Nick Folkes, the founder of a new anti-Islam party, lives on a street that smells of gardenia flowers and overlooks Sydney city. He answers the door wearing a cartoon of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a nuclear bomb. As night falls, the city lights up.

His manner is non-threatening, almost ingratiating. The party is selling commemorative t-shirts for $50 each. "Australian-made organic cotton," he says, holding one. "Make a few dollars."

The t-shirts read: 'Sydney is fun. Cronulla is a riot'.

The interview is held in the party HQ - a small crowded room by the front door. Further back in the house Folkes' wife, who is originally from Japan, is banging pots together cooking the family dinner.

Details of his domestic life contrast starkly with the the logistics of organising a party strictly opposed to Muslim immigration. The Party for Freedom, which Folkes says has 400 members, celebrates the racially-charged violence in Cronulla 10 years ago as a "rebellion". In the centre of the room beside a box of children's shoes is a full-size coffin, stood on its end and painted black.

It is stenciled: '2015 Cronulla beach memorial Saturday 12/12/15. RIP multiculturalism'.

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Whatsapp Party for Freedom founder Nick Folkes beside a coffin commemorating the Cronulla riots.

The coffin was Folkes' idea. He had planned to hold a mock funeral procession with pallbearers and a hearse, and bury it at the beach, but police said no and sought an injunction to stop the rally.

"I know it's a very controversial thing to say, but Islam isn't compatible with our way of life," he says, seated at his desk beside the coffin. On the desk is a copy of the Qu'ran annotated with sticky notes and a stack of anti-Islam Cronulla rally flyers. The room is full of all kinds of flags: the Aboriginal flag, the boxing kangaroo, the southern cross flag, the Australian national flag.

"What happened 10 years ago we feel needs to be marked."

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Whatsapp A police officer helps a man after he was set upon by a crowd at Cronulla beach in Sydney on December 11, 2005.

On Thursday, Folkes will go before the NSW Supreme Court to fight the police injunction. He is also fighting a racial vilification charge in the Federal Court. He looks weary and hunted. He's just paid a barrister $5000. Whatever happens in court, he says, he and others will go to Cronulla on Saturday to commemorate the riots. They want to celebrate an episode in Australian history that exposed an ugly racial divide the mainstream would prefer to forget. Folkes says he will go to jail if necessary.

Hack: What are you commemorating?

Folkes: A rebellion

Hack: But was it a good thing?

Folkes: I think overall it was a good thing. We spoke to residents who say there were serious problems going on down there. Gangs were going into the area.

Hack: But we have police to deal with that.

Folkes: The unfortunate thing is these people are protected, they're privileged.

Hack: Privileged?

Folkes: Ethnic privilege. Where do we fit into this multicultural project?

Hack: But you're white, you're part of the most privileged group in the country.

Folkes: If I went to government and said I'd like a multicultural grant they'd tell me to piss off.

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Whatsapp The Party for Freedom headquarters in the front room of founder Nick Folkes' hosue.

Taking ownership of the Cronulla riots

What's striking about meeting Folkes is not his extreme views, which are already on record, but his banality, his superficial ordinariness. A bearded, middle-aged industrial painter who grew up in the small coastal community of Anna Bay north of Sydney, he is nostalgic for a time when the fathers of his friends had guaranteed work in the Newcastle steelworks. He was against Keating and celebrated with John Howard at Sydney's Wentworth Hotel on the night of the 1996 election victory.

"That was fantastic," he says of that night at the Wentworth.

Folkes does not see himself as racist, and despite the apparent racism in his policies (such as opposing Muslim immigration), dismissing Folkes as a crackpot misses the point. His party may have few members, but he sees himself as part of a rising movement that has found expression in other "centre-right patriotic parties" including One Nation, the Australian Liberty Alliance, Rise Up Australia and the Love Australia or Leave Party. He identifies with some factions of the Liberal party and has "a lot of respect" for Senator Cory Bernardi, but mostly the "party machine is just sewerage".

The morning after our interview with Folkes, the Daily Telegraph published an op-ed by former prime minister Tony Abbott arguing Australians were in denial about the "massive problems" within Islam and the West should stop apologising for its culture.

