Comment - note how Roberts associates the KKK with One Nation and then, later in the article, states: When told of his KKK ties, however, One Nation's national director, Mr David Ettridge, moved immediately to expel Mr Coleman. "We don't support that sort of extremism in any way," Mr Ettridge said.
1st June 1999
"Our aim is for a white Australia" ... Exalted Cyclops Peter Coleman, centre, with Klansmen during a meeting at a western Sydney home.
By GREG ROBERTS
The Ku Klux Klan has established what it describes as a "real nice size Klavern in the Realm of Australia", organised by a Sydney man associated with the notorious Australian Nationalist Movement and the One Nation party.
In the first confirmation of the presence of the feared white supremacist group in Australia, a major KKK group, the Imperial Klans of America, based in Kentucky, has set up branches in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. A second group, the New Order Knights, based in Montana, plans to start an Australian chapter soon. Other groups have individual members in Australia. The KKK boasts it is recruiting Australians through the Internet. The Web is giving it a virtual office here free of official scrutiny.
The Imperial Klans has appointed the Sydney man, Mr Peter Coleman, as its Australian "Exalted Cyclops".
"I am happy to shout it from the rooftops," Mr Coleman told the Herald. "There is nothing illegal or extraordinary about it. The only reason groups like this exist is that if you try and talk in a normal manner, you are pilloried from post to post. Just look at Pauline Hanson. You are forced to be extremist.
"Our aim is for a white Australia, a fair Australia."
In the past two years, there have been a series of KKK-style attacks on Aborigines, especially in north Queensland, but police have denied the existence of a Klan presence. Mr Coleman denied his members were involved in such attacks but said members of other KKK factions may have been, and he could understand such behaviour. "People are at their wits' end," he said. "They don't know what else they can do."
The Imperial Klans' international leader, Mr Ron Edwards, was subpoenaed to appear last month before a US Federal Grand Jury investigation into allegations of a plot by right-wing extremists to blow up government buildings. His appearance followed a raid by more than 100 police on the group's head-quarters searching for explosives. Mr Coleman said they found nothing incriminating and the KKK was not involved in any such plot. "We don't condone violence." Mr Coleman is a former member of the Australian Nationalist Movement, whose leaders, Jack Van Tongeren and John Van Blitterswyk, are serving jail sentences for firebombing Asian restaurants in Perth in the late 1980s.
Mr Coleman, who asked that no details of his personal background be revealed, has been a member of One Nation since its inception. He says he greatly admires Ms Pauline Hanson, and that the party's electoral fortunes have given legitimacy to groups such as the KKK. When told of his KKK ties, however, One Nation's national director, Mr David Ettridge, moved immediately to expel Mr Coleman. "We don't support that sort of extremism in any way," Mr Ettridge said.
Mr Coleman said the Klan's Australian groups held monthly meetings, with members wearing the traditional hoods and robes and conducting what he described as "cross lightings". "It's just like the Masons dressing up in their pretty wild gear," he said. "It's a traditional thing." The Klan had about 70 members in the three eastern States but membership was growing rapidly. "We're getting a tremendous amount of applications from Australia via the Internet. People are intrigued by us, not repelled." Mr Coleman claimed some races were "genetically programmed" to commit crime; that "there is Jew under every rock"; that homosexuals are "abnormal"; and that Aborigines are "beyond help ... the worst of the whites mixed in with the black". The KKK's emergence has prompted anti-racism groups to call on the Federal Government to expand its legislation censoring Internet pornography to race hate groups. "If offensive material such as pornography on the Internet must be regulated, so too must hate," said the director of the B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation Commission, Mr Danny Ben-Moshe. "If the KKK were to succeed in doing in Australia what they have done overseas, we could see a serious deterioration in race relations."
With the revelation coming in National Reconciliation Week, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission called on the Government to examine urgently ways of banning the Klan.
ATSIC's social justice commissioner, Mr Terry O'Shane, said: "This has the potential to shake the social fabric of our community, and Australia as a society simply can not tolerate it in any shape or form. It has got to be outlawed."
Tomorrow, the Herald examines other Australian organisations which believe in the supremacy of the white race.