A one-time violent far-right extremist now talks to others caught up in radical movements – and occasionally takes a small arsenal of weapons off the streets

It was nearly midnight, a stifling October evening, when Matt and Smithy found themselves staring at a scattered box of fuses, disassembled fireworks and what looked like hard plastic bars.

Not for the first time, the Afghanistan veterans were wrist-deep in the ingredients for a makeshift bomb. But this was no dirt road in Uruzgan province. It was a featureless stretch of highway near Dubbo, in central New South Wales.

Matt is part of an unusual arrangement with the NSW police. A former white supremacist, he volunteers to help “deradicalise” alleged violent extremists, in this case, a 25-year-old on remand in Silverwater prison, awaiting trial on 18 weapons charges.

Minutes earlier that night, the pair had been screaming down the highway towards Sydney, freshly loaded boxes shifting uneasily in the back of their four-wheel drive. “But Matt’s a shit driver,” Smithy recounts the next day, “and he takes a corner too fast, and the boxes go flying.”



Perched over the boot, Smithy held his mobile phone for light as he combed the scattered metal and plastic looking for anything resembling a detonator. He barked at Matt to keep his distance. “Man, I’m not going to let you die alone,” Matt replied.

The pair grin as they recall the face of the officer the next morning when they turned up at a western Sydney police station to drop off the explosives, live ammunition and other “Chopper Read shit” they had picked up the night before.

United Patriots Front head Shermon Burgess resigns over video mocking him Read more

Matt’s work mostly involves a lot of talk: “Taking off [a client’s] blinkers, getting him to start seeing the grey.” Occasionally, as it did last week, it involves venturing into apparent neo-Nazi compounds and removing weapons and explosives.

By necessity, he works under the radar. His full name has been withheld at his request. But Matt’s involvement in the case and key details of the account he gave Guardian Australia have been confirmed by police.

The 25-year-old he is working with was arrested in September, allegedly in possession of an arsenal of weapons, including home-made ones, along with Nazi paraphernalia.



Matt believes he, and former violent extremists of any persuasion, are uniquely placed to help in these situations. Not long ago, he too was fuelled by hate. He says he even started assembling a cache of bombs and weapons, mentally edging himself towards a massacre.



He reckons it started with bullying. “I had a mate at school, the kids thought he was gay,” he says. “I went and sat with him, and so now I’m gay, too.”

His mate was hit by a car and died. The abuse worsened. “I was dealing with this grief, and still getting beaten up on the way to the station,” he says.

One of my grandfathers was tortured by the Japs. I was like, fuck this, I hate Japs

Eventually, “it happens so much that it doesn’t even hurt any more”. At 13, he started carrying a metal crowbar in his backpack. “I was having a nervous breakdown,” he says.

A slew of psychologists couldn’t reach him. He says he was too hurt to let them in, smart enough to keep them out. He found relief another way.

“I could pick people who were doing the same shit as me, who were having trouble at home, who didn’t have any mates. So I started building this little group.”

Matt says he imparted on them the monochrome worldview that had started simmering inside him. “Both my grandfathers were in the war. One of my grandfathers was tortured by the Japs,” he says. “I was like, fuck this, I hate Japs. It must be the Japs’ fault. The Asians were the reason all this was happening.”

It was a few blows to the skull that finally cracked his rigid mindset, he says. One day Matt was asleep on a stairwell waiting for a bus when a rival gang found him. “I was just sitting there. I didn’t wake up. I just had my head smashed up against the wall. Someone started kicking me,” he says.

He says he recalls slipping in and out of consciousness, but could see that someone had interrupted the beating. “This dude from an Asian background started throwing them. He was like a ninja … This guy would deal with a couple of the guys, then come back to check on me, then go back to fighting them,” he says. “And then he just took off.”

Everything seemed different after that. “I’m here hating Asians, but this guy just saved my life,” he says.

Matt found work as a tradesman, and a decade later joined the army. But first he had to shed his ties to the gang. “I didn’t want to hang out with these dickheads any more … But then I thought, hold on, I got these guys together, I need to do something about helping them out,” he says.

