Expert warns there’s no guarantee stronger legislation will directly prevent antisemitic attacks
The Coalition has demanded the Albanese government explicitly outlaw threats and attacks against places of worship as part of a planned crackdown on hate speech.
Labor’s bill to further outlaw speech directly inciting violence and threats will be a major focus when federal MPs return to Canberra in February, with the final sitting weeks before the election likely to be dominated by discussion of a recent spate of antisemitic incidents.
The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, has maintained the bill introduced in 2024 is a strong deterrent to antisemitism and other forms of hate speech and would protect places of worship. But it was quickly criticised for not going far enough to protect vulnerable groups from vilification and the shadow attorney general, Michaelia Cash, said the opposition would push for the bill to include more specific protections for religious institutions.
“We want to see that bill strengthened to include urging or threatening attacks against places of worship,” Cash told Guardian Australia.
When introducing the bill in September, Dreyfus said the legislation would set up new criminal offences for threatening violence on the basis of race, religion, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or political opinion.
It would create new offences for threatening force or violence against groups, with a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment for threatening force or violence against a group and that threatens peace, order and governing of the nation.
The explanatory memorandum, which explains the purpose of the bill, also highlights examples of where the law would protect religious groups. It says the bill would allow groups “to worship, observe, practice and teach their religion without being subject to this harmful conduct”.
Labor will push to pass its legislation as it faces growing pressure to act following recent antisemitic attacks, including arson and graffiti attacks on synagogues and cars in Jewish communities.
As Dreyfus made a diplomatic visit to Israel last week, the government was criticised for a “clearly ineffectual response” to antisemitism. Several weeks earlier, Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, had claimed a December attack on Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue was linked to the government’s “anti-Israel position”.
Dreyfus said the laws would be brought on for debate again in February, telling Guardian Australia they should be “passed as soon as possible”. He challenged the opposition to support the bill.
“The real question is: will Peter Dutton support the government’s laws to criminalise hate speech?” he said.
Cash said the Coalition was “ready to work constructively” with Labor, but argued the bill should be amended to explicitly protect places of worship.
Independent MP Allegra Spender called on the government to include a stronger vilification offence for hateful speech in its bill.
Her eastern Sydney electorate has a large Jewish community and LGBTQ+ community, who she said have both raised concerns about the laws not doing enough.
“I come back to what [Asio chief] Mike Burgess has said from the start … he said that words matter,” she told Guardian Australia.
The intelligence agency’s submission to the Senate inquiry into the bill noted the agency was seeing “direct connections between inflamed language and inflamed community tensions”.
“The point is that when people are seriously vilifying different groups, particularly the Jewish community and the LGBTQ community, that there is no offence to prevent that is a real concern to me,” Spender said.
She said she would support the government’s bill in its current form, but hoped to amend it to better protect those groups.
One legal expert, Prof Luke McNamara of UNSW who has studied vilification and hate speech legislation, believes overall the legislation “strikes the right balance”.
Criminal and civil laws prohibiting vilification overlap between state, territory and commonwealth jurisdictions. That includes protection against racial vilification under section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act – a section that Tony Abbott once promised to repeal.
McNamara said Labor’s legislation, though not criminalising speech inciting hatred, still had an important “symbolic” role.
“Criminal laws in this space, both at the federal level and at the state level in NSW, rarely yield prosecutions,” he said.
“It can have an important symbolic function in sending a message to a community and condemning behaviour defined by the legislation … and remain[s] available to be enforced.”
Despite the public pressure to stop and prevent antisemitic attacks, McNamara said there was no guarantee legislation like this could directly prevent future attacks.
“A lot of faith is often placed in the deterrence effect of criminal law, but whether we like it or not, the evidence tells us that criminal law is less effective in deterring behaviour.”
