David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This bill, the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026, comes as part of the Labor Party's response to an appalling antisemitic attack at Bondi Beach that took the lives of 15 Jewish members of our community. This parliament, barely an hour ago, passed laws that directly respond to critical elements of that attack by addressing some of the loopholes in our national firearms laws that allowed hate to be armed that day. Whilst it wasn't unanimous, we did get the majority needed, and that was good work to make the community safer.

Much of this bill, however, includes scapegoating migrants and attacking peaceful protests and protest groups, and it's not a legitimate response to the Bondi attack. It wrongfully conflates caring about international law, protecting the vulnerable and having a conscience about world events with the cruel ugliness of antisemitism. The Australian Greens have deep concerns about the politicised content included here. We do not have any comfort that it is going to substantially address any form of hate in this country, and that includes antisemitism. We're also concerned that the amendments to the migration laws are designed to directly place migrants in the frame in this debate and to blame migrants and multicultural Australia for the failures of intelligence and security agencies.

Again, we see how failures at ASIO and our security agencies are being used to weaponise against multicultural Australia and then to give those very agencies more and more secret powers. This parliament should be coming together now to make laws that bring communities together and that have their confidence and support. Instead, we have a last-minute major-party deal to create laws that can criminalise large segments of the community who are following their conscience and their hearts to stand up against genocide. I know who I am with in this debate and I'm proud to be with them. We will not sit quietly in the corner while these parties try to make it a crime to stand against genocide and for a free Palestine. We will remain in solidarity with the community—peaceful, principled and proud.

I want to say thank you to the thousands of people who made submissions to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. Of course, it's part of the club; it's populated just by Labor and the coalition, but the community engaged. This whole process was a stitch-up between the Labor and Liberal parties with committees like the PJCIS, but I want to thank the people who still took the time to ensure they were heard and that their detailed concerns about the proposed laws were on the record. I note the large number of Palestinian, LGBTQI+ and refugee organisations who raised strong concerns about the divisive and dangerous proposals in these bills. At all times, the timeframe for consultation was grossly inadequate. We genuinely appreciate every group who still made themselves available in these last few short days to talk with us about the proposed changes.

Every stakeholder we spoke to, every single one, raised new and more detailed concerns about these laws. The overwhelming response from all of them is that the original Labor Party proposal was too flawed, too politicised, too biased and too divisive to be fixed. I agree with them, my party agrees with them and millions of Australians agree with them, and we thank them for their time. With their collective help, we have prevented broken vilification laws passing that were biased in their application, broken in their reach and dangerous in their politics, and I want to thank all of those Australians who joined with us in that.

I note in particular the difficulty of this proposal for the many communities, including but not limited to the queer community and the disability community, who have long waited for this parliament to take their concerns about hate attacks against them seriously. This government brought them into this parliament, gave them encouragement and then just dropped them, like they've done so many times before. This government has again let down diverse communities in this process. They are more than disappointed with this government today. I want to let all of those vulnerable and diverse communities know—you have our word as Greens that we will keep working to ensure a comprehensive suite of measures are adopted, funded and resourced to reduce hate, provide support and make this country safe for all.

I thank the Law Council for their insightful analysis of the draft and the final laws, including in the few short hours we had them today. Likewise, I thank the Justice and Equity Centre, the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Hindus for Human Rights and the Arabic Council, as well as lawyers from the Australian Lawyers Alliance—among many, many others—for their guidance. They have spoken with one voice. Indeed, they've been stronger than that. They've spoken with a diversity of voices. From multiple different perspectives, from multiple faiths and multiple communities and multiple parts of this country, they have said, 'Don't support these laws, for the damage they can do to society.'

In the last 24 hours, the bill has become even worse. The coalition amendments, far from the nonsense we heard from Senator Cash about 'limiting their scope' and 'saving people from overreach'—what nonsense! What rubbish we heard. What facile defences she's trying to build for whoever's in her perceived support base. Let us be clear about this: the coalition amendments expand the reach of Labor's already dangerous crackdown on legitimate free speech and political expression, and they do so in unprecedented ways.

Far from narrowing these laws, these changes expand the law to expressly cover conduct that falls far short of violence. The rushed changes expand the conduct that can lead to organisations being banned and their members—including 'informal members', whatever that means—going to jail for 15 years. They include references to seven different state and territory laws. That raises multiple constitutional issues and significant uncertainty as to how these laws will apply across the Commonwealth. That didn't narrow the scope of these banning provisions and proscriptive provisions; it massively expanded them. It massively expanded the thoughts and the speech that can be covered by these laws.

