This article is republished from Mark Collett’s new Substack with permission. Mark Collett is one of the most censored activists in the world, and has been either banned or demonetised from almost all major platforms, if you can afford, please support him by subscribing.
Locked in a cell for 23 hours a day without natural sunlight, the prisoner was only allowed to shower once every four days and was granted just a single day of open-air exercise during his 133-day incarceration. This isn’t a tale from the Soviet Union, but an account from a political prisoner in modern-day Australia, this was the fate that befell Joel Davis – a man that the Australian state would effectively brand the most dangerous prisoner in the whole country. During his period in jail he was at times denied access to his legal team, denied access to books – including a bible – and was strictly barred from interacting, eating, or exercising with any other prisoners. Joel spent 133 days in what was effectively one of the strictest solitary confinements ever recorded, with only occasional monitored phone calls and heavily restricted meetings with his lawyer for human interaction.
But what makes this so much worse, is that Joel Davis had not been found guilty of any crime, he was being held on remand, awaiting trial. When reading about such restrictive jail terms that appear to breach all regular human rights protections, most readers would conclude that the suspect was being held in a country like Russia or China, or that he or she had committed the sort of grisly offences that would make Hannibal Lecter wince. But what kind of heinous act could a man be accused of that would warrant such treatment in a Western nation like Australia? In short, Joel Davis’s alleged crime was a social media post. Joel had allegedly shared a post by an Australian politician and added the caption: “Patriots, I bid thee to rhetorically rape Allegra Spender”.
At this point, it is worth noting that this alleged post was a rather stupid idea and something that I wholeheartedly condemn. Using terms like “rape” – even as a joke – is obviously at best in poor taste and at worst gives the state and the media the ability to demonise and even imprison a person. What’s more, by engaging in this kind of activity, an activist risks allowing any group or organisation that he or she is involved with to be smeared by association. But equally, it is clear that by using the term “rhetorically” in conjunction with the word “rape”, Joel Davis was not in fact directing people to sexually assault Allegra Spender, but in fact directing his followers to make fun of her on social media in relation to something she had written earlier on X – this is further evidenced by the fact that Joel shared Ms Spender’s post when he issued his ill-fated and poorly worded instructions.
To claim Joel Davis’s social media post was either a genuine threat or that he deserved to spend 133 days in jail under one of the most restrictive prison regimes in Australian history would undoubtedly seem like ridiculous overreach to anyone outside of the Australian establishment. But the treatment of Joel Davis is not a one off, and it is sadly likely to become ever more commonplace for those who dare to speak out against the Australian state – especially when it comes to speaking out on the issues of race and ethnicity. This is because in the wake of the Bondi beach terror attack that took place on December 14 2025, the Australian government has passed a new piece of highly restrictive legislation which grants law enforcement, the government and the judiciary unprecedented new powers that can effectively gag White Australians from speaking out and protesting on a broad range of issues including immigration and demographic change.
Despite the Bondi attack happening just before Christmas, the Australian Federal Parliament managed to draft, debate and vote on this new anti-freedom legislation in record breaking time. The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026 was rushed through parliament and was officially passed on January 19 2026, with the law coming into effect just a few days later, on January 22 2026. A five-week turnaround from a public incident to passing permanent federal legislation is an exceptionally fast and rare timeframe in Australian politics, as such, in order to achieve this feat, the federal government had to bypass multiple standard democratic protocols.
