What happened in Boorloo / Perth

At Forrest Place in Perth’s CBD, an Invasion Day rally of more than 2,000 people was evacuated after a 31‑year‑old man allegedly threw an improvised explosive device into the crowd from an elevated walkway before fleeing. Police later described a glass container filled with an unknown liquid, wrapped in ball bearings and screws, and have charged the man with offences related to explosives and endangering life.

First Nations (Australian Aborginal) leaders and organisers have called it a targeted act of violence against a First Nations‑led rally which must be treated as a hate crime, noting that Elders, children and babies were in the blast zone and “it is a miracle the device didn’t explode.” Noongar elder Herbert Bropho, who was speaking at the time, said that if it had gone off, there would have been “a lot of casualties,” especially where women and children were standing.

The other rallies on Australia Day

On the same day “March for Australia” right‑wing rallies ran as a kind of mirror image, drawing nationalists, anti‑immigration activists and, in some cities, open neo‑Nazis. In Sydney, members of the National Socialist Network marched at the front of a previous March for Australia event under a banner demanding an end to mass immigration and promoting the white nationalist idea of “remigration,” the forced return of non‑European migrants.

“Australia First” rhetoric that animates 'March for Australia' rallies has spent years painting anti‑racist and First Nations protests as a threat to “ordinary Australians.”

One Nation’s story about “safety”

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has built its politics on the idea that “ordinary Australians” are under siege from outsiders—Asians in the 1990s, Muslims and African gangs more recently, and now a rotating cast of migrants and “elites.” Hanson first entered national politics after a letter in the 1990s complaining that Indigenous people were being given too much help, and later infamously warned that Australia was being “swamped by Asians,” arguing they would form ghettos, take jobs and change the country “in a way that we don’t like.”

One Nation policy documents and speeches have repeatedly pushed for slashing immigration to “zero net” levels, framed multiculturalism as a threat to social cohesion, and campaigned against Muslims, African refugees and foreign students under the language of “law and order” and “keeping Australians safe.” Their origin story is that danger arrives from the outside, on boats and planes and in “ethnic crime gangs” while safety is something white Australia "grants or withholds".

Hate that ignores the passport

The attempted bombing in Perth rips a hole in that story. The alleged attacker, according to current reporting, is not a boat arrival, not an unvetted refugee, not a “foreign gang member,” but a man who walked into a square in broad daylight and, police allege, tried to turn a First Nations‑led rally into a kill zone. Rally organisers are clear that this was aimed at Aboriginal people and their allies—people whose claim to this land predates the Commonwealth, the flag and every border Hanson has ever campaigned to harden.

If “safety” rhetoric only ever points at foreigners and never at the kind of person who throws a fragmentation device at Elders and kids, then it was never about safety. Hate anywhere is not imported by migrants—it is manufactured, refined and circulated within local politics, media and street movements, and it has no trouble wrapping itself in a flag while targeting the continent’s first peoples.

In the hours after the device was thrown, authorities reassured the public that there was no ongoing threat.