Laws drafted following the harrowing Bondi terror attack on December 14 “won’t work” to eradicate the promotion of hate speech, a legal expert has told Sky News.
Good grief, even the Greens are against it?
Albanese’s hate speech legislation ‘wouldn’t work’ in practice, as Greens and Coalition line up against it
The Albanese government’s draft hate speech laws will need a thorough rewrite to have any chance of “working”, according to a leading legal commentator as the bill faces multiple hurdles.
A prominent Australian legal commentator says the government’s draft hate speech laws would betray their very intentions.
Rule of Law Institute Vice President and the Australian’s legal affairs editor Chris Merritt said Labor’s Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 was “worse than doing nothing”.
The proposed bill includes significant gun law reform and also creates new offences for aggravated hate speech and serious vilification.
However, the laws include a carve-out to allow the direct quoting or referencing of religious texts “for the purpose of religious teaching or discussion”.
Mr Merritt said, unless the religious text defence is dropped, “it will undermine the overall legitimate purpose of the bill”.
“(The purpose) is to suppress the promotion of hate speech, hate speech on the basis of race, Jew hatred,” he said.
“If it goes ahead, if this bill goes ahead with that defence… I think it would be worse than doing nothing… The law wouldn’t work.
“It would betray any possibility that reasonable members of the Muslim community could put pressure on their religious leaders to throttle back and take a more reasonable approach.”
He said the government should redraft the legislation to exclude the religious text defence, believing an updated bill “should go ahead quickly after the law is redrafted”.
He said it appeared the government had rushed the bill and reproduced a “flawed” act from the New South Wales Parliament.
“They’ve simply copied a flawed act of the NSW Parliament that was introduced about February last year despite misgivings from the former Chief Justice of NSW, Tom Bathurst, who warned against using incitement to hate as a criterion for criminal law,” Mr Merritt said.
“He preferred a more orthodox approach of basing criminality on incitement to violence. Now the government, the NSW government, disregarded Mr Bathurst’s concerns and legislated.
“The federal government, I think, has simply copied that approach and … That explains why (the defence is) there.”
It comes after the Greens said they would not support the bill in its current form, and Sussan Ley announced her party could not either.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) pressed the Coalition to work on amending the bill rather than opposing outright when parliament reconvened next week.
At a press conference on Thursday, however, the Opposition leader panned the legislation, labelling it “pretty unsalvageable”.
She said the government could not expect to pass laws which it did not know how to implement in practice.
“The government has not been able to explain how key provisions [regarding hate speech] would operate in practice and what conduct would actually be captured,” she said.
“The Attorney-General’s Department couldn’t tell us if phrases like ‘globalise the intifada’ or ‘from the river to the sea’ would be captured by this law. Officials couldn’t even answer whether a Fatwa preached by an Islamic extremist was classified as a religious text.
“If the government can’t explain how the legislation will work, the parliament can’t be expected to vote for it and the community cannot possibly have confidence in it.”
Politicians will return to parliament on Monday and Tuesday following the Bondi Beach terrorist attack.