What does hate speech do — and why is it so hard to legislate against?

The massacre at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025 — during which two gunmen targeted a group of Jewish Australians who had gathered to mark the first day of Hanukkah, killing 15 people — violently punctuated two years of escalating antisemitic incidents.

Bondi was an act of terror that realised the worst fears of many Australian Jews, who had seen their synagogues and restaurants torched, their houses, schools and electorate offices vandalised, and members of their community ostracised, harassed and abused on city streets, in cultural institutions, on university campuses.

Adding insult to grievous injury was the fact that so many Australian Jews had expressed their feeling of being estranged and afraid within their own country, only to have their fears routinely minimised or dismissed.

Horrific events of this kind invariably elicit a collective reckoning. What are the contributing factors that created the conditions in which something like this could occur, and what can be done to ensure nothing like it happens again? For many Australians, the act of discriminatory violence at Bondi represented a four-fold failure:

• the inability of police and intelligence services to prevent the attack;
• the laxness of existing gun control laws;
• the inadequacy of laws involving hate speech, hate crimes and hate groups;
• the unwillingness to take the fears and experiences of members of the Jewish community seriously in the face of rising antisemitism.

The first and last of these failures will be the particular focus of the recently announced royal commission. But the Albanese government was intent on moving quickly to address the second and third by recalling parliament to pass new legislation. In so doing, the federal government confronted some of the dangers involved in legislating in the aftermath of a national tragedy.

Not only are there the general risks of overreach, of scapegoating, or of unintended consequences due to laws that are written either too specifically or too vaguely. There is also the role that the emotion can play in attempting to craft a legislative response to the loss of these particular lives — which included someone who survived the Holocaust, some who died protecting others, rabbis, parents, grandparents and siblings, a 10-years-old girl.

But then there is also the fact that this mass shooting took place in the context of a period of heightened social conflict and emotion over the war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attacks. There can be little doubt that the large public displays of anger at the State of Israel and grief over the killing of tens of thousands of men, women and children in Gaza contributed to the climate of hostility experienced by many Jewish Australians — whether they supported the actions of the Netanyahu government or not.

So it seemed inevitable that the tidal wave of sorrow and remorse over the victims of Bondi would slam into the wall of anger and grief over the devastation of Gaza — to say nothing of concerns, on the left and the right, that new hate speech laws would supress or criminalise forms of robust political expression that should otherwise be protected. For the new laws to pass, something would have to give.

In the end, on Tuesday, the federal government was able to pass two significantly amended bills — one involving gun control, the other addressing hate speech, hate crimes and hate groups; the first with support from the Greens, the second with members of the Coalition. The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 focusses now on the grounds on which an organisation could be specified as a “prohibited hate group”, an expanded definition of “hate crimes”, new visa refusal powers and the creation of an “aggravated grooming offence” aimed at “religious official[s] or other spiritual leader[s]” who advocate violence or teach hate to those under the age of 18.

What the public and political debate over these laws has exposed, in the process, is a fundamental lack of agreement over the nature and harms of “hate speech”, or understanding of its effect on groups and individuals in a democratic and diverse society. We have also seen how risky it is to address hate speech simply by criminalising it.

You can read Kath Gelber’s reflections on the first and final versions of the federal government’s hate speech laws on ABC Religion and Ethics (here and here).