleman's door, and she called him "a plant put there to discredit the party".
One Nation wasted little time in expelling Coleman after the revelations that he sometimes wore another political hat - or in this case hood - which is against party rules.
And to Hanson the claims that her party was a rallying point, even a cover, for organisations such as the KKK was an "old accusation" she said she had never understood.
"Coleman would never have been able to use One Nation for a recruitment drive for the Ku Klux Klan," she said. "I would have heard about it and thrown him out of the party.
"This fellow belongs to an overseas organisation and its aims are not compatible to the aims and objectives of One Nation. We believe in equality no matter what race, colour or creed. I have never been approached by this organisation, and they have never been active in the party. It is absolute rot."
Queensland One Nation leader Bill Feldman is a little more tolerant of the possibility that his party has its KKK members who, he says, are "probably within every Australian political party".
Certainly, in Queensland the rise of One Nation could not be blamed for spawning far-right extremist groups.
At times, the Sunshine state has been accused of being a hot-bed of race-hate groups such as the KKK and the Christian Identity Ministries - another American group linked to a range of murderous racial attacks.
In more recent years, the KKK has been blamed for a number of assaults on Aborigines in central and north Queensland, which have been largely unsubstantiated, despite investigation.
Queensland Anti-Discrimination Commission Karen Walters says that in the past two years, complaints of KKK-style attacks around Mosman, in northern Queensland, have been investigated by the police and her own organisation.
"We sent out investigators, as did the police, but, as you would expect with an organisation like the Klan, it was very cloak-and-dagger and we couldn't prove anything," she said.
"But certainly, the Aboriginal community up there believes there are right wing supremacist groups operating."
After a series of Klan-style attacks between 1999 and 1991, the then-leader of the American KKK, James Farrands, admitted his group was on a "recruitment drive" in Australia with local members providing monthly reports on their activities.
The announcement attracted the interest of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, which said it would keep an eye on the group's movements.
But neither ASIO nor Farrands were ever heard in public on the subject again.
According to federal Race Discrimination Commissioner Zita Antonious, there has been an ebb and flow in the level of activity in such groups which, she says, often contain the same faces.
Antonious says she would question the claims of Coleman and that of the Queensland-based Christian Identity Ministries that their membership "is strong and growing" across Australia.
"We are talking about very small numbers," she says. "I would be very surprised about the veracity in numbers that have been talked about.
"The Human Rights and equal Opportunities Commission has never received a formal complaint about acts of violence by extremist groups like the KKK. We have talked to people informally, but you have to appreciate most people don't want to pursue it with a formal complaint because of the fear of reprisal."
But according to the Australian KKK and the Christian Identity Ministries the movements are not about promoting violence.
Despite the Christian Identity Ministries' reluctance to be interviewed, leader of the Australian group, Hank Roeleff, based in Cardwell, north Queensland, said his organisation had been promoting the teachings of the Bible for years.
Asked whether he was a white supremacist group, Roeleff responded, "You'll have to work that out for yourself."
But the "Exalted Cyclops" of the Australian KKK is less cagey about his self-described "extremist views".
Coleman believes in a white Australia, and end to immigration other than for white Europeans, and the abolition of the anti-discrimination laws which have been "drawn up by the Jews" in this country.
The "klaverns" which he claims have been set up in north Queensland, Brisbane and on the Sunshine Coast, usually gather once a month and start their meeting with a Bible reading.
Coleman says the Klan for too long has been wrongly perceived as violent and acts such as the "lighting of the cross" - a practice he often performs in the backyard of his west Sydney home - are often misinterpreted.
"It symbolises lighting up the glow of Christianity around the world. It has nothing to do with terrorising somebody and I would never do it," he said.
"I am against violence, but believe that I have the right to meet and discuss my views about my country with who I like. You only have to read the newspapers and see the violence and the crime to see who has the monopoly of crime: it is the immigrants, and the Government is not listening to the victims - the whites."
But Coleman doesn't share all the views of his American leader who, despite his confessed lack of knowledge about the Aborigines, believes they should be made to live in separate communities to whites.
"I have no problem with the Aborigines," he says. "They are the original inhabitants of Australia. They are not part of the immigration problem."
According to Walters, federal and state legislative attempts to muffle public cries of racial hatred have been lost in the roar of opposition.
In Queensland, says Walters, it is almost impossible to punish someone criminally who is advocating race-hate or threatening ethnic or religious groups with graffiti or distributed material.
Both Labor and Coalition governments have suggested - and then sunk - anti-vilification legislation following a series of racially motivated incidents.
"It needs to be done to punish these people and to show that a sophisticated society like ours has drawn a line in the sand as to how people should not be treated," she says.