One year after a disruptive act of protest marred one of Australia’s most solemn national commemorations, a Melbourne court has delivered guilty verdicts and substantial fines to four men who interrupted an Indigenous Welcome to Country address during the 2023 Anzac Day Dawn Service.
The disturbance unfolded shortly before 5:40 a.m. on April 25, as Indigenous Elder Mark Brown stepped forward to deliver his opening welcome to a crowd of thousands gathered at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. The group—three known members of the now-banned far-right white supremacist organization National Socialist Network, plus a fourth man affiliated with the movement—launched into coordinated booing that cut through the quiet of the dawn service. The heckling was picked up by live broadcast microphones, airing the disruption to television audiences across the nation.
On Thursday, Magistrate James FitzGerald found all four men—Jacob Hersant, 27, Nathan Bull, 24, Michael Nelson, 22, and Ian Lomax, 35—guilty of offensive behaviour. In his ruling, FitzGerald emphasized that the Dawn Service, a ceremony dedicated to honoring Australian and New Zealand soldiers who died in conflict, is not a platform for political grandstanding. While he acknowledged that Welcome to Country ceremonies remain a topic of public debate in some circles, he rejected the group’s claim that their views justified ruining the solemn occasion for thousands of attendees.
Three of the offenders—Hersant, Bull and Nelson—are prominent adherents of the neo-Nazi ideology propagated by the National Socialist Network, which was formally designated a prohibited hate group and disbanded earlier this year. All three are currently unemployed. The fourth man, Lomax, a dentist from Ballarat, has already had his medical practice license suspended by the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency over his ties to the extremist group, and he now works as a farmhand.
Court documents detail that the men split into pairs to spread their disruption across the crowd: Hersant and Bull stood in one section, while Nelson and Lomax positioned themselves elsewhere. After the initial interruption, crowd members removed Nelson and Lomax from the service, but Hersant and Bull continued their heckling through subsequent portions of the ceremony. Hersant was captured on camera shouting vitriolic slogans including, “What about the Anzacs?” and “We don’t need to be welcomed to our own country”. Nelson, meanwhile, was recorded arguing with other attendees and claiming “The Anzacs fought for white Australians” and “The first heads of the RSL were pro-White Australia”.
In their defense, the three younger men did not deny booing during the address, instead framing their actions as protected political activism. Lomax’s legal team argued that prosecutors had failed to produce sufficient evidence to prove their client participated in the booing. FitzGerald ruled that even though Nelson was removed from the service quickly, his offense was aggravated by deliberate goading of other attendees, noting “In other words you set out to be offensive and you succeeded in being highly offensive.”
In sentencing, the judge handed down a AU$1,500 fine to Lomax, an AU$1,800 fine to Bull, and AU$3,000 fines to both Hersant and Nelson, with formal convictions recorded against the latter two. Prosecutor Ryan Mallia had previously pushed for a jail sentence for Hersant, citing his extensive prior criminal history tied to far-right extremist activity. Mallia stressed the severity of the offense, noting “It was heard by many people, likely most if not all that were in attendance … On the most sacred day for the Australian public to commemorate fallen soldiers.”
Outside the courtroom following the verdict, Hersant, Nelson and Bull engaged in a verbal altercation with a female member of the public before police stepped in to separate the parties and de-escalate the conflict.