Protection for some, pedagogy for others

The racial hierarchy of the Australian government’s response to its envoys’ recommendations leaves Muslims unprotected by the law.

Ten months after Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, released his report and its 54 recommendations, the Albanese government has finally responded — a delay the envoy himself criticised, warning the government not to wait for another Christchurch.

The government’s response gathers at the softest end of what he proposed: a review of the national curriculum for racial and religious tolerance, an Islamophobia Education Taskforce, expanded police community liaison teams, mental-health supports and multicultural grants. The more structural and state-related recommendations were rejected or deferred:

• endorse Recommendation 16 of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Anti-Racism Framework, and conduct an independent review of counter-terrorism laws, policies and practices;
• establish an advisory panel of representatives from diverse Muslim communities, to provide insight into the potential impacts and unintended consequences of new counter-terrorism legislation;
• endorse Recommendation 14 of the same Framework, and implement religious discrimination protections at the federal level; and
• establish a commission of inquiry into anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, with terms of reference examining their extent, drivers, causes, impacts and experiences.

The accepted measures are not worthless. But the question is: why is the government reluctant to take note and do something about the structures that Muslims, scholars and the envoy himself, say help produce Islamophobia?

How the envoys’ terms of reference set the limits

Part of the answer was visible before either envoy reported. As I have pointed out from the onset, the two envoys’ terms of reference were embedded in a social cohesion agenda born of the War on Terror that has targeted Muslims for two decades. Those terms restricted Islamophobia to interpersonal discrimination and positioned Muslims’ safety as a contribution to Australia’s social cohesion and stability, while framing antisemitism as a national security risk, with Jewish safety an end for itself. The government’s responses to both envoys affirmed this distinction.

For more than two decades, scholars have documented the harms of the counterterrorism measures institutionalised through the US-led Global War on Terror, with Muslims profiled at the centre of their targets and governed as a suspect community. Those harms reached Muslims everywhere: an estimated 4.5 million killed, with no accountability, in the post-9/11 war zones of Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond; Palestinians enduring genocide in Gaza; and Muslims in the West living under suspicion and the disciplinary weight of ‘deradicalisation’ agendas, often disguised as social cohesion.

Against that record, an independent review of counter-terrorism legislation, and an advisory panel through which Muslim communities could communicate its ‘unintended consequences’, are modest proposals. But it seems the government finds them too radical.

Of course, a government that continues to view Muslim communities primarily through the framework of social cohesion as a national security threat cannot easily concede that Islamophobia is embedded in its counter-terrorism apparatus.

Because Muslims remain a ‘suspect community’, any structural protection or review that might limit the state’s own security powers to surveil and govern Muslims reads as an impossible ask.

The same machinery, a new assignment, the same target

Yet the very national security apparatus that emboldened Islamophobia has now been put in service to prosecute antisemitism.

On 9 December 2024, the Australian Federal Police established Special Operation Avalite, a squad of 21 ‘experienced counter terrorism investigators’. Avalite was followed by the National Security Investigations teams in October 2025 and then, after the Bondi Beach attack, by Operation Arques in December 2025.

In one year, the AFP stood up multiple specialised squads deploying antiterrorism operations specifically against ‘antisemitism crimes’. No criminal offence of ‘antisemitism’ exists in the Criminal Code Act 1995 or anywhere else in federal law. Yet the AFP lists ‘antisemitism’ as a distinct crime category on its website alongside ‘terrorism’ and ‘cybercrime’, and names ‘suspected terrorism-related antisemitism (Special Operation Avalite)’ among its terrorism investigations.

The AFP has operationalised antisemitism as a national security crime inside the post-9/11 apparatus that was originally developed for, and targeted at, Muslim communities.

The multicultural affairs minister, Anne Aly, is troubled by the “consistent comparison” between the government’s responses to Islamophobia and antisemitism. “Both are worthy of pursuit in their own right”’ she says, and of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism: “I just really want to focus on Islamophobia…We need to be looking at Islamophobia in its entirety and in its own right, and what we did here was the right thing.”

But Aly cannot refuse such comparison, for a simple reason: the government invited it. The moment it named these two distinct forms of racism and granted each a special envoy at a volatile time, it made its two responses comparable and the difference between them a legitimate matter of public judgement.

Nor can the minister for multiculturalism treat the comparison as a nuisance because social cohesion within multicultural societies requires that communities feel heard and feel equal. Yet, Muslims’ concerns, many supported by the evidence of hierarchical treatment, are waved away rather than answered. This invalidation of a community’s experience of an inequity is a form racial gaslighting.

The deeper issue here, though, is that the manner in which the government has responded to antisemitism is itself a manifestation of Islamophobia. It undermines the very community the minister’s portfolio exists to serve. Anti-Palestinian racism is not a separate file to be set aside in order to ‘focus on Islamophobia’; it is tightly bound to it.

A hierarchy written into law

What the squads above began in practice, parliament then sedimented in law. The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Act 2026 carried the same counter-terrorism logic into serious new offences extending across national security and migration control. One is the government’s power to brand an organisation a ‘prohibited hate group’ on ASIO’s advice, and to criminalise – with penalties of up to 15 years – directing, joining, recruiting for or funding it.

The definitions that trigger criminal liability for hate crimes, prohibited symbols and vilification are pegged to groups ‘distinguished by race or national or ethnic origin’. Religion is absent. Yet, the Act names ‘antisemitism’ explicitly, places it at the centre of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security’s review of the Act’s effectiveness and offers ‘the Nazi salute’ as its example of a hate crime.

The combined effect is to give antisemitism a distinct legislative prominence and to institutionalise a hierarchy of protection that leaves other religious groups outside it.

