Chaos as the Australian Liberal Party backflips to pass hate speech laws

The conservative opposition splinters as the populist-Right surges signalling a major political ‘vibe shift’

Last week we reported that Australia’s opposition had “scuttled” planned hate speech laws, labelling them “unsalevageable” and refusing to provide the votes to pass them in the Senate. It turns out political expediency can salvage just about anything, except your reputation. With a modest set of amendments in hand, the Liberal Party took Olympic gold for the backflip, but not before losing their junior Coalition partner the Nationals, who in a combination of integrity and political face-saving stood up for free speech and in the process crashed a multi-generational political alliance.

(It is routinely confusing for international readers that Australia’s Liberal Party is in fact a centre-Right conservative party.)

The collapse of the Coalition signals a tectonic shift in Australian politics driven by the wild growth in support for Australia’s long-time marginal right-populist One Nation party, which has pulled ahead of the Coalition in the nation’s premier poll for the first time in 40 years. In recent times, One Nation has been the most consistent party in backing free speech (despite a bid to ban flag burning). Their hardline on immigration and Islamic extremism seems to also be winning them support.

The fallout from the hate speech bill is the clearest sign that the global right-populist “vibe shift” has arrived in Australia.

Non-Australian readers might ask – why would the political machinations of such a far off land matter?

Australia is a key node in the Anglo-American alliance and thus an important player in the system of (albeit declining) global western hegemony. Australia is also critical to the Five-Eyes, the global intelligence alliance that in-part facilitates that hegemony, and is the closest Western ally to the US’s real and growing rival, China.

In the wake of Trump’s 2024 victory and the subsequent denting of the US “anti-disinformation” industry, the Censorship-Industrial Complex, has been increasingly offshored, and Australia has picked up part of the slack. Last year Australia became the first country in the world to institute a national teen social media ban that is in reality a project to de-anonymise adult users. The government is now gleefully exporting that program to the world with more than a dozen countries now considering it including the UK, Denmark, and Malaysia.

Australia is no bit actor, but a key player in the Censorship-Industrial Complex’s regrouping.

This makes the newly passed hate speech legislation all the more concerning, and for Australians it puts us firmly on the UK’s path of policing people for mean tweets, a fate we had largely avoided up til now.

The laws were brought forth in a panic to combat anti-semitism in the wake of the allegedly ISIS-inspired mass shooting at Bondi beach last month. What passed this week was a slightly less bad version of the original Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026, which was split into two so as to gain support of the Greens on gun control and the Liberals on hate speech and hate groups. The public was given just 48 hours to comment on the bills, which passed in just two days.

The news is not all bad. In a win for Australians: the hate speech offence of potentially causing intimidation or fear of harassment in a hypothetical person of a target race or ethnicity was scrapped from the final version of the hate speech bill after being slammed from all sides for being too vague and subjective. Also, the Greens did not get their wish of expanding the laws to cover myriad other minority groups.

The security state is the big winner though, with the Home Affairs Minister being afforded new powers to proscribe organisations as hate groups and a lower threshold for listing a hate group.

In the words of constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey, to be proscribed, “no crime need actually have been committed, and no one needs to have been convicted” – the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) director general need only “be satisfied the group has engaged in activities that are likely to increase the risk of politically motivated violence or communal violence, and has either itself advocated for or engaged in such violence, or there is a risk that it may do so in the future.”

In other words, pre-crime. And, in determining that an actual “hate crime” has taken place, authorities have licence to retrospectively apply today’s laws to past conduct that wasn’t a crime at the time. This can all be done without any need for a judge or a court, leaving open the door for extreme levels of abuse.

The bill also includes new offences for hate preachers and leaders, with a maximum penalty of 10 to 12 years imprisonment; up to 15 years imprisonment for associating with a listed hate group; offences for ‘grooming’ children into racial violence; broader hate symbol laws to scoop up symbols of banned hate groups and to lower the threshold to ‘recklessness’ (as opposed to intent); expansion of the term ‘public place’ to include online expression; and stronger powers to refuse or cancel visas of people who might spread hate.

There is a specific exemption for quoting from religious texts, but no exemptions for satire and political speech. The laws will be reviewed by a parliamentary committee every two years for proportionality and effectiveness.

You can read more lengthy explainers of the laws here, here, and here.

Ultimately the laws diminish the rights of citizens and further empower the security apparatus – an apparent reward for their failure to prevent the Bondi massacre. As we saw with the Australian Twitter Files, these same agencies are also in-part responsible for online censorship in Australia.

In response to concerns that the government might use these powers to outlaw its opposition (it’s been tried before), the Liberals secured a “safeguard” amendment ensuring that the leader of the Opposition must be briefed over proscribing a new hate group.

This will be cold comfort to those who see Labor and the Liberals as two sides of a piece – a uniparty staging kayfabe while working hand in glove behind the scenes to continually expand the security and surveillance state. Internet sleuths reminded us this week that it was only in 2019 while playing the role of opposition that now Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was tweeting about the importance of protecting speech and protest rights, neither of which appear to be high on his priority list since taking government.

The collusion of the major two parties in passing this hate speech bill will no doubt drive even more voters to the populist-Right (and possibly even the leftist Greens who also opposed the bill, though only in part on civil liberties concerns).

As we noted in our explainer article last week, these laws are not likely to prevent another terror attack. Bondi is widely looked upon as an intelligence, policing, leadership and cultural failure, and the Royal Commission into the incident (and antisemitism more generally) has barely begun, let alone determined what went wrong. Amorphous feelings of ‘hate’ will probably not top the list of findings, but even if it did, would these laws make any difference to someone set on mass murder?

The contradictions draw in part from a confused hypothesis – that hate speech is a gateway drug to terrorism. Stop the antisemitic speech and you stop the terrorism. If only it were that simple.

Moreover, Australia already had laws allowing organisations to be banned if they advocate or incite violence, and allowing for visas to be refused or cancelled on character or security grounds. In December 2025 (before the Bondi attack) a South African member of the National Socialist Network was deported within weeks of his participation in an anti-semitic demonstration. The problem of anti-semitism in Australia has not been an issue of law but one of will, culture, and leadership.

These new powers will do little to dissuade terrorists (who already operate outside the bounds of the law), but will primarily restrict the free speech and activities of regular Australians, who, when in doubt, will self-censor to minimise risk of prosecution.

While this new round of ‘anti-hate’ laws is not as bad as it could have been, it’s another brick in the bricolage of federal and state laws that already exist to regulate what people can say and who they can associate with.

If there is a silver lining, it will be the accelerated collapse of this uniparty and the ushering in of a much more representative multi-party configuration, ideally one with greater skepticism towards the ever expanded daddy state and a laser focus on dealing with those that actually invoke and enact violence.