ABSTRACT
As previously mentioned, it would be a mistake to assume that the French and Australian extreme right have a similar background and that the rise of the radical right in the 1990s was the result of parallel development. While France witnessed the almost constant harassment of its democratic and republican ideals by powerful, thoroughly developed and organised movements, Australia was for the most part spared the same threat. Therefore, even a superficial historical study of the extreme right in both countries would reveal the uselessness of a comparison. However, as has been shown elsewhere, the lack of an organised extreme right in Australia does not mean that extreme right ideas and rhetoric were not present and that the country was blessed with immunisation to such politics (Mondon 2012). In fact, if Australia was for most of its history spared a strong extreme right when its European counterparts succumbed to ethno-exclusivist movements, it was because, from the country’s inception, mainstream politics had incorporated much of what made the extreme right an alternative elsewhere. With the White Australia policy and the treatment of indigenous people, the extreme right had little room to thrive on an exclusivist agenda.