Jewish Australians are already protected under the category of race in federal law – the Racial Discrimination Act 1975– while Muslim Australians are protected only where a link can also be drawn to their ethnicity.

Despite decades of scholars and advocates naming the dangers of this legislative gap in section 18C of the 1975 Act, comprehensive religious discrimination protections remain deferred.

The government rejected amendments to the Combating Antisemitism Act 2026 that would have extended equivalent protection to religiously motivated hatred. Protection was gatekept at precisely the point Muslims might have accessed it. Religion appears in the Act as a source of risk. The Act aggravates penalties for urging or advocating violence, to up to ten years’ imprisonment, where the speech is delivered by a ‘religious official or spiritual leader’.

The joint submission to the inquiry on the bill by leading Muslim legal organisations put the community’s concern plainly: ‘the underlying premise of this Bill risks conflating legitimate religious, academic or political expression with hatred and extremism and disproportionately burdens religious scholars and readers’. The Bill ‘unfairly targets minorities, including Muslims, while offering inadequate protections to them and could undermine genuine dialogue and cohesion rather than strengthen it’.

Since the Act passed, the AFP has confirmed it is ‘taking an even more aggressive approach’, including a standing operation – Operation ANTROBUS – to ‘disrupt’ those it describes as ‘hate preachers’. The category is not defined. But the Commissioner has warned that ‘these malicious manipulators’ are ‘getting legal advice to push their hate and their radical recruitment drives to the edge of what is lawful’ and affirms that hate speech ‘often masquerades as a right or freedom to do or say something’. Such radicalisation is driven by ‘personalised grievance… often connected to world events…‘[one’s] own sense of injustice’.

Consider what that logic does. Rights are recast as disguises. Grievance over world events – over a genocide, for instance – is framed as a pathway to violence.

The Greens warned of the Act’s chilling effect: people may fall silent or abandon a cause, criticism of Israel, for instance, not because they have crossed a well defined line of what constitutes hate, but because the legislation is closing rings around speech in ways that can only be understood by reference to ‘new antisemitism’: the conflation of traditional antisemitism with anti-Zionism, which is being institutionalised through a second channel: the Antisemitism Envoy’s relentless push to embed the IHRA definition of antisemitism across every level of government and public institutions.

We need a clear definition of what constitutes antisemitic ‘hate preaching’ and what does not.

Without a clear definition of antisemitic ‘hate preaching’ in an increasingly hostile environment towards pro-Palestine movement and the relentless push to adopt the IHRA definition, coupled with harsher penalties for ‘religious official or spiritual leader’; Muslim communities campaigning against the genocide in Gaza risk facing prosecution.

Muslim advocacy is left under-protected and over-exposed.

Policed through the apparatus built in its name

Australian Muslims are now navigating one of the most vicious environments of structural Islamophobia in decades: grief over Israel’s unlawful aggression in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran may be labelled ‘hate’ and penalised through policy or codes of conduct. And deciding what counts as antisemitism is being left to the discretion of institutions and police, amid a public fury pressing toward the criminalisation of anti-Zionism.

In March, Queensland criminalised the phrases ‘from the river to the sea’ and ‘globalise the intifada’, with penalties of up to two years’ imprisonment; two protesters were charged within hours of the law taking effect.

That same month, police in Melbourne and Sydney conducted early-morning raids on the homes of women aged between 34 and 71 who had joined pro-Palestine demonstrations, in one case smashing open a front door and dragging a woman from her bed.

In February, protests against the Israeli president’s state visit were met with what Human Rights Watch documented as excessive force: demonstrators punched and pepper-sprayed, praying Muslim men violently dispersed.

In Victoria, expanded stop-and-search powers over ‘designated areas’ have reached a Ramadan night market in Dandenong. None of these people were charged with antisemitism. But they were policed through the apparatus built in its name.

And what fills the category of ‘antisemitism’ in police hands has already been documented, and negated. At a NSW parliamentary inquiry in October, police conceded that a ‘significant number’ of the antisemitic incidents in their official records – invoked to justify the state’s anti-protest and hate speech laws – ‘do not meet the criteria for antisemitism’. Deepcut News’ analysis of the police list found significant errors in the incidents listed.

Without a clear articulation of what is not antisemitic, Muslims, Palestinians, Lebanese and Arabs may find their opposition to Zionism policed by the same apparatus that has surveilled and governed Australian Muslims for two decades: the apparatus that the Islamophobia Envoy and an abundance of scholars have concluded causes Islamophobia.

Why the refusals fit together

Let’s return, then, to the rejected recommendations. The four rejected recommendations share a feature worth noticing: each would have required the government to inspect its own laws, its own agencies and its own conduct. An independent review of counter-terrorism laws would examine the mechanism through which the state has surveilled and governed Muslims for two decades, which it has now assigned, through Avalite, Arques and the 2026 Act, to prosecute antisemitism. And an inquiry into anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism would examine how that same mechanism, joined to a definition of antisemitism that absorbs anti-Zionism, is being used against pro-Palestinian advocacy.

The government declined both reviews because the legislative and institutional structure built to protect Australian Zionist Jews is built by, and for the purpose of, subverting Australian pro-Palestine movements. An inquiry into anti-Palestinian racism would be an inquiry into that structure itself.

Within this zero-sum architecture, the protection of Zionist feelings and wellbeing is secured by systematically undermining the voices, the grief and the political claims of Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians and their supporters.

Both communities deserve safety. What the government’s response to its Islamophobia envoy reveals is what it is prepared to offer Muslims: education about their pain, grants for their resilience, liaison officers for their reporting, and what it is not: a review of the powers that police them, protection under federal law, and an inquiry into the racism that targets them now.

Protection for some and pedagogy for others is not a settlement a fair multicultural state can defend.