The far-right hecklers who disrupted the Welcome to Country ceremonies at Friday morning’s Anzac Day services in Melbourne and Perth were quickly condemned as fringe actors.

But what they shouted – “We don’t need to be welcomed,” according to reports – has become a common refrain. It is repeated with rising frequency in conservative debates about Welcomes to Country on social media, in Sky News segments and even the Senate.

The Coalition stoked this debate earlier this year, when it brought the phrase into mainstream politics by pledging to wind back spending on Welcomes to Country if it formed government.

“Welcomes to Country should be reserved for rare occasions, especially when the taxpayer is being asked to pick up the tab,” the opposition’s Indigenous affairs spokeswoman, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, said in February this year.

Clive Palmer’s $100 million ad blitz has kept the issue alive ahead of next weekend’s election, with banners that declare: “We don’t need to be welcomed to our own country.” The ad ran in metropolitan newspapers on Anzac Day, including this masthead.

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Then, on Friday, neo-Nazis agitators hijacked the conversation.

Josh Roose, an academic at Deakin University who specialises in extremism, said it demonstrated the latest tactics of far-right extremists, who are seeking to appropriate “anti-woke” talking points for their own ends as they stage attention-seeking stunts during this year’s election campaign.

“What they’re tending to do is tie their extreme views into a wider backlash from a small but vocal minority on the right, who stand against the Welcome to Country. In so doing, they attempt to cast themselves as standing against woke politics, but what is really behind this is a hate-filled ideology,” Roose said.