This Labor and coalition deal may lead to organisations being banned and people being criminalised across the country if they ridicule or express contempt for a group or a person. These laws cover much more than threats of violence; they extend to economic, social and psychological harm and are enforced not by courts but on secret reports from ASIO and the opinion of the Home Affairs minister. Labor and the coalition are expressly intending to capture acts and statements done in the past, with retrospective operations of these laws. Groups could be criminalised; people could see their actions criminalised. They could face lengthy jail time for actions or words said before these offences were even created. What was a rushed process last week, with poor process, excluding critical consideration, has now become a farce. Unprecedented legal changes are being made law without even a cursory review by experts or the community.

As Greens, we have used some general principles to analyse these changes. Laws that seek to protect only select parts of the community and expressly exclude protection for other vulnerable parts of our community are bad laws. They're divisive laws. Rushed, complex criminal laws are terrible process and risk criminalising conduct nobody would want to see people going to jail for—well, nobody except for their political opponents, that is. Removing procedural fairness from decisions that could potentially put people in jail for years or over a decade is plain dangerous. And let's be clear. Anything that Labor and the coalition agree on in a late night meeting with the toxic politics that they've been discussing in the last few years, especially when it comes to criminal law, is likely to be terribly compromised at best and downright Trumpian at worst.

We've spoken in the last hours to a number of lawyers and experts on the change to prohibited hate group laws. They had a long list of questions, a long list of concerns about the provisions, and they show that they are very far from clear and possibly completely unworkable. Is that how laws should pass through this parliament, on a wink or a nod, on the vibe of Senator Cash, on the nod of the Prime Minister, on the hope of the Attorney-General, on the toxic politics of whichever part of the coalition agreed to this?

We start by noting, as the law council points out, that the banning powers rely in part on underlying conduct that is in part already criminalised and in part has never before been used as legal tests. That will see the home affairs minister relying on secret advice from ASIO about potential future conduct of an organisation before banning them without any pretence of natural justice, without ever considering procedural fairness. In this case, the discretion given to the home affairs minister means the courts will not consider a listing and there's no independent oversight. The listing can occur on the grounds where the minister has reasonable belief that a person has engaged in a hate crime, and that can be satisfied by a range of state based vilification offences that only require a person to be critiquing or ridiculing. Again, I repeat that all of that is done by ASIO with a secret report never seen by those being targeted, never seen by the parliament, never seen by the public and by a minister who doesn't even have to tell the organisation he's thinking about doing this.

The second limit of the test requires that the minister is satisfied it's reasonably necessary to protect a part of a community from harm. That harm could include not just physical harm but also economic, psychological or social harm. Under these laws, the anti-apartheid movement would have been captured. Under these laws, federal ministers in the 1960s and 1970s could have threatened thousands of anti-apartheid activists with jail and banned their organisations because of their strident, correct and pointed criticism of the South African government and its hateful apartheid policy. They're people we now celebrate as proud human rights campaigners. In 2026, cross out 'apartheid' and write in 'free Palestine', and you'll see what these parties are trying to do.

Can I point out that in the short time that we've had these unprecedented proposed changes, lawyers have said to us that roping in the criminal offences of seven different state and territory laws, defining them as hate crimes and saying they apply under Commonwealth legislation creates immeasurable legal uncertainty. Does a test that used to only apply in Victoria now apply across the whole country? Are there seven different tests across the country, depending on where you live, for what you say? None of this has been answered by the government. It's chaos. It's bad in principle. Even with those laws, the government goes out of its way to say that only three categories of offensive conduct will be covered by those laws, writing out protections for other religious groups, for the LGBTIQ community, for gender and intersex. How have we got to this point?

Can I finish with this on migration. This bill dangerously lowers the threshold for visa cancellations from requiring a person would engage in hateful conduct to merely that they might. That's not a test. I want to thank the ASRC for their continued positive engagement with this. When the government says they need these changes to ban hate preachers from this country, they know that's false. Every single one of those could already be banned under the character tests. There are two separate legal provisions under the Migration Act that would fully cover all of the conduct that's covered in these migration law changes, and the government is lying when it says otherwise, and the coalition is covering itself with pretend political cover when it says otherwise. We won't accept those lies. It's a false narrative. At the core of the narrative on the migration changes, they want to blame migrants for the violence and failures of security agencies, for the gaps in our gun laws. We won't let them scapegoat migrants, we won't support these changes to the Migration Act, and we won't support the rubbish politics that is trying to give them cover when they do it.