In Australia a standard legislative timeline involves several distinct phases, with each phase typically taking longer than the entire process took for the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026 to be passed into law. The first phase is drafting and policy research which typically takes three to six months. During this phase government departments draft a bill and distribute what is known as an “Exposure Draft” to legal bodies, civil rights groups, and industry experts for feedback. Once complete, the draft legislation faces scrutiny from parliamentary committees in a series of public hearings, this takes two to four months and suggested amendments are then fed back to parliament. Finally, there is a parliamentary debate on the draft legislation which takes between one and three months, during this phase the bill is formally debated, tweaked, and voted on across separate sitting weeks in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Typically, a law that limits speech or alters property rights (like the national gun buyback) requires extensive consultation with human rights watchdogs, gun owner associations, and legal groups. After Bondi, the government completely bypassed these steps, passing the law without any real scrutiny from the public. As such, the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026 was criticised by a number of different human rights groups.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a formal assessment of the new law warning that the Act lacked the fundamental procedural fairness and required rigorous independent monitoring. HRW principally criticised the mechanism that now allows the Home Affairs Minister to unilaterally designate and ban “hate groups”. Because a group can be criminalised without a prior court conviction, HRW warned it bypasses standard judicial oversight. The group also raised concerns over the severe criminal sentences introduced by the law – up to seven years in prison for mere membership of a banned group and 15 years for the directors or financial backers – arguing these penalties pose a direct threat to the fundamental right to freedom of association.
Domestically, various state Councils for Civil Liberties and legal groups condemned the “emergency” nature of the bill’s passage. Legal bodies fiercely condemned the government for forcing a 144-page bill through parliament with only a 48-hour window for public submissions. Human rights lawyers labelled the process “performance art” rather than robust lawmaking, pointing out that nobody had adequate time to consider the long term impacts the Act would have. Experts writing for policy platforms like The Conversation warned that the laws rely on highly elastic, poorly defined terms such as “promoting” hate or causing “harassment”. They argued that this ambiguity would have a major effect on the rights of ordinary Australians to peacefully protest or critique foreign governments, as legitimate political dissent could now easily be branded as hate speech.
During the drafting phase in January 2026, the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights provided an official submission highlighting structural flaws regarding religious freedom. International human rights experts criticised specific exemptions in the bill, arguing that the law shouldn’t provide a blanket defence for individuals to quote directly from doctrinal religious texts if the context explicitly incites racial or religious hatred against minority groups.
Ultimately, the consensus among human rights organisations was that the Act was a blatant example of political overreach that had produced a rushed piece of legislation that bypassed essential democratic checks and balances in order to severely limit freedom of expression. But the law goes further than that, it creates a system of two-tier justice whereby White Australians face limits on freedom of speech that do not extend to those from minority religious groups. In effect, this law is antiwhite, as those who benefit from such exceptions are disproportionately from ethnic minority backgrounds. It is also worth noting at this juncture, that despite the Bondi shooters being a migrant from India and his Australian-born son, nothing in the Act attempts to deal with the problem of immigration, but instead focuses entirely on strict and draconian restrictions that will affect the rights and freedoms of Australians and prevent them from speaking out against mass immigration and migrant criminality.
But what exactly is in the new legislation, and how will the Act affect freedom of speech, freedom of association and the right to protest in Australia? The first thing that must be noted is this is not a narrow law, but instead a broad and far-reaching piece of legislation that will have numerous effects on Australian life, specifically on how people can speak in public, the right to protest, who people are allowed to associate with and even how parents can speak to their own children when talking about certain political matters. What’s more, the legislation grants a raft of draconian new powers to the judiciary, ministers and law enforcement.
The first and most notable part of the Act is that it gives the government the right to outlaw what the legislation terms as non-terrorist “hate groups”. The law allows the federal government to ban and criminalise organisations deemed as “hate groups”, even if they do not meet the legal threshold of a violent terrorist organisation. The power to ban “hate groups” without requiring any evidence of violent terrorist activity represents a profound shift in Australian law. Previously, outlawing an organisation required that the state could prove a direct link to political violence or terrorism. By removing this requirement, the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026 introduces a much lower and far more subjective legal standard. This mechanism poses an unprecedented threat to freedom of speech, freedom of association and the rule of law.
Under standard criminal law, the Australian government must take a suspect to court, present evidence before an independent judge, and prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before a punishment is issued. This new Act bypasses the judiciary; instead granting the Home Affairs Minister the unilateral executive power to list an organisation as a proscribed “hate group”. The government now essentially functions as both judge and jury, and whilst the Minister acts on formal briefings compiled by intelligence agencies when making such a designation, there is no pre-emptive due process, and the only way to challenge a ban is via an appeal after the ban has already been enacted. Once the Minister proscribes a group, membership automatically becomes a severe criminal offence with an individual facing up to seven years in prison, not for committing a violent act, but for simply for being associated with an organisation that the executive branch has deemed unacceptable.
