Do ASIO, the AFP and the Australian media actually know what a real Nazi looks like?
Or have they spent so long chasing the cartoon version that they missed the one with six gun licences?
1. The Parody
On 9 November 2025, Matthew Gruter a 34-year-old South African civil engineer who had never been arrested in Australia was flown out of the country under s116 of the Migration Act by order of the Minister.
His crime? Standing on Macquarie Street six weeks earlier holding a banner that read “Abolish the Jewish lobby” next to two dozen masked men.
Cost to taxpayers: 68 separate AFP officers, ASIO analysts, Home-Affairs briefings, two Federal Court mentions and saturation media coverage.
Threat to life: zero.
Firearms owned: zero.
Outcome: Gruter is back in Durban; Australia is not measurably safer.
ASIO’s own Director-General calls groups like the one Gruter joined “the opportunistic”—publicity-hungry misfits who “see journalists as useful idiots” and celebrate every sensational headline because it “inevitably leads to a surge in membership applications”.
Job well done—if the job was free advertising for the far right.
2. The Men they never profiled
Thirty-five days later, a 50-year-old Australian walked into a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach with six legally purchased firearms and murdered 15 people aged 10 to 87.
He left improvised-explosive devices in his car.
He had held six gun licences for a decade.
He had posted online for months that Jews “must be removed from our soil”.
He was never on a national-security watch-list.
The same agencies that spent months on the Gruter circus had no open file on the shooter, obviously distracted by their own hubris & ignorance at having made an example out of Gruter.
3. What ASIO says a Nazi looks like
According to the Director-General’s 2025 Lowy Lecture, the “modern neo-Nazi” is:
Anti-immigrant, anti-Jew, anti-gay, anti-Islam, anti-everything-not-white.
That description perfectly fits Thomas Sewell’s National Socialist Network—the people Gruter stood with.
It does not fit a quiet, middle-aged Australian who never marched, never saluted, never gave interviews, but did stockpile weapons and fantasise online about “finishing what Hitler started”.
