Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026
Secretary
Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security
pjcis@aph.gov.au
Dear Madam/Sir,
Review of the Exposure Draft Legislation: Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026
Please accept this submission in relation to the above Bill.
The Queensland Council for Civil Liberties (QCCL) is a voluntary organisation concerned with the protection of individual rights and civil liberties. It was founded in 1966 in order to protect and promote the human rights and freedoms of Queensland citizens.
1. Opening Remarks
The tragic events at Bondi, the product of appalling and incomprehensible bigotry and cruelty, have had a profound impact on this country. However, as John Frew writing in Pearls and Irritations on 12 January 2026 said[1]:
What must be resisted, however, is the temptation to allow grief to harden into certainty, and emotion to substitute for judgement. Moments of collective shock are precisely when our capacity for rational moral reasoning is at its weakest, not because we lack intelligence or goodwill, but because stress narrows perception. Under threat, the mind seeks clarity, blame and reassurance. Complexity becomes intolerable. Context is rejected as excuse. Explanation is confused with justification.
Yet it is precisely in these moments that restraint and analysis matter most.
But this government is showing no such restraint nor commitment to reasoned public policy debate.
Instead, the government has introduced a complex piece of legislation which is 144 pages accompanied by a 319-page close typed explanatory memorandum. The Bill has significant potential to interfere with basic civil liberties.
The Bill will fundamentally rework and expand hugely hate speech laws as well as having the 2026 equivalent of the 1950s ban of the Communist party which was struck down by the High Court. It is simply performative politics.
Even more alarming is that the public and Parliament is given effectively a week to review this proposed law.
In our view this inquiry is then a charade. This position was made irrefutable by the press release of the Chair of this committee announcing this inquiry which also all but announced its result.
By all means recall Parliament to mark the proposed National Day of Mourning to express the utmost solidarity with the Jewish community for its hugely tragic loss.
However, laws made in haste with minimal consultation inevitably turn out to be bad laws.
Notwithstanding our deep-seated cynicism about this process, we have decided to adhere to our policy of attempting to improve laws, even those we strenuously oppose by making this submission.
That said the QCCL is an organisation run by volunteers. Most members of our executive, including the author of this document, work full time. This means that we have not had the time to carry out a detailed analysis of the Bill’s provisions and most of our comments will be statements of principle.
2. Hate Speech Provisions
We oppose the proposed new hate speech provisions.
Given the lack of consensus about values in our society the underlying idea must be that everyone of us would want equal freedom with everyone else to be able to express our values and ideas as they relate to government and the management of our society. When we suppress a person’s ideas, we are violating that basic conception that everybody has an equal right to participate in the decision-making process on matters which may affect them. What must be added to this is the notorious fact that Governments consistently overestimate threats to the country and to their policies. Furthermore, when regulating speech which interferes with its activities government is in essence in a conflict of interest situation. This is not meant to be some conspiracy theory. It derives from the fact that in the words of Lord Acton “All power tends to corrupt.”
As the American political philosopher TM Scanlon has said[2]:
It is legitimate for the government to promote our personal safety by restricting information about how to make your own nerve gas but not legitimate for it to promote our safety by stopping political agitation which could, if unchecked, lead to widespread social conflict… The difference (between the two cases) is rather that where political issues are involved government is notoriously partisan and unreliable. Therefore, giving government the authority to make policy by balancing interests in such cases presents a serious threat to particularly important participant and audience interests. To the degree that the considerations of safety involved in the first case are clear and serious, and the participant and audience interests that might suffer from restriction are not significant, regulation could be acceptable
The application of these principles leads in our view to the conclusion that the State is entitled to take action to suppress speech if, and only if, it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action in this particular context that conduct is violence. As to what intent is needed, it is that a person intends certain consequences, and they desire that their acts cause those consequences or know that those consequences are substantially certain to result from their acts
Additionally, as we are discussing criminal offences, as a matter of principle, generally, criminal liability should only be imposed where it is proved the person had a guilty mind.
Further when making laws about speech the State must use criteria that are generalizable i.e. the terms used must be very precise so as to limit the breadth of speech covered by the law[3]
The New South Wales Law Reform Commission[4] has recently argued cogently that “hatred” is not a generalizable term.
The Commission commented at para 4.31 that “Criminal offences carry serious penalties, including the possible deprivation of a person's liberty. It is therefore important that criminal offences are clear and can be consistently understood across the community”
The Commission accepted the view of those submitters who argued that “there are differences of opinion in the community about what hatred means” and that “this ambiguity makes hatred an inappropriate standard for the criminal law”[5].
In summary the Commission found that the criminal law is a “blunt instrument” for combatting vilification and for achieving or maintaining social cohesion.[6]
We respectfully agree.
This proposed law does not conform to these principles
For an example of a law which does we refer to section 52A of the Criminal Code (QLD), as it deals with serious conduct in that it requires incitement to or a threat of physical harm to persons or property.
We have no objection to making racial or religious motivation a circumstance of aggravation to existing offences such as assault.
A physical assault or threat of such is not by any stretch of the imagination a type of speech protected by any concept of free speech. It is quite common for sentencing judges to consider a wide variety of factors in addition to evidence bearing on guilt in determining what sentence to impose on an offender.
In addition, hate-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes and inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims. These features of such crimes provide justification for adding a further penalty in those situations over and above mere disagreement with offenders' beliefs.