Interestingly, terrorism has a strict, universally understood legal definition in Australia: it requires an intention to advance a political, religious, or ideological cause by using force or violence to coerce a government or intimidate the public. Conversely, “hate” and “extremism” do not have clear, objective legal definitions. This allows the government to decide on a whim what constitutes radical extremism, and what is merely a form of political activism. Because the Act allows for a group to be banned based on the “promotion of ideas” rather than acts of violence, the threshold relies entirely on political interpretation. This opens the door for future governments to weaponise the law against peaceful, non-violent dissident organisations that hold views that the ruling party disapproves of.
Moving on from the ability to ban groups, the Act also creates a new federal offence of “aggravated hate speech” and introduces “hate” as an automatic aggravating factor during sentencing for online threats or harassment, this operates much like legislation that already exists in the UK. This represents a fundamental restructuring of how criminal intent is punished under the Australian Criminal Code. Under standard criminal law, a person is punished based on the severity of the act (what they did) and the level of harm caused to the victim, however Australian law will now punish a criminal more harshly based on their supposed motivations at the time a crime was committed.
If an individual uses the internet to threaten or harass someone, they can be charged under standard criminal law. However, if the prosecution proves the harassment was motivated by bias against the victim’s race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, the charge is automatically elevated to “aggravated hate speech”, significantly increasing the maximum prison sentence. For any standard online offence, the judge is legally mandated to view a “hate motive” as an automatic aggravating factor, meaning a harsher sentence must be handed down than if the exact same act was committed for a different reason.
This immediately creates an instant legal inequality. Take for example a hypothetical case of online harassment, as such cases are specifically mentioned within the legislation. If a suspect harasses a victim online, causing the victim to suffer some form of breakdown, if the harassment targeted the victim’s weight, appearance, or financial status, it does not qualify as “aggravated hate speech” and the suspect will receive a standard sentence. However, if the suspect was to target a victim for their race or ethnicity and as a result exactly the same form of breakdown occurred, a judge will now hand down a much higher penalty to the suspect due to “hate” being an aggravating factor. In a fair and equitable society all victims of severe harassment would deserve equal protection under the law, but this new legislation does away with that, creating an inherently unfair situation where the severity of a criminal’s punishment depends entirely on which demographic group their victim belongs to.
What’s more, because “hate” is an elastic or fuzzy concept that is not immediately or easily quantifiable, prosecutors are now granted immense power to comb through a defendant’s past text messages, internet search history, or political views to assemble a circumstantial case about their character. This tilts the scales of justice unfairly, as a defendant can be slapped with a much harsher “aggravated” sentence based on a prosecutor’s subjective interpretation of their political beliefs or personality, rather than hard, objective evidence of their intent to cause harm.
Laws like this already exist in the UK and have created a system of two-tier justice. Whilst on paper supporters of these laws argue that they are intended to “reduce racism”, in reality they create two new forms of inequality. The first being that victims of the same crime receive different levels of justice based on an aggravating factor that is highly subjective. The second being that the state decides whether to upgrade a standard charge to a “hate” charge – which results in a system open to political tampering and bias. An example of the subjective nature of this kind of system can be found in the UK where Pakistani Muslim men targeted White British girls for sexual abuse, but prosecutors chose not to apply aggravating “hate” charges despite the fact that victims were regularly referred to using racially derogatory language. Conversely, there was a case in the UK where a White British pensioner was interviewed by the police for a non-crime hate incident as she had beeped her car horn at a black man and a passer-by had perceived the act to be motivated by racial animus.
Furthermore, state authorities have passed similar legislation that strengths the Act in certain jurisdictions. For example, Queensland authorities have added legislation that also criminalises symbols and chants and establishes a maximum two-year prison sentence for publicly displaying the flags or symbols of banned groups. Part of this expanded legislation covers specific political chants, such as “globalise the intifada”, that are frequently used at demonstrations. Under these new laws, the prosecution does not need to prove that displaying a flag or symbol caused any public disorder or directly threatened an individual or a group. The act of displaying the flag or symbol in a public space, on a piece of clothing, or on a banner at a rally is enough to trigger an immediate arrest and result in a criminal conviction.
