The government’s push for universities to adopt racism definitions risks turning anti-racism into compliance policy while leaving structural racism untouched and constraining speech on Palestine.
Against the backdrop of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, on 13 July the Albanese government announced that “universities will be required to develop their own definitions of racism towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples under new national standards aimed at strengthening responses to racism on campus”. The government’s declaration of what it calls ‘a new anti-racism standard’ ties this mandated definition of anti-Indigenous racism to the adoption of “definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia”. While, to date, universities have been allowed the choice to adopt antisemitism definitions or not, the packaging together of anti-Indigenous racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism under a new mandate to devise definitions of all three removes the autonomy universities have enjoyed until now.
As a settler colony, Australia is founded on the material and cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples which underpins the treatment that continues to make them “vulnerable to premature death”, as the radical geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism.
The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Respect at Uni: Study into antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and the experience of First Nations people report (Respect @Uni), published in February 2026, found that “81 per cent of First Nations respondents had experienced direct or indirect racism at university”. However, it was antisemitism that was prioritised in the announcement of the new definitions; Education Minister Jason Clare saying that “there is no place for antisemitism or any type of hate in our universities or anywhere else”.
In Australia racism predominantly affects Indigenous people, Muslims, Black people, Pasifika people, and migrants from Global South countries and is enacted through law, policy and the practice of public institutions such as the criminal justice system, healthcare, housing and education.
The outsized emphasis on racist attitudes and on self-reporting as a way of assessing racism – as can presently be witnessed at the Royal Commission – allows for the impression to be created that antisemitism in Australia is rife.
Although I face antisemitism from right-wing extremists, white Jews like me do not experience structural discrimination or exploitation across these domains today. What Zionist Jews experience and often conflate with antisemitism is the public’s anger about the fact that most Jewish people in Australia continue to identify with and support Israel.
The Respect @Uni report did not conclude that the adoption of racism definitions was a necessary or adequate response to the gravity of its findings. Rather, it noted First Nations participants “expressed concerns about prescribing definitions without broader structural change” and recommended that, instead of adopting racism definitions, universities should “prioritise building racial and religious literacy and intercultural capability, ensure procedural fairness and address racism holistically”.
Despite commissioning the study, it is important to ask why the government has avoided acknowledging its ambivalence regarding definitions, choosing to mandate them instead. To understand this, it is vital to examine the politics of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism (IHRA-WDA). Despite its author Kenneth Stern saying as far back as 2019 that he is concerned about the definition being “weaponised… to suppress – rather than answer – political speech”, it has been adopted by states and public institutions worldwide, often integrated within diversity, equity and inclusion policy or, in the United States, the Civil Rights Act.
The IHRA-WDA is widely recognised as an inadequate definition of actually existing antisemitism targeting Jews as Jews. Seven out of the 11 examples of antisemitism it provides link antisemitism to criticism of Israel and Zionism. Therefore, the IHRA-WDA is primarily a tool for repressing speech and action in favour of Palestine and Palestinians. As a punitive tool, the IHRA-WDA’s role is to define Zionism as a protected identity category and to criminalise anti-Zionism. With the global outpouring of protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza since October 2023 being met with growing state and institutional repression, the IHRA-WDA has been described by University of California Riverside Professor Dylan Rodríguez as an arm of counterinsurgent “asymmetric warfare”.
As a university worker and a scholar of race and racism, I am concerned that the mandating of racism definitions will make it harder to have important conversations about the depth of racism in Australian society with our students. Defining racism can have pedagogical benefits, but the leading scholarship demonstrates that it constantly shifts and adapts across time and place. Mandating fixed definitions as a response to racism, which is systemic and derives from Australia’s constitution as a white settler colony and a subimperial power, will have little beneficial impact for Indigenous people and other negatively racialised people in their everyday interactions with institutions such as universities.
In my book, The New Racial Regime, I argued against mandated racism definitions as they are ineffective for dismantling the systems that keep racism in place. Rather, explaining the complexity of racism must be grounded in evidence and continually honed through study, not mandated in a top-down fashion with individual compliance governed by university policy.
As the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine showed, university staff and students have experienced the use of ostensibly anti-racist measures to discipline their demonstration of solidarity with a people facing genocide.
We should recognise that the government’s mandate on racism definitions does not exist in a separate realm to the more openly repressive tools in its arsenal such as laws against protest and the banning of pro-Palestinian phrases. While apparently grounded in concern, these definitions turn the attention away from the state as the primary agent of racism, a state founded on the genocide of Indigenous people here and complicit in that of another people in Palestine today. Pointing this out will become harder as defining racism is taken out of the hands of those who experience and study it and into those of the same university managers who have acted to repress their staff and students standing up against a live-streamed genocide.
