A peak body representing the Jewish community has called for bipartisan support for the government’s “hate speech” laws in order to move Australia towards a complete ban on “promoting hatred”.
Peter Wertheim, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), which was consulting during the drafting of the legislation but has since said the laws should be even stricter, urged Opposition leader Sussan Ley to not to block Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s new bill.
Ms Ley said on Thursday she would oppose the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026, and on Friday said she had “extremely serious concerns” about the “hate speech” elements, which have sparked anger from everyday Australians, free speech advocates, Liberal MPs, One Nation and the Greens.
Mr Wertheim said he feared the Coalition would “allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good”, and warned the “defeat of the bill would be a retrograde step”, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
“The entire history of legislative reform concerning this issue has been one of incremental steps towards achieving the effective proscription of speech that deliberately promotes hatred of people based on their race, nationality or ethnic origin,” he said.
“The current bill would represent a significant further step towards that destination, even if it does not completely get us there.”
Earlier this week Mr Wertheim said he hoped the bill would be “strengthened” after passing, and said the ECAJ wanted the new serious vilification offence broadened beyond race and religion to cover so-called gender identity and sexual orientation, age and disability.
He also said an exemption for religious texts should be removed, along with barriers to prosecution such as proof of intention and impact on victims, and said the Proscribed Hate Groups component did not go far enough.
His calls come after fellow ECAJ co-chief executive Alex Rychin said the Greens should be excluded from talks on amending the bill, and the Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) said the legislation should be changed to make it illegal to substitute the word “Zionist” for “Jew”.
Legal figure and political activist Mark Leibler said he didn’t think the bill could be “satisfactory” to the Jewish community if it passed with the support of the Greens.
“I’ve always expressed the view that the Greens are fundamentally an anti-Semitic party. We’re not going to get any joy out of the Greens in this case,” he said.
NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip also said the government should work with the Coalition and not the Greens, after the far-left party said on Thursday it would not support the bill in its current form as it “scapegoats migrants”.
But conservative group the Australian Jewish Association (AJA), spoke out against the bill, warning that “invoking the Jewish community as the justification for this deeply flawed bill will, in fact, lead to an increase in anti-Semitism”.
“The Bondi Beach Chanukah massacre was allegedly motivated by radical Islamic ideology, yet the proposed legislation goes out of its way to avoid confronting that reality. By excluding radical Islamic extremism, it is difficult to see how this legislation will have any impact on preventing future Bondi-style attacks,” AJA CEO Robert Gregory said.
“If the legislation is expanded, as expected, it could perversely result in victims being prosecuted for criticising the ideology that inspired the violence against them.
“This bill risks regulating subjective opinions and relies on vague concepts such as ‘intimidation’. Australia risks heading down the same path as the United Kingdom, where thousands of people are arrested each year merely for expressing opinions.”
Former AJA President Dr David Adler made similar statements on Wednesday on Thursday, calling the bill “mad” and “rushed” and saying the government should be focusing on Islamic extremism.
“The cause of the Bondi Beach Chanukah massacre was radical Islam. That is the only issue for decisive action and it needs strong effective action – hate preachers, radical mosques, deport terror supporters. It is an insult to the victims for the tragedy to be used for another political agenda,” he said.
Mr Albanese on Friday refused to rule out a deal with the Greens and said making an arrangement with the Coalition was like “trying to grab smoke”.
“We don’t have a majority in the senate, and we’ll engage respectfully with people in the parliament, with both members of the house of representatives and the senate,” he said.
Labor MPs have also expressed concerns about Mr Albanese’s attempts to rush the laws through an early sitting of parliament, with one calling it a “shit show”, The Daily Telegraph reported.
Header image: Left, Mr Wertheim and Mr Albanese at a meeting last year (ECAJ). Right, Sussan Ley addresses a Melbourne synagogue on Thursday (Facebook).
The post Jewish group says hate speech laws are vital ‘incremental step’ towards total ban first appeared on The Noticer.
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