When examining the specific example involving the word “intifada”, it is important to note that the word literally translates from Arabic as “uprising” or “shaking off” and is viewed by many protestors as a legitimate call for civil disobedience and resistance against occupation. However, the Australian authorities have conflated the phrase with historical waves of suicide bombings and violence. By allowing the government to permanently ban a phrase based on one specific interpretation, the law strips citizens of the right to defend their actions based on context. This means that a person who is stood peacefully with a placard bearing a banned slogan can be treated in the same way as a person who was using the phrase whilst directing a riot or encouraging a violent act. Future governments can easily weaponize this mechanism to suppress inconvenient political movements by banning their slogans and catchphrases. What’s more, this law shifts the role of the police from maintaining the peace and ensuring the right of peaceful protest to one of enforcing state-approved language.
Whilst Australia does not have an explicit constitutional Bill of Rights like the United States, the High Court has firmly established that the Australian Constitution contains an implied freedom of political communication. This freedom is essential for a functioning democracy and to allow people to express themselves freely. Central to this is the acknowledgment that political communication can naturally be provocative and will often lead to someone taking offence. By threatening citizens with up to two years in prison for using offensive chants or displaying provocative symbols, the law directly violates the spirit of this constitutional freedom. The legislation forces protestors to self-censor and to align their language with government approved guidelines, ultimately diluting the public’s ability to hold powerful institutions, foreign states, or domestic policies to account.
The legislation also grants the Home Affairs Minister expanded powers to fast-track the deportation or visa cancellation of any foreign national accused of spreading hate or being associated with any banned group. A foreign national – including permanent residents, international students, and work visa holders – can have their visa revoked if they are accused of engaging in public vilification, hate speech, or utilising banned political chants. Crucially, those accused do not need to be convicted of a crime in a court of law; a formal police or intelligence report detailing an accusation is sufficient grounds for the state to act. Visas can be summarily cancelled if an individual is found to be “associating” with any organisation listed under the new non-terrorist “hate group” provisions. Association can include attending meetings, donating funds, or communicating with known members online.
This is yet another part of the legislation where due process is absent. The fundamental pillar of a fair legal system is the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial before a penalty is applied. Because this power is administrative rather than judicial, a Minister presiding over a case can cancel a visa based on secret intelligence or unproven allegations. The standard requirement to prove a case “beyond a reasonable doubt” is replaced by the Minister’s subjective satisfaction that the person’s presence is “not conducive to the public good”. This leaves the accused with virtually no immediate path to defend themselves or cross-examine the evidence being used against them before they are placed in an immigration detention centre awaiting deportation.
Under this provision, a foreign national could face deportation simply for attending a public debate, participating in a political rally where a banned group happened to be present, or being part of a shared WhatsApp group chat. The legislation creates a system of collective guilt where individuals are punished not for their own personal actions or speech, but merely for proximity to people or ideas that the government has outlawed. What’s more, this has already occurred, with a number of supporters of the National Socialist Network – all who had clean criminal records – being deported or having their visas cancelled for mere association with no due process and their only recourse being a right to appeal that occurs after they have been removed from the country.
Another part of the legislation expands the right of the state to monitor Australian citizens and relates to what the government terms as the “radicalisation of minors”. This portion of the Act introduces severe criminal penalties for the online and offline transmission of “extremist ideas” to children. It establishes a specific, standalone federal offence inside the Commonwealth Criminal Code for adults who deliberately groom, recruit, or attempt to radicalise minors (people under the age of 18). It directly criminalises the act of sending, sharing, or introducing minors to violent extremist material via encrypted chat apps, gaming servers, or decentralised networks. Adults convicted under these new provisions face a maximum prison sentence of up to 14 years, reflecting the government’s push to treat youth radicalisation with extreme severity.
