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Australia’s new hate crimes laws are rushed, vague, and dangerous—threatening free speech while distracting from Labor’s failures to enforce existing laws and confront rising anti-Semitism.

This Albanese Government’s two hate-crimes laws are a political distraction from its many failures:

• Failure to prosecute for incitement to violence, hate speech and obstruction of law enforcement under current laws.
• Failure adequately to fund intelligence agencies – ASIO has warned of being stretched due to the lack of resources, while the Federal Police shut its terrorism unit because of funding shortages just weeks before the Bondi massacre.
• The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security has been largely dysfunctional due to lake of resources.
• Failure to deal with rising anti-Semitism.

The original omnibus bill received so much political and public opposition, including from the heads of many major churches, that the Government split it into two bills: one bill on gun control, and a second hate-speech bill.

Labor’s draft omnibus bill was released on the January 12 and the final two bills were passed on January 20, backed by most Liberals. In this time frame, it was impossible to analyse the legislation and its possible impacts at all adequately.

The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 was justified as combatting anti-Semitism.

While this bill dropped the originally proposed highly contentious racial vilification provisions, serious threats to freedom of speech remain, making it the worst attack on free speech since the ill-fated misinformation and disinformation bill.

Vague Definitions

The new law says it will be a crime for “publicly inciting hatred of another person or group” because of their “race or national or ethnic origin”.

“Hatred” has several vague definitions in the new act, including conduct “that would, in all the circumstances, cause a reasonable person who is the target, or a member of the target group, to be intimidated, to fear harassment or violence, or to fear for their safety”.

It would be possible for the Minister for Home Affairs to declare an organisation believed to engage in such vague conduct a hate organisation.

Recall the notorious Racial Discrimination Act (1975) Section 18C, which says it is unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate someone because of their race, colour, or national or ethnic origin. Whereas this low bar for an offence carried civil penalties (an offender cannot be jailed), the new hate speech law carries imprisonment of up to 15 years for breaching certain provisions.

This new Act’s bar for a criminal act is so low that it could be used against those who opposed the Voice to Parliament, for example.

Again, the new legislation says a criminal act would include “dissemination of ideas of superiority over or hatred of a person”. Once more, this is vague. Another definition includes “hostility or malice”, which again is a dangerously low bar for a criminal offence.

Another definition refers to conduct that causes a person or group “to be intimidated, to fear harassment or violence, or to fear for their safety”. This conduct is illegal if it could/might/possibly cause a member of the targeted group to feel intimidated.

“Hatred” is a famously slippery term, and something that might be defined as hatred by one person would not be considered as such by another. There are cases where traditional, mainstream religious teaching has been classed as “hate speech” by militant minority groups.

No Debates Here

As categories of protected persons or groups according to their race, ethnic or national origin can in some cases be almost inextricably linked to religious beliefs, then “hatred” also seems to include disagreement over ideas or beliefs. If so, then the legislation may criminalise discussion or debate over such differences.

Several times the new act puts power to determine a crime in the hands of the individual or group claiming offence, by saying that a hate crime is what would “cause a reasonable person who is the target, or a member of the target group” to consider to be a hate crime. It has also extended this definition to all state and territory hate crimes laws.

Further, the Act has made offences retrospective; that is, to cover conduct engaged in before the law was passed.

As there is no limit to the types of groups that can be banned by the Minister for Home Affairs, could groups protesting foreign ownership or high levels of immigration be banned?

Summary

Inciting violence or hateful conduct against any person or group is already illegal at state and federal level. Why haven’t these provisions already been acted on to deal with the increasing anti-Semitism seen since October 2023?

Any new legislation should have been informed by the Royal Commission into the causes and solutions to rising anti-Semitism, which has not yet even met.

Rather than increasing effective protections against anti-Semitism and other forms of racial hatred, the new hate crimes law is likely to chill political speech and pave the way for vexatious and politicised charges that will drag individuals through the courts even if they ultimately avoid conviction.
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Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Adobe.