SYDNEY — Thousands of Australians joined anti-immigration rallies across the country on Sunday that the center-left government condemned, saying they sought to spread hate and were linked to neo-Nazis.

March for Australia rallies against immigration were held in Sydney and other state capitals and regional centers, according to the group’s website.

“Mass migration has torn at the bonds that held our communities together,” the website says. The group posted on X on Saturday that the rallies aimed to do “what the mainstream politicians never have the courage to do: demand an end to mass immigration”.

The group also says it is concerned about culture, wages, traffic, housing and water supply, environmental destruction, infrastructure, hospitals, crime and loss of community.

Australia – where one in two people is either born overseas or has a parent born overseas – has been grappling with a rise in right-wing extremism, including protests by neo-Nazis.

“We absolutely condemn the March for Australia rally that’s going on today. It is not about increasing social harmony,” Murray Watt, a senior minister in the Labor government, told Sky News television, when asked about the rally in Sydney, the country’s most-populous city.

“We don’t support rallies like this that are about spreading hate and that are about dividing our community,” Watt said, asserting they were “organized and promoted” by neo-Nazi groups.

March for Australia organizers did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the neo-Nazi claims.

Laws banning the Nazi salute and the display or sale of symbols associated with terror groups came into effect in Australia this year in response to a string of antisemitic attacks on synagogues, buildings and cars since the beginning of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023.

Counter-Protesters Express ‘Disgust, Anger’

Some 5,000 to 8,000 people, many draped in Australian flags, had assembled for the Sydney rally, the Australian Broadcasting Corp reported. It was held near the course of the Sydney Marathon, where 35,000 runners pounded the streets on Sunday, finishing at the city’s Opera House.

Also nearby, a counter-rally by the Refugee Action Coalition, a community activist organization, took place.

“Our event shows the depth of disgust and anger about the far-right agenda of March For Australia,” a coalition spokesperson said in a statement. Organizers said hundreds attended that event.

Police said hundreds of officers were deployed across Sydney in an operation that ended “with no significant incidents”.

A large March for Australia rally was held in central Melbourne, the capital of Victoria state, according to aerial footage from the ABC, which reported that riot officers used pepper spray on demonstrators. Victoria Police did not confirm the report but said it would provide details on the protest later on Sunday.

Bob Katter, the leader of a small populist party, attended a March for Australia rally in Queensland, a party spokesperson said, three days after the veteran lawmaker threatened a reporter for mentioning Katter’s Lebanese heritage at a press conference when the topic of his attendance at a March for Australia event was being discussed.

Katter was “swarmed with hundreds of supporters” at the rally in Townsville, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail reported.

In Sydney, March for Australia protester Glenn Allchin said he wanted a “slowdown” in immigration.

“It’s about our country bursting at the seams and our government bringing more and more people in,” Allchin told Reuters. “Our kids struggling to get homes, our hospitals – we have to wait seven hours – our roads, the lack of roads.”

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(Reporting by Sam McKeith and Hollie Adams in Sydney; Editing by William Mallard)