Australia’s most powerful Jewish lobby group has demanded the government urgently bring in new “hate speech” laws to make “promoting hatred” a criminal offence.
Peter Wertheim, co-chief executive of peak body the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), echoed calls made last week by federal Labor MP Mark Dreyfus, who is also Jewish, for anti-vilification laws to be expanded to cover non-violent and non-threatening speech.
The ECAJ helped draft controversial new “hate speech” and prohibited hate group legislation passed in January in response to the Bondi Islamic terrorist attack, but immediately complained about the removal of a racial vilification offence and said the laws didn’t go far enough.
The influential group then received $124 million in taxpayer funding in Labor’s Federal Budget in May to provide “enhanced security for the Jewish community”.
Mr Wertheim on Saturday again called for immediate action to stop online and in-person “hate speech”, which he claimed was “harmful” to victims and the “peace and harmony of our society”.
“We need to get past the misinformation and scare campaigns, and understand what is really at stake,” he told The Saturday Telegraph.
“There is no suggestion that anyone who inadvertently makes a racist comment in an unguarded moment should be charged with a criminal offence.
“But if it can be proved that a person has deliberately set out to promote hatred of other people on the basis of their skin colour or their national or ethnic background, then there can be no excuse under any circumstances, and such behaviour should definitely be penalised.”
Mr Dreyfus, who devised a raft of new “hate speech” laws while serving as attorney-general, made a similar suggestion in a submission to the ongoing Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion.
“I believe that further extension of hate speech laws is needed to create a broader offence that does not require elements of violence or threatening force,” he wrote.
Fellow Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns also called for tougher anti-vilification laws at the Royal Commission last week, but denied trying to restrict freedom of speech and political communication.
“I don’t want to restrict people’s ability to participate in our democracy, I just want to protect people from being vilified,” he said.
The Coalition helped pass Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill, but Opposition legal affairs spokeswoman Michaelia Cash said it would now oppose any attempts to introduce new provisions.
“The government has showed it is not serious in addressing anti-Semitism… their proposal to combat anti-Semitism by cracking down on free speech is unacceptable,” she said.
The conservative Australian Jewish Association spoke out last week against “hate speech” laws brought in as a result of lobbying from Jewish groups, saying they had “backfired” and caused anti-Semitism to increase.
“I know some Jewish groups, they’ve just historically always done this, and they’ve thought that ‘we don’t want to see hate speech’, so the answer to that is to police it and make it illegal,” AJA CEO Robert Gregory said.
“People accuse the Jewish community, and Jewish organisations, of wanting to censor speech, and it’s something we can easily prevent.”
Header image: Peter Wertheim and Anthony Albanese (ECAJ).
