Okay, it doesn’t have quite as much poetic panache as the opening line in Banjo Paterson’s Waltzing Matilda, but as a set-up for the battle between the working class and their authoritarian overlords, it is as accurate today as the original was back in 1895.

The battle in Paterson’s time, 130 years ago, was symbolised by a hungry swagman who nicks a rich squatter’s jumbuck to eat.

TROOPERS

The squatter arrives with three troopers to arrest the swagman who, rather than submit to their authority, drowns himself in a billabong.

The equivalents of the swagman today are Thomas Sewell and his band of black-clad friends who on Sunday marched past a war memorial in Adelaide singing – you guessed it – Banjo Paterson’s Waltzing Matilda and waving Australian flags.

Like the swagman, they were planning to steal something to which they thought they had a moral right – not a jumbuck, but something far more valuable, if less tangible.

They wanted to steal the narrative about Australian culture back from the mainstream media, whose claim over it is even less legitimate than a squatter’s was over uncharted pastoral land back in the day.

There is no crime against parading around the streets expressing one’s patriotism – yet.

So the cops, as loyal to media tycoons as troopers once were to squatters, busted most of them for loitering instead.

This normally wouldn’t even make page 15 of a weekly suburban newspaper but it was all the rope the major metropolitan newspapers and broadcasters needed to finish the job off.

Having committed a crime, Sewell and his mates could now be photographed guiltily leaving the courthouse, and the ensuing stories could describe them not as loiterers but “alleged neo-Nazis”.

Now, let’s be clear: Sewell and his friends look like nutters.

By dressing in all black when they performed their patriotic stunt, they made it easy for the media to get away with tarring them as amateur stormtroopers. And some of them have in the past committed some intolerable acts, like intimidating people outside a gay bar.

Why they conflate their love of Australia with this kind of behaviour is beyond me. But I’m still not as offended by it as the media thinks I should be, for one simple reason.

White Nazis are as much a threat to Australians as a drop bear is to a humpback whale. Even if it does exist, it’s so small, remote and harmless that it can be thoroughly ignored.

GOOSE-STEP

The media-political complex has a vested interest, however, in fostering the idea that white Australians are a mere goose-step away from attending Nuremberg-style rallies at the MCG or Homebush stadium, busting out bogan versions of Die Fahne Hoch and descending on the nearest synagogue to force-feed the faithful pork chops marinated in Vegemite.

The attraction for the media is clicks, which the story about Sewell et al has been attracting around the nation for three days now.

The homepage of The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, 1400km from where Sewell and his mates committed their pedestrian crimes, today portrays them as dangerously dumb white-supremacist thugs.

This generic hit job was composed by no less than three journalists, who called Sewell “the country’s most senior neo-Nazi”, as if the lebensraum-seekers amongst us had already formed themselves into a nationwide hierarchy.

The three journalists must have clutched each other’s pearls as they quiveringly typed the introduction: “Members of the group include prominent alleged neo-Nazis who have previously participated in a public Nazi salute, as well as a self-described ‘whites lover’ council prospect.”

What those journalists did to that sentence is infinitely closer to murder than anything Sewell and his friends espoused by marching along an Australian street waving Australian flags and singing an Australian folk song.

Politicians jump at this because it gives the impression that they are intolerant of anyone undermining our multicultural utopia, and is an excuse to introduce even more censorship, which is curiously almost never applied to the real racists in our midst.

Sewell and his mates are prohibited from speaking to each other between now and their cases being heard, presumably so they can’t conspire to commit even more heinous crimes, like jaywalking or littering.

Australia, meanwhile, is becoming less and less safe, thanks to people whose malicious intentions are clearly announced in bright Texta on bits of cardboard held aloft at Invasion Day marches.

At the same time as the cops were arresting the “alleged neo-Nazis” in Adelaide, people were walking around in Melbourne carrying signs saying, “Death to Australia”, “Abolish Australia” and “Watch out whites”.