Parliament returns next week, with Labor trying to pull together enough numbers to push through new hate-speech and antisemitism legislation. On paper it’s simple: punish threats, stop intimidation, protect people from abuse. Stop the bad guys. 

The problem is the bill isn’t simple. The boundaries aren’t specific. 

Right now, the criticism isn’t that hate should be tolerated — it shouldn’t. The criticism is that the bill doesn’t clearly define where lawful speech ends and unlawful conduct begins. And once your legal lines get fuzzy, enforcement doesn’t just target extremists. It starts clipping ordinary people who didn’t even know they were standing near the boundary. 

One key point of this legislation is the perception that some religious groups — including Christians and Catholics — aren’t being treated equally. Another is the bill’s failure to cleanly separate Jewish hatred (which should be confronted) from political criticism of Israel (which will always exist in a democracy). Those are not the same thing. 

Then there’s the religious text exemption. Supporters say it protects religious teaching. Critics and opposition say it hands extremists a ready-made loophole: “Relax officer, it’s not hate — it’s just verse 12.” 

But the bigger issue isn’t the exemption. It’s the direction. 

This bill shifts the legal focus away from clear offences — threats, harassment, inciting violence — and instead heads toward a broad, subjective concept: “to publicly promote or incite hatred.” And “hatred” isn’t something you can reliably measure like intent to harm, a threat, or a call to violence. It’s an emotional outcome. 

That’s a problem for anyone speaking publicly, because you can’t predict what “hatred” will be ruled to mean until cases start getting tested. And the first people to test it won’t be politicians. It’ll be everyday Australians, comedians, business owners — especially the politically disengaged voters who have spent the last five years in quality-of-life decline. 

We’re already seeing why this matters in the UK. UK law isn’t identical to what Australia is proposing — but it shows what happens when speech law leans on broad standards like “grossly offensive.” A YouTuber was prosecuted and convicted after teaching his pug to do a Nazi salute. Whether you think the joke is childish, vile, or simply unfunny, the point is the same: when the test becomes subjective, the net gets wider than the public expects. (cite: count dunkula) 

And it’s not just convictions. The bigger issue is the grey zone: complaints trigger police involvement, often lead to no further action — and yet the process itself becomes the punishment. Most of us have seen the videos: UK police showing up at people’s homes over a “bad tweet” or a social media post. It intimidates citizens, it goes viral, it drains national morale — and it doesn’t exactly help the Starmer government with record-low polling. 

Worse, it creates a system that can be weaponised: jury-by-intimidation, political provocation, “I’ll report you and let the process grind you down.” You don’t need to win in court. You just need to make the other side shut up. 

That’s the point Australians should take seriously: systems like this don’t always get used by “good people” with “good intentions.” They get used by whoever is organised. 

If your enforcement model is complaints-driven — especially online — it becomes a magnet for bad-faith campaigns: coordinated reporting, narrative flooding, intimidation-by-process. Minority activists can do it. Ideological groups can do it. And yes, foreign influence networks can do it too, because it’s cheap, deniable, and it works best in low-trust countries. You don’t have to prove anything — you just have to generate enough friction that speaking becomes not worth the hassle. 

Australia also isn’t walking into this debate with a clean trust record. Since COVID, we’ve watched rights-restricting measures expand, oversight bodies raise concerns, and public confidence in institutions slide. Roy Morgan’s trust data makes the direction of travel pretty clear. (Cite: Roy Morgan) 

And we’ve already seen this kind of controversy before. In 2024, the government tried to introduce the failed misinformation/disinformation bill. 

The 2024 legislation explicitly framed misinformation affecting confidence in a financial institution as a threat to system stability. It leaned on terms like “imminent harm to the Australian economy” — language that sounds sensible until you realise it’s broad enough to be stretched, contested, and ultimately decided case-by-case. And case-by-case judgement is exactly where bad-faith actors thrive: the uncertainty itself becomes the lever. (cite: misinformation Bill 2024) 

My concern with the new hate-speech package is the same concern I had in 2024: broad laws don’t just catch bad behaviour — they create new incentives. And once you build a system that can be exploited, it will be exploited. 

If the government wants to protect Australians from genuine extremism and intimidation, the law needs to be specific — not adjective-driven. Define conduct. Define thresholds. Anchor enforcement to objective tests: threats, harassment, incitement to violence. Not vibes. 

Short-term governments shouldn’t be careless with long-term legal infrastructure. If we get this wrong, we won’t just inhibit freedom of speech — we’ll build a new vulnerability where Australians can be silenced using their own taxpayer-funded institutions.