New anti-protest laws target opponents of genocide

A raft of new laws, purportedly to combat the antisemitism “crisis” in Australia, have been passed federally and by some state governments. The Human Rights Law Centre summed up the situation, saying that the laws have “been introduced under the guise of protecting against hate speech and vilification [but] on closer inspection, these laws are likely to have a chilling effect on our democracy while failing to stamp out hate speech and discrimination”.

The same political leaders who in sucking up to Donald Trump have refused to condemn his calls for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, or the recent Nazi salutes by Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, are now pontificating about “racist hate” to pass laws that undermine our democratic rights. This is occurring in the context of a McCarthyite-style witch-hunt of Palestine supporters across media, educational and cultural institutions.

At a federal level, the new laws mostly increase sentences for existing offences, while also introducing new offences of threatening to use force or violence against protected groups, and either advocating or threatening damage to, or destruction of, places of worship. The Labor government performed a spectacular backflip, capitulating to Peter Dutton and the Liberal opposition by including mandatory minimum sentences of up to six years’ imprisonment for some offences, while ramming through the legislation in less than 24 hours. This is despite Prime Minister Anthony Albanese just weeks earlier describing mandatory prison terms as “fraught” and “unproductive”.

Mandatory sentencing explicitly goes against the Labor Party’s own official policy platform, given its disastrous history of resulting in mass incarceration of marginalised and oppressed people. This didn’t stop Albanese and every Labor MP voting for these laws.

In NSW, the Chris Minns Labor government has gone further, passing three new sets of laws. The first targets the display of Nazi symbols and graffiti near synagogues, Jewish schools or the Sydney Jewish Museum. The second and third are explicitly targeting protesters, despite there being no link between protests and the recent spate of antisemitic attacks—which the police have theorised were likely coordinated by organised crime networks.

The NSW government’s Crimes Amendment (Places of Worship) bill 2025 creates an offence with a potential two-year imprisonment and/or a $22,000 fine for blocking, impeding or hindering access to places of worship. It grants NSW police the extraordinary powers to arrest and move on people in or near a place of worship for any reason. As the NSW Council for Civil Liberties argues, “these offences could be used to charge members of the faith protesting their own organisation, sexual abuse survivors demanding justice and any snap rally or assembly that happens within a vicinity of a place of worship, such as Town Hall”. The laws are extraordinarily broad, especially given that almost everywhere in the Sydney CBD is “near” a place of worship, all of Sydney’s most common protest locations being close to a church.

Minns has made no secret of the fact that he is a staunch supporter of Israel and wants to stamp out the mass Palestine movement that has mobilised tens of thousands against the genocide in Gaza for more than sixteen months. These laws follow a wave of other anti-protest laws passed in NSW in recent years, many targeting climate protesters, and could be used against people protesting for any cause, including the union movement.

The third law passed by Minns makes it a criminal offence to incite racial hatred, with a maximum penalty for an individual of two years’ imprisonment and/or fines of up to $11,000. In Victoria, new anti-vilification laws have also passed, although they include other protected categories besides race, and potentially some protections from the laws for political speech.

The danger of these laws is that a concerted effort is being made by supporters of Israel to define criticism of or opposition to the state of Israel as inherently antisemitic. Pro-Palestine activists have been falsely accused of antisemitism for decades to silence opposition. Now they want to make opposing Israel a crime. In a similar vein, Universities Australia recently adopted an official definition which says that calling for the abolition of the state of Israel is antisemitism, potentially opening up thousands of academics and students to disciplinary proceedings.

Decisions about who should be prosecuted under these laws will be in the hands of the police and public prosecutors—that is, the very institutions of power that uphold racist inequalities and the interests of Australian capitalism. For that reason, no-one should be under any illusion that these laws will be used to prosecute vicious racists like Peter Dutton, Sky News or the pro-Israel lobby, who have dehumanised the Palestinian people, supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza and systematically demonised the Arab and Muslim population. In fact, all these racists are clamouring for even more draconian “hate speech” laws to try to outlaw dissent.

All progressive causes, including the union movement, should unite in opposing these undemocratic laws.