Anthony Raymond Mitchell, 33, performed a Nazi salute and goose-step with two co-workers near the Sydney Jewish Museum in October 2023.
The salute, captured on the museum’s CCTV by a security guard, came mere days after Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage in southern Israel, triggering the latest conflict in Gaza.
”They are immediately recognised as being associated with that regime and period of history,” he said in the Downing Centre court.
There was no reasonable excuse for the trio’s actions to be performed outside the museum, he said.
Although the new law permitted the Nazi symbol to be displayed for academic, educational, artistic, or other public interest reasons, the tradies’ actions were “nothing of the sort,” according to Judge Smith.
Lawyer Bryan Wrench, representing one of Mitchell’s colleagues, Daniel Muston, informed the court that the actions took place in a split second and were not premeditated.
“There is no Nazi ideology behind this,” he said.
Muston, 42, had completed a tour of the museum since his conviction in an attempt to educate himself on Jewish culture and history, Wrench said.
Judge Smith accepted Mitchell, Muston and the third man – Ryan Peter Marshall, 31 – did not have any connection with the hateful ideologies underlying the Nazi party.
But he upheld a magistrate’s guilty findings against all three men and the decision to record a conviction against Marshall and Muston.
Mitchell’s conviction was however scrubbed from his record with the judge accepting he did not know he was outside the Jewish museum, unlike his co-workers.
“I’ve been persuaded to a different position for Mr Mitchell,” Judge Smith said.
Mitchell was handed a nine-month good behaviour bond in place of the conviction.
The judge also reduced Muston’s fine from $1000 to $500, labelling it as “excessive”.
The original $1500 fine for Marshall, the instigator of the salutes, was kept in place.
The judgment follows the arrest of two men in February for unfurling a Nazi flag at a pub near the Sydney Jewish museum, and the jailing in November of a far-right extremist and self-proclaimed “Hitler soldier” in Melbourne.