There are further objections to these laws
Firstly, Andrew Kopelman[7] has argued, “the advocates of censorship were never able to establish a persuasive causal nexus between silencing and any particular speech act. It was impossible to show that any single instance of racist speech …..could have that kind of devastating effect on a person. Speech is certainly integral to the problem: racism and sexism are ideas in people’s heads….. Antidiscrimination law is necessarily committed to the reshaping of culture to eliminate or marginalise such malign ideologies. Censorship is the wrong tool for this job. The cost to free speech of a hate speech prohibition – and there is every reason to think that it would be substantial – would not buy much.”[8]
There are psychological studies that show, as well as the evidence of history, that censored speech becomes more appealing and persuasive to many listeners merely by virtue of being censored.[9]
John Stuart Mill also argued that being exposed to false ideas is critical to continuing to hold true beliefs[10]
3. Proscription
It is indeed ironic that a Labor government led by an allegedly left-wing Prime Minister is introducing the most extensive proscription legislation since the Communist Party Dissolution Bill which was so courageously opposed by Doc Evatt.
The Council makes 3 points against proscription:
a) It is actions that should be the subject of criminal sanctions not indications of support or involvement in political or other organisations.
b) Proscription introduces into our law the principle of guilt by association. In doing so it undermines one of the fundamental principles of our criminal legal system. By doing so proscription makes it more likely that innocent persons will be convicted of offences.
c) Finally, the relevant sections are extremely vague and grant to the Minister a power which is capable of being used in the most arbitrary manner. An example of such a provision is clause 2(c) of the definition of “advocates”
These general concerns are in this case reinforced by three further aspects of the proposed law:
a. The legislation is retrospective with the Minister being able to have regard to conduct which occurred prior to the introduction of this Bill
b. The Minister is not required to comply with the rules of natural justice in making his or her decision
c. No conviction for an offence is required
Australian history is replete with examples of the arbitrary misuse of proscription powers. The first being the proscribing of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1916 [11] . That law resulted in the wrongful conviction and imprisonment for significant periods of time of the “Sydney Six”.
There are serious questions about the effectiveness of proscription. The British Inquiry into legislation against terrorism while putting a case for proscription in the end conceded “that the primary purpose of proscription was to give a legislative expression to public revulsion and reassurance that fair measures were being taken.” [12]
If these laws are to proceed in our submission
a. The power to proscribe should be vested in a Court and not in the Minister so that the Court can determine the matter on the merits.
b. The Minister or Court should be specifically required to take into account the impact of proscription on human rights in particular freedom of political association and communication.
c. A person or organisation who might be affected by a decision to proscribe an organisation should be entitled to be heard according to the principles of natural justice prior to proscription.
d. Once an organisation has been proscribed steps should be taken to publicise that widely so that individuals may disassociate themselves from the organisation. This it is submitted is a necessary corollary of the defence that a person has taken reasonable steps to disassociate themselves from a prescribed organisation
4. Immigration Law Changes
The Council does not take the view that there is an unrestricted right to enter this country.
However, the concern with these proposed changes is that they give the Minister an enormous amount of discretion to exclude people from the country which could be used to exclude people who might be supporters of the political opponents of the government of the day. In this regard we reference the use of the undefined word “harm” in section 5C(1) 1A (d) (ii).
Once again, it appears that the contemporary members of the Parliamentary Labor Party have forgotten their history. These laws bring to mind the absurd lengths which the government went to in 1934 to exclude from this country the communist Egon Kisch who came here to warn everyone about the dangers of German fascism. The fact is that once these laws are in place they are available to be used by any subsequent government for their own purposes. For these reasons such broad and vague powers should not be vested in the Minister
5. Firearms
No International Human Rights instrument recognises a right to bear arms. Nor does this Council. That said, in the past, this Council has criticised Queensland State laws regulating weapons for giving excessive and unnecessary powers to police to enforce them.
We flag that we are concerned about the following provisions in the Bill
a) allowing reference to spent convictions when assessing whether a person should have a firearm
b) Why is section 54E(3) needed
c) We note the provisions for the automation of the suitability assessments provided for in it . The automation of any decision-making process raises significant concerns even in situations like that in this Bill where there is a right of review to the Administrative Review Tribunal. We do not have time to consider these issues in any further detail
[1] Grief, proximity and the failure of moral judgement
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/01/grief-proximity-and-the-failure-of-moral-judgement/
[2] TM Scanlon Freedom of Expression and Categories of Expression page 98 in Scanlon The Difficulty of Tolerance Cambridge University Press 2003
[3] Scanlon A Framework for Thinking about Freedom of Speech, and Some of its Implications pages 7 -8 A lecture delivered in 2018 and found at https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Freedom-of-Speech-Berkeley.pdf. “Offence” is another term which is not generalisable
[4] Serious racial and religious vilification Report No 151 September 2024
[5] Ibid para 4.32
[6] Ibid para 3.61
[7] Professor of Law and Political Science and author of an American text on Antidiscrimination Law
[8] Revenge, pornography and First Amendment Exceptions (2016) 65 Emory Law Journal 661 at pages 685-686
[9] Nadine Strossen Regulating Racist Speech on Campus – a modest proposal 1990 Duke Law Journal 484 at page 512 and Strossen Hate Oxford University Press 2018 pages 144-147
[10] see Kelly, Paul (2006) Liberalism and epistemic diversity: Mill's sceptical legacy. Episteme, 3 (3). pp. 248-265 http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/5186/1/Kelly_Liberalism-and-epistemic-diversity-Mill's-sceptical-legacy_2006.pdf
[11] PJ Rushton “The revolutionary ideology of the Industrial Workers of the World in Australia” Historical Studies volume 15 page 424 at page 435 I Turner Industrial Labour and Politics pages 123-138 and 214-5 and Raymond Evans Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Home front 1914-18 Sydney Allen & Unwin
[12] Quoted in “Terrorism and the Law in Australia: Legislation Commentary and Constraints” Department of the Parliamentary Library Research Paper No. 12 2001-02 See also the Report of the Security Legislation Review Committee June 2006 at paragraph 7.1.