The Slippery Slope of Australia’s Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026

A Wake-Up Call for Free Speech Advocates

By Mark Neugebauer

15 January 2026

As Australians who value free speech, we have long relied on a fragile but essential balance: the freedom to speak, to argue, to worship, and to dissent, alongside the need to restrain genuine harm. That balance is never simple. It requires humility, restraint, and constant scrutiny of power.

The proposed Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 presents itself as a response to real and troubling problems: rising antisemitism, religious intolerance, extremist violence, and social fracture. These are not imaginary threats. Jewish communities, in particular, have faced persistent and sometimes violent hostility, and any serious society has a moral duty to protect people from targeted hatred and harm.

But the moral seriousness of a goal does not excuse the moral risks of the means used to pursue it.

My concern is not that this bill is driven by malice. It is that it concentrates power, lowers key legal and procedural thresholds, and expands coercive authority in ways that deserve far more public scrutiny than they have received.

At its core, the bill expands criminal and administrative powers to regulate speech, symbols, associations, and access to public life. Supporters frame this as a necessary response to hatred and extremism. That may be partly true. But laws must be judged not only by their aims, but by their structure, incentives, safeguards, and long-term effects.

The bill proposes:

• New speech-related offences, including public promotion or incitement of hatred based on race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, carrying serious criminal penalties. While defences exist for religious, academic, and journalistic use, these often operate only after investigation or prosecution has begun, shifting practical risk and burden onto ordinary citizens.

  
  

• Prohibition of symbols and materials linked to designated groups, enforced through criminal law and border controls. This raises unavoidable questions about how context, intent, historical discussion, or critical examination will be assessed in practice.

  
  

• Expanded ministerial power to designate “prohibited hate groups” through regulation, with limited prior judicial process. Once designated, membership, support, or association can carry severe criminal penalties. The concern is not only who is targeted today, but how readily such powers can be widened tomorrow.

  
  

• Higher penalties for religious leaders judged to advocate violence in their public role. While genuine incitement must be restrained, history shows that moral, theological, and political language is often misunderstood or misclassified when institutions lack cultural or religious literacy.

  
  

• Immigration and border controls tied to speech and association, allowing visas to be denied or cancelled based on broad assessments of belief, history, or perceived connection.

  
  

• Expanded firearms and background assessment systems, relying on intelligence and risk profiling that may operate with limited transparency, clear thresholds, or avenues for appeal.

  
  

Individually, many of these measures can be defended. Collectively, however, they represent a significant shift toward preventive, risk-based governance, where people are restricted not primarily for what they have done, but for what authorities believe they might represent.

Power rarely arrives announcing itself as tyranny. More often, it advances through necessity, emergency, and good intentions, embedded in administrative systems that prioritise risk management, institutional protection, and legal insulation.

Security laws and hate-prevention regimes almost always begin narrowly and expand quietly, not because leaders are villains, but because institutions, by their nature, seek control, predictability, and reduced liability over time.

When legal frameworks rely on terms such as “advocacy,” “praise,” “recklessness,” or “unacceptable risk,” the moral burden increases. These are not purely technical categories. They are interpretive judgments, shaped by culture, politics, and institutional temperament.

A system that allows groups to be banned by executive action, speech to be criminalised on relatively low mental thresholds, and association to become evidence of culpability creates long-term pressure on free conscience, especially when combined with secrecy provisions and limited mechanisms for challenge or review.

History suggests such frameworks rarely remain static. They are repurposed, expanded, and normalised. That is not paranoia; it is institutional reality.

Although the bill foregrounds antisemitism, its legal architecture focuses primarily on race, colour, and ethnic origin. This raises difficult questions about how religious hostility not tied to ethnicity will be addressed, even though religious hatred can be just as real and destructive.

At the same time, religious leaders are exposed to heightened liability under some provisions, creating an asymmetry between protection and punishment. The risk is not only the suppression of extreme speech, but the quiet discouragement of robust moral speech more broadly.

As a Christian shaped by the conviction that we “wrestle not against flesh and blood,” I believe moral language must remain free, even when it is uncomfortable, unpopular, or contested. Restraining violence is necessary. Restraining conscience, except in the most exceptional and clearly defined circumstances, carries far greater moral danger.

A just system protects all communities without privileging some forms of suffering while marginalising others.

This bill alone is not proof of tyranny, but it is a warning sign.

It reflects a broader cultural shift toward managing risk through control, speech through surveillance, and disagreement through regulation. It assumes that safety is best achieved by expanding coercive authority rather than by strengthening social trust, moral responsibility, and institutional humility.

As citizens, parents, carers, believers, and neighbours, we should not respond with panic, but with seriousness. Laws that reshape the relationship between the state and conscience deserve rigorous debate, transparent reasoning, and proportional design.

If we care about liberty, we must care about the structures that quietly erode it.

That means:

• Engaging our representatives respectfully but firmly.

• Asking for clearer limits, stronger oversight, and higher evidentiary thresholds.

• Defending both the vulnerable and the freedom needed to speak for them.

This is not about choosing between safety and freedom. It is about remembering that safety without freedom tends toward control, and freedom without responsibility tends toward chaos. The task of a moral society is to hold both, without surrendering either.