This is immediately problematic as in digital counter-cultures the distinction between an “adult manipulator” and a “participating youth” is often blurred. Legal advocates have warned that because these new laws operate alongside existing anti-terror frameworks, they risk sweeping up older teenagers (those aged 16-17) who share memes or text files and subjecting them to adult-level criminal prosecution. Again, the law is vague and fails to objectively define the exact point at which ideological teaching or discussion crosses the line into “radicalisation”. For example, an adult mentoring a minor in political ideologies which take anti-government positions could face heavy legal scrutiny if a police officer subjectively interprets that mentorship as “radical grooming” – this applies even if the adult is the parent of the minor in question. This opens the door for the Australian government to begin arresting parents for expressing an opinion to their children about topics such as immigration and race.
The new Act also standardises and unifies Australia’s previously fractured state-by-state intelligence-gathering apparatus into a singular federal surveillance asset – known as the National Hate Crimes Database. Historically, if an individual was charged with a minor racial offense in Queensland, the New South Wales counter-terrorism unit could not immediately view that information unless a formal request was made. The National Hate Crimes Database bypasses this “hurdle” by consolidating real-time data from every state police force. Crucially, the database does not just log convicted criminals, but instead keeps active, searchable profiles on individuals who are merely charged with or suspected of committing an incident that was motivated by “hate”. This reporting extends to low-level infractions like vandalism or shouting a banned phrase at a rally. The Federal Joint Counter-Terrorism Teams can then use the registry to monitor the physical movements, cross-border travel, and interpersonal meetings of anyone who is flagged in the system.
By logging unproven suspicions rather than judicial convictions, the federal government has effectively established a permanent watchlist of citizens who have never been found guilty in a court of law. Once an individual’s profile is entered into the system, that marker can covertly influence subsequent bail applications, firearms licensing evaluations, and employment background checks. While presented to the public as a tool for tracking violent extremists, it is clear that such architecture is highly vulnerable to abuse. It can easily be expanded to monitor peaceful political movements, placing everyday protesters on the same analytical tier as violent terrorists, thereby conflating lawful dissent with national security threats. This pervasive surveillance capability can have a profound effect on the population; serving to discourage citizens from participating in public rallies out of fear that their identities will be permanently tracked across state borders by counter-terror officers.
Alongside the new legislation, the government has also granted the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and other law enforcement agencies sweeping permanent, preventative, and surveillance powers. Prior to 2025, ASIO’s most intrusive tool – Compulsory Questioning Warrants – was treated by parliament as an extraordinary, temporary measure. These warrants force individuals (including minors as young as 14) to undergo intense interrogation or face up to five years in prison for refusing to answer. They were strictly bound by “sunset clauses” that required regular parliamentary reviews and re-authorization. The government permanently removed these sunset clauses as part of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2025, meaning that ASIO’s coercive, non-custodial questioning powers are now a permanent fixture of Australian law.
While the mechanism remains subject to retrospective oversight by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, the removal of the sunset clause permanently enshrines these coercive interrogation powers into domestic law without the requirement for periodic parliamentary renewal. This eliminates a vital democratic check on state power. Sunset clauses exist to ensure that “temporary” emergency powers do not morph into permanent tools of oppression. By making these powers permanent, parliament has normalised a system where an intelligence agency can legally compel citizens to speak, effectively removing the fundamental common-law right to silence.
The Act also integrates federal counter-terrorism data directly into state-level law enforcement operations, giving police unprecedented discretionary powers over property and movement. Police forces can now utilise “intelligence-led” data provided by ASIO to immediately suspend or permanently seize firearms licenses or security clearances without a prior criminal conviction or a warrant. Furthermore, state-level offshoots of the Act grant police expanded powers to randomly scan individuals with metal-detecting wands in public spaces and force the removal of face coverings at protests (such as masks or scarves) if a prohibited symbol or chant is merely suspected. This strips citizens of both the presumption of innocence and due process. If police can seize an individual’s property or search their person based entirely on classified “criminal intelligence” that the suspect is not allowed to see or challenge in a court of law, the door is left wide open for political policing and the profiling of political dissidents.
