Mehreen Faruqi says she has received a “pretty much non-stop and ever-increasing torrent of racist and sexist abuse” via online comments, emails, handwritten letters and phone calls to her office since she entered politics in 2013.

“It is relentless and grinding,” Faruqi says. “The very clear message I get is that as a brown migrant Muslim woman, I have no right to exist, let alone participate in public debate in Australia.

“The abuse ranges from racial and Islamophobic comments right through to death threats and threats of violence.”

Faruqi says Australia’s far-right nationalists and the politicians who support them are “merchants of hate”.

“What is really scary is that while racist and neo-Nazi groups have existed for a long time in Australia, they have often been on the fringes,” she says. “Now they have found a home in the Australian parliament.”

These groups and politicians use “hateful and divisive” rhetoric to “prey on the anxieties of Australians”.

“This is creating a dangerous environment for us all,” she says. “In my experience, when Muslim Australians have received threats of death and violence over the years, they simply haven’t been taken seriously.”

Melbourne anti-fascism researcher Andy Fleming says while not all elements of Australia’s far right “embrace the full range of misogynistic views embodied in and expressed by the more militant or radical”, it is “very common”.

“Misogyny is one of the enduring themes which animates fascism and the far right in Australia [and] obviously elsewhere,” Fleming, who documents the country’s far-right nationalists on his blog Slackbastard, tells BuzzFeed News. “When these men discuss Muslim women in particular, given that these persons occupy two positions or identities which are especially despised, the hate directed at them tends to be even more vicious than that directed at non-Muslim women.”

Fleming says just as the role of white women in the reproduction of the white “race” was esteemed by far-right nationalists, the role of Muslim woman in the assumed reproduction of Muslim faith and culture was considered “especially threatening” to their worldview.

“Much of their ire is directed at Muslim women who dress in a 'modest' and recognisable fashion; a kind of mirror-image of the hostility they express towards so-called 'THOT's [That Ho Over There].”

Fleming says the “just” social order these men — “and they’re overwhelmingly men”— advocate and agitate for is “not only a racialised but a gendered one” in which people of colour are understood to be “subordinate to Whites” and women are understood to be “subordinate to men”.

He says challenges to this “order” are understood by these groups to be a “sign of political and cultural degeneracy” and that “nefarious, principally Jewish forces” were assigned responsibility for the emergence of various forms of feminist and/or queer politics.

Fleming says white women were “principally esteemed for their role in biological reproduction” and that these groups understood the role of women in society to be “mothers and homemakers”.

“Various misogynistic US propagandists” had found an audience in Australia, Fleming says.