"Cultures are not all equal. We should be ready to proclaim the clear superiority of our culture to one that justifies killing people in the name of God," Abbott wrote.

In the interview, Folkes asks, "Where are these Christians going around screaming Jesus is great and shooting people and stabbing people?"

"There is an inherent problem with Islam."

For many in Cronulla, the riots are an embarrassment. The mayor of Sutherland Shire - which includes Cronulla and has brought the racial vilification charge against Folkes - says the riots were caused by outsiders stirring up trouble. Elsewhere in the country, the myth is reversed. In this narrative, the riots were an isolated event in a peculiarly racist place that could not have happened elsewhere.

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Whatsapp Party for Freedom campaign material at Nick Folkes's house.

Like Folkes, Cronulla has been a convenient way for people to disown themselves of the broader problem of pernicious everyday Australian racism.

But disavowing the riots have let groups like the Party for Freedom take ownership of its meaning.

Folkes' brand of unapologetic anti-Islamic rhetoric is also convenient for people who want to ignore the broader problem of Islamophobia in Australia. How pervasive is difficult to say. Twelve months ago the Islamophobia Register Australia began asking members of the public to submit incidents. According to the register's founder, Mariam Veiszadeh, prior to this many incidents would not have been reported. "Often people don't go to police," she told Hack. "People are under the misguided impression that unless someone has been physically punched it's not an incident. Of course that's not true."

A preliminary findings report published last week recorded an average of 5.4 incidents per week around the country. They included everything from physical assault to pig carcasses left on property belonging to Muslims. "You'd be absolutely shocked as to how many those reports we get." More controversially, the Register found "possible correlations" between a spike in reported incidents and Abbott's national security address critical of the Muslim community for not doing more to denounce terrorism, as well as the short-lived proposal to ban burqas inside Federal Parliament. Veiszadeh is wary of interpreting these early results, but says political rhetoric does play a role in inflaming tensions. "It can indirectly have an effect of sending a message to society that certain behaviour is acceptable."

"It does contribute to making people think they have an indirect endorsement."

'I feel like I've been forgotten in some ways'

Folkes broke with the Liberal Party in the noughties, dismayed by what he saw as gathering support for "progressivism" such as same sex marriage. He joined Pauline Hanson's One Nation and then became NSW spokesman for the Australian Protectionist Party, which opposed multiculturalism. He contested the 2012 state election, won less than one per cent of the vote, and resigned months later. "A lot of people in the APP were not willing to go public and get out there and fight the battle," Folkes says.

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Whatsapp Nick Folkes with One Nation party founder Pauline Hanson.

Folkes' economic policies are to the left and his social ones to the right. He sees the economic rationalism as a mistake that exposed Australians too much to global competition. His political philosophy seems to be about returning Australia to a time in the early 1980s before Hawke and Keating began the process of privatisation and removing tariffs that has been continued by subsequent prime ministers.

"I didn't like it, I didn't like it at all," he says.

"When I came to Sydney in 1986 it was so cheap and I could find a job. Now Australians can't afford to buy a home and can't get a job so why do we have so many [economic immigrants on] 457 visas."

"I feel like I've been forgotten in some ways. I'm marginalised in the whole multicultural project. I'm not part of it. If I say something critical then I'll be demonised and taken to the Human Rights Commission under the Racial Vilification Act."

Folkes' mum immigrated to Australia in the 1950s from Russia. He says his supporters tend to be other second-generation European immigrants as well as young men who feel left out and frustrated. As an Australian-born white male, he feels forgotten. He sees his legal battles - the injunction and the vilification charge - as evidence of Muslim "privilege".

Given his sense of alienation from the state, it is easy to see why he would be drawn to the spectacle of white male vigilantism at Cronulla 10 years ago. It is easy to see how a legal injunction and a racial vilification conviction would only deepen this alienation. And why he would start a party. The party needs 550 members before it can be registered and field senate candidates.

Before we leave, Folkes offers to pose for a photograph inside the coffin. Whatever his reasons, he will not let Cronulla be buried.