He says he approached them one-by-one, “starting with the hard ones”, recognising there was a common thread. “They were just pissed. Like, one of them because his mum was never around, his dad was always throwing him around,” he says.

“Every single person, all over the world, they’re looking for a place to belong to. Lots of people don’t ever find it.”

Deradicalisation makes headlines, but Muslim initiatives win young minds Read more

Experience negotiating with extremists came in handy last Wednesday when Matt, and his army mate Smithy, rounded on a ramshackle compound near Dubbo. He says they were there on behalf of the client’s family, who had asked them to pick up some boxes from the clubhouse, where he had sometimes stayed.

“It was sort of like a maze,” Smithy says. “Half the windows were broken. We were told there would only be so many people there, but when we went past half a dozen cars were parked.”



A man creaked the door open, keeping one of his arms concealed, they said. Later, they noticed he had been carrying a cleaver.

Inside the scene was nightmarish: “This long corridor, man. It was pitch black. All these doors, and some of them had massive padlocks. And I was peeking, thinking, behind each one could be a guy with a rifle,” Smithy says.

Smithy climbed into a roof cavity, where they had been told the boxes were stored. Matt stayed down with the man who had let them in. “He was getting a little agitated,” Matt says.

“He’s like, come into my room and check out this stuff. And I’m like, I’m not going into your room mate, it’s your personal space. All good.

“He had this massive samurai sword collection, and started waving one around, saying, what do you think of this? I said, yeah man, they’re awesome swords.”

Matt says he figured this carry-on was primal, a way to claw back dominance. “I mean, he was shaking the whole time. Two random guys rock up in suits. How would you be?

“We said to him a few times: we don’t care mate, we don’t care about any illegal shit. We’re here to do one job, to get these boxes and get out.”

They loaded the small arsenal into their four-wheel drive and tore off. They still aren’t sure who the stuff belonged to — only that someone wanted it off the streets. Smithy shakes his head telling the story the next day. “Honestly, it was quite intimidating to be in there,” he says.

Matt now regularly works with extremism experts such as professor Anne Aly, and was invited to June’s regional conference on countering violent extremism. It was through Aly that he became involved in this case, “as a last resort”, he says.

I tell him, if you want to get rid of the government, there’s other ways of doing it

Drawing on his background in military intelligence, as well as his past, Matt spent days examining the young man’s social media profiles and interviewing his cousins, grandparents, sister, “the whole lot”. “I build a psychological profile of who this person is before I meet them,” he says.

When he spoke to Guardian Australia he had just been to Silverwater prison to meet the young man. “I’ve already started on him,” Matt says.

“I said, look mate, you can’t laugh about this shit. At the moment there’s a high terrorism threat, and you’re laughing about explosives. That’s not a good look to the police.”

He says his aim will be to redirect the man’s zeal. “I tell him, if you want to get rid of the government, there’s other ways of doing it. You can get into a political party, you can go to rallies,” Matt says. “Then he can go back to his jail and think about that.”

The family has taken on lawyer Lydia Shelly, a prominent Muslim community advocate.

“That’s a bit of grey,” Matt says. “Because it’s already showing him, well, you hate everyone who’s a Muslim. And yet you’ve got a Muslim person in there defending you.”

The point is to “get the rapport up, get the trust up with them, so they can see you’re working with them, not against them.

“Once you’re at that point, you can get them into counselling, and the counsellor can start working on the deep shit,” he says.

It is dangerous, unpaid work, and he lacks basics such as insurance. Ultimately he wants to establish an NGO comprising a loose network of social professionals and vetted former extremists of any stripe, who can work with troubled young people. “With external funding, we can do our job 100% properly,” he says.

Matt says he is already building networks inside Muslim communities. As he sees it, the latest spate of Islam-inspired violence is no different to what enticed him as a young man, and what has seduced young people for generations.

“They’ve had some sort of injustice in their lives, no one is listening to them any more, they can’t get any help about it,” he says.

“Look at Ned Kelly. He saw injustice. What did they do to his sister, assaulted her? So he gets pissed off, joins a gang, and he took on the government. That guy was Irish. Everyone hated the Irish. Ned Kelly: he was a radicalised Australian.”