One Nation candidate called to ‘decolonise’ Muslim lands

One Nation’s candidate for Melbourne has a history of promoting far-right rhetoric about waging religious war against Muslims, using misogynistic language and spreading COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

Matthew Collins has deleted or locked his social media accounts since being selected as a candidate – one of 112 running for Pauline Hanson’s party at next month’s state election.

But The Age has obtained a catalogue of his X (Twitter) posts captured before he shut down his account, and has verified them using data-scraping tools which archived some of his almost 17,000 posts made over the previous decade.

His posts display a fixation with a perceived clash of civilisations between Christians and Muslims, which an extremism researcher said was a preoccupation of extreme right-wing figures that should be rejected.

One Nation refused to answer detailed questions about Collins’ posts, including his calls to “decolonise” parts of the Muslim world and his frequent references to the Christian crusades. The candidate did not respond to attempts to contact him through his election campaign Facebook page this week.

The party’s candidate profile for Collins says the 35-year-old works in sales and is running in the Greens-held seat to restore community safety and government responsibility, and to ease cost-of-living pressures.

One Nation is currently polling at a 23 per cent primary vote , according to the latest Resolve Political Monitor conducted for this masthead, suggesting the party will for the first time have a significant presence in the next Victorian parliament.

Collins, whose profile picture on X portrays himself as a knight, posted in November last year: “If you thought the crusades ended with Richard the Lionheart, you’ve got another thing coming.”

In another post, he suggests that The World Decolonization Forum – an academic event that examines the legacy of colonisation – should “decolonise constantiople [sic]… and syria and kurdistan”.

Another post in August features a picture of the Battle of Clavijo in 884AD captioned “RECONQUISTA” – a reference to the Christian military campaigns to retake what is now Spain and Portugal from Muslim rule.

Expelling Muslims from the Turkish capital Istanbul – previously called Constantinople when it was the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire – is a tenet of some extreme far-right ideologies.

Brenton Tarrant, the Australian man who murdered 51 Muslims in the 2019 Christchurch shootings, referred in his manifesto to “coming for Constantinople” and making it “Christian owned once more”. Tarrant also inscribed “Clavijo 844” on his weapon before opening fire.

Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a terrorist attack in Norway in 2011 and inspired Tarrant, referred to the “Reconquista” several times in his manifesto and also adopted crusader iconography.

There is no suggestion Collins endorses violent extremism, only that his online posts closely align with elements of some of those ideologies.