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Self-proclaimed neo-Nazi Jacob Hersant arrived at court through the front door dressed in a royal blue suit and wheeling a small suitcase, but left out the back in a prison van after a judge upheld his jail sentence.
Hersant will be imprisoned for one month after performing a Nazi salute outside the County Court in 2023, where minutes earlier he’d been sentenced for a Nazi-led attack on hikers. The 26-year-old was the first Victorian to be charged under then-newly introduced legislation designed to abolish such gestures amid a rise in antisemitism.
On Wednesday, Judge Simon Moglia lashed Hersant as being remorseless and thumbing his nose at the court when he stood in front of a press pack and performed the gesture on October 27, 2023.
Moglia described the salute as an assault on human dignity with the rule of law protecting the freedoms of all Australians through legislation aimed to support the diverse “body of people who we truly are”.
“Diverse in ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, differing ability, and nation of origin. The diversity and its protection in our representative democracy is not just happenstance, we are an intentional community,” Moglia said.
“We are a free, civil and representative democracy that ought to be cherished understood and safeguarded.
“Parliament has ensured that that safeguarding of those precious features of our community are, in part, to be achieved by prohibiting a making of a Nazi salute.”
Moglia said that at the time of the offence Hersant had just been handed a 14-month community corrections order for violent disorder after he and up to 15 others from two separate neo-Nazi groups attacked people who were taking photographs from inside a car after noticing the group were wearing masks and black attire.
During the smashing of the victim’s car, at Victoria’s Cathedral Ranges state park, Moglia said Hersant reached into the broken driver’s side window and attempted to take the car keys during an unprovoked, “terrifying, intimidating and violent incident” that sent a chilling message to the community.
Moglia chose not to resentence Hersant for that offending, instead convicting him of breaching the sanction and fining him $1000.
He also upheld Magistrate Brett Sonnet’s one-month jail sentence for the salute, handed down in October 2024, which Hersant had sought to appeal in the higher court.
At the time, Sonnet shot down Hersant’s bid for immunity and found him guilty of the offence, rejecting the argument that the case was constitutionally invalid.
“Australia for the white man. Heil Hitler, heil Hitler,” Hersant was captured saying after the act.
In court on Wednesday, Hersant was supported by his mother and fellow neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell.
There, Hersant’s defence barrister Timothy Smartt urged the judge to avoid imprisonment, arguing jail was no place for his client who has a young child and strong family support.
Smartt acknowledged Hersant was a grown man aged 24 at the time of the offending, but denied his client ever intended to break the law.
He said of the 18 other cases for similar offending across the country, all but Hersant had been sentenced to fines or community-based orders, making his one-month jail term the most severe in Australia.
Hersant, Smartt said, was also no longer a right-wing leader after his neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, recently disbanded. The driver of his criminal behaviour though, he accepted, was his “views”.
“People are far better than their very worst deeds. That includes Mr Hersant,” Smartt said.
“This is far from the worst possible [crime].”
Smartt called for his client to be placed on a second community corrections order with community work attached, which he was given for the earlier violent disorder offending.
“Jail is not the sentence [that will help the community] move through this reckoning,” Smartt said.
Moglia, however, agreed with Crown prosecutor Daniel Gurvich, KC, who argued Hersant’s actions were calculated, saying the fact the salute was performed outside a courthouse was contemptuous to its authority.
“I accept he relished that opportunity at the time and that his intention was to engage in the gesture in full knowledge that it was being done … in the presence of the wider community,” the judge said.
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