Sadly, the extraordinary case of Joel Davis is not an ugly anomaly, but a warning of much worse things to come. Whilst Joel was languishing in jail, the Australian government was rushing through legislation – minus the usual democratic checks and balances – that will take away the rights of Australians and leave them open to unprecedented legal restrictions, many of which can be applied based on the mere suspicion of a crime taking place. This new legislation is some of the most expansive and far reaching of any such legislation found in the Western world, making it entirely probable that Joel’s incarceration will be a fate shared by many more Australians in the future.
The legislation passed by the Australian government is clearly similar to legislation that has been passed by successive British governments over a period of decades, however in many cases the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026 goes far further and is more restrictive than laws that exist in the UK. What’s more, this Act contains so many restrictive legal changes, it feels like the Australian government was in some ways playing “catch-up” with other Western countries and had just been waiting for the right crisis in order to justify enacting such restrictive legislation this quickly and without any of the usual oversight or democratic checks and balances. And what better than a crisis that involved the killing of Jews and that was all conveniently caught on camera for the world to see? And who could argue with such legislation, after all, doing so would open one up to the accusation of antisemitism.
Looking at the Act as a whole there are two worrying threads that run throughout this new legislation which are mirrored in both UK legislation and in laws found in other Western nations. The first is that the legislation relies on very fuzzy or “elastic” definitions, which rather than being quantifiable could easily be interpreted very differently by different judges or ministers who are asked to independently look at any single case. This will not result in fair and equal judgements, but will allow the political slant of the person presiding over a case to heavily influence the outcome. The second worrying thread is that the legislation creates many cases where merely being a suspect in a case creates a negative outcome for any named individual – removing any notion of due process and effectively abolishing the age-old legal protection of being innocent until proven guilty. In fact, in the case of bans for so-called “hate groups”, the only way for a group to beat the ban is by appealing a judgement that was the result of a decision made by a single individual rather than from a case heard in a court of law, essentially meaning judgement is passed before the trial takes place.
The legislation also creates a big list of those deemed as a threat to the state – and again suspects can be placed on this list without ever having committed a crime. This allows the government to monitor those with the “wrong” opinions – and the “wrong” opinions can be updated at will by the government depending on the current situation. Just imagine how this new legislation would have been used during the Covid lockdowns. The list that the Australian state aims to create will form a spiders-web of associations; one that is able to snare political activists who never actually committed a crime but simply happen to be suspected of “wrong think”, accused of using a word that the government deems illegal or have been accused of associating with the wrong people in the most tangential manner. Of course, this will have the effect of turning a certain number of people into pariahs, whilst likely scaring a larger number of people into silent compliance.
Finally, just like in the UK, these laws open up the prospect for the creation of a two-tier justice system. A system that carves out exceptions for certain groups and engages in selective prosecution to ensure that more often than not, it is White Australians who come out as the group that are most disadvantaged by the legislation. What’s more, it is already clear that when it comes to the application of this legislation it will be those who hold traditionalist or anti-migrant views that will be targeted the most harshly – essentially putting pressure on people to hold their tongue when it comes to a wide range of issues including demographics, race and ethnicity.
The irony that modern day Australia began as a penal colony should not be lost on anyone. Whilst Australia seemed to have had one of the most remarkable historical trajectories – going from being the world’s largest prison island to a country known for freedom – it now seems to be performing a legal U-turn and heading in the wrong direction at break-neck speed. White Australians now face restrictions, that thanks to modern day technology, are arguably stricter than the restrictions faced by their ancestors. However, there is one fundamental difference between how Australia was once governed and how it is governed today. Historically, it was of course Britain who controlled the fate of convicts who were sent to Australia; now however it is a Zionist elite who passes draconian laws that seek to control Australians with the clear intention of gagging them from speaking out against their own replacement under the threat of prison sentences that can exceed those handed down to murderers and rapists.
Header image: Anthony Albanese at a memorial for the victims of the Bondi Islamic terrorist attack (PMO).
The post Australia’s two-tier hate crime laws explained first appeared on The Noticer.
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