At a beachfront park in Brisbane’s north, suspended Australian doctor William Bay told a gathering that an upcoming referendum to recognise the country’s first inhabitants and enshrine an Indigenous advisory body in the constitution would “open a gateway to unending tyranny and lawlessness”.

The proposal was “equivalent to Germany’s Enabling Act of 1933, which turned Hitler into the Fuhrer”, Bay said in the speech in August, which he posted on Facebook for his 14,000 followers. The advisory body could “control the parliament and the government, thus replacing our system of representative democracy”, added Bay, who lost his medical licence in 2022 after protesting against COVID-19 vaccines.