What was claimed
Pauline Hanson hugged neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell on stage at an April 2026 anti-immigration rally.
Our verdict
False. The person Senator Hanson hugged was not Thomas Sewell.
AAP FACTCHECK - A man who hugged Pauline Hanson on stage at a Canberra anti-immigration rally is being wrongly identified on social media as Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell.
Mr Sewell is a self-described Hitler fan who faces multiple charges over his alleged involvement in a violent attack on an Indigenous camp at Melbourne’s King’s Domain in August 2025.
But the man on stage at the April 26 anti-immigration rally was not Mr Sewell. It was Ben Shand, who also goes by the moniker ‘Dusty Bogan’.
Several social media posts misidentified Mr Shand.
A Threads post linking to a Channel 7 news report about the event commented: “Pauline Hanson jogs up the stairs of the Canberra rally and into the joyful arms of Neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell”.
Similar false claims appeared on Facebook and X.
The Channel 7 report included a shot of Senator Hanson walking onto the stage and hugging a man wearing a navy shirt (timestamp 22 seconds).
The man was not identified in the Channel 7 news report.
However, in a livestream of the event posted to YouTube, the man in question identifies himself as ‘Dusty Bogan’ (timestamp 52:34).
“I’m the Dusty Bogan, right? That’s my name,” the man says in the livestream .
Nationals leader Senator Matt Canavan, who spoke at the rally, also referred to the man as “Dusty” before giving his speech (timestamp 46:08).
Mr Shand’s on-stage embrace with Senator Hanson was also captured in the livestream (timestamp 1:04:31).
‘Dusty Bogan’ is the nom de plume of Ben Shand, a former member of the far-right Proud Boys group who describes himself on his YouTube account as “Australia's true-bluest New Zealander”.
In July 2024, the Courier-Mail reported that Mr Shand caused a security scare after gaining unauthorised access to a Queensland Labour Party event attended by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
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