I’ve just written for UnHerd about the wild rise of Australia’s Right-populist One Nation party. Largely a backlash against mass-migration, their support has gone into overdrive since the Bondi terrorist attack and grown still further in the wake of new hate speech laws passed in parliament last week.

I write:

If Australia found itself in a job interview, it might describe its cultural and political latency as both a strength and a weakness. The latest trends and ideas still seemingly come by tall ship, our distance serving as a kind of ballast that limits the wild political swings and upheavals felt elsewhere in the world. It’s the beach for us — until people start shooting us on it.

December’s Isis-inspired Bondi Beach terrorist attack has rapidly turned Australia into the global populist vibe shift. Until then, the country had been in a slow-motion version of the Western political realignment, its political duopoly bleeding support from a few scratches rather than an open vein. Now, however, the Right-populist One Nation party has climbed to 26% in some polls, up from just 6% support at last May’s election. The centre-right Liberal Party, which was last part of a government in 2022, has a vote share as low as 14% in some polls. In decades of polling, never has a member of the two-party duopoly polled third. What, then, is behind this realignment on the Australian Right?

If the country’s populist shift had previously been concealed, it was in part because of high living standards and a conservative coalition that took a robust approach to illegal immigration in the early 2000s. But the conservatives also catalysed mass legal immigration, a policy later enthusiastically embraced by their Labor counterparts. This reached a record high in the year ending September 2023, with more than 500,000 arrivals, in a country whose total population was around 26 million at the time.

In poll after poll, a strong majority of Australian voters express a desire for far less immigration. And despite the luxury of being able to observe the predictable impacts of mass migration in other Western countries, the Australian political class has dialled down the programme only slightly. Now, One Nation is reaping the benefits from this development, its rise turbocharged by the Bondi attack and then the Liberal Party’s backflip last week from opposing to supporting radical new hate speech laws.

You can read the full article here.

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.

Free speech is not dead yet in Australia if the backlash to proposed hate speech laws stays the course, with condemnation coming from both the Left and the Right.

Following the mass shooting of 15 mostly Jewish civilians at Bondi Beach in December, the Labor government recalled parliament two weeks early in an attempt to ram through a massive omnibus bill to crack down on alleged hate speech and tighten gun controls and migration law.

The Royal Commission into the incident to find out how the worst terror attack in Australia’s history was allowed to happen hasn’t even begun yet, but the government has already decided that hate speech was a key cause that must be immediately dealt with.

The sprawling Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 advances what Attorney General Michelle Rowland called “the toughest hate laws Australia has ever seen,” with new offences for hate preachers (except when quoting directly from religious texts) and people publicly promoting hatred or ideas of racial superiority, and tougher penalties for hate crimes.

Controversially, the new laws would criminalise speech absent demonstrable harm if a “reasonable person” of the target race or ethnicity would be “intimidated” or “fear harassment” – a subjective test based on a hypothetical situation.

In a submission to the government’s review process, human rights lawyer Peter Fam of Sydney firm Maat’s Method lists some potential scenarios:

An academic writing about the Israel/Gaza conflict; a playwright depicting a religious extremist; or a whistleblower sharing information about the influence of ethnic-based lobby groups over Australian foreign policy.

All would need to think twice lest they risk a five-year jail term. “It does not regulate harm,” said Fam of this part of the bill. “Rather, it seeks to regulate discomfort.”

There are plenty more contentious elements. The expansion of the term “public place” to include online expression would expand the government’s online powers, chilling online discourse.

The Minister in charge of the federal police will have the power to designate “prohibited hate groups” without mandatory judicial oversight nor any direct appeal mechanism for the group itself, denying procedural fairness. Given past politicisation of enforcement of speech laws by government — be it Home Affairs co-ordinating the takedown of memes during the pandemic, or eSafety going after ‘misgendering’ online — it is not only plausible but likely that this will lead to overreach where political or activist groups are unfairly swept up or even targeted.

And, the burden of proof for symbol-related offences has been reversed, meaning that people charged with displaying a prohibited symbol must prove their innocence, rather than prosecutors being required to prove criminal intent or harm. This may seem tangential, but the case of playwright and author CJ Hopkins, who has been dragged through German courts for years over the satirical use of a swastika on a book cover, is illustrative.

Compounding all this awfulness is the fact that some sections of the bill, if passed per their current form, will be retrospective, meaning people can be arrested for things they said (or tweeted) in the past.

What the bill doesn’t do is address the government’s own failings which allowed alleged killers Sajid Akram and his son Naveed Akram to travel to an extremist hotspot in the southern Philippines just weeks before the Bondi shooting, and for Said to purchase multiple firearms despite Naveed having previously been on a security service watch list due to his associations with a Sydney-based IS cell.

Yet, like other liberal democracies, Australia has consistently responded to social division and isolated acts of violence not by dealing with the root of the problem, but by attempting to dictate the bounds of the Overton window.

But, as noted in a submission by digital rights group liber-net (of which Andrew is CEO), treating complex social and political problems as technical compliance issues to be micromanaged through regulation is a technocratic reflex that, while creating the appearance of decisive action, often serves to suppress underlying core issues and dissent rather than resolving them.

Listen to Andrew on Josh Szeps’ podcast Uncomfortable Conversations discussing the hate speech bill and other recent free speech controversies in Australia.

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

PREMIUM: “Should We Ban Hate Speech After Bondi?” with Andrew Lowenthal

There’s a lot of big events happening in the world at the start of the year, but between bushfires and flash flooding, Australia is grappling with the aftermath of the Bondi terror attack…

Listen now

2 months ago · 12 likes · 2 comments · Josh Szeps and Andrew Lowenthal

We need only look to the UK, to see that when the government convicts or harasses people for tweets rather than dealing with serious social issues such as discontent over migration and failed assimilation, the temperature does not subside, but rises to boiling, with aggressive policing of speech failing to tamp down protests.

As flagged by Dr Reuben Kirkham, director of the Free Speech Union of Australia, this bill “is an expanded copycat of provisions in the UK that are being used basically to arrest 30 people a day (for social media posts).” While some of these arrests have covered actual incitement to violence, police have shown up at people’s houses for complaining about a school on private messaging channel WhatsApp or sharing an anti-Hamas meme on social media.

With both the leftist Greens and the conservative Coalition coming out against the bill, it is certain that the current iteration will not pass given that Labor needs one or the other to have it passed in the Senate next Tuesday.

The Coalition is currently calling the bill “unsalvageable,” but it’s possible that the Greens will work with the government to craft a revamped version that’s even more restrictive. While the Greens have concerns over the bill’s impact on protest rights, they want hate speech protections extended to other identities including gender, sexuality, disability and religion.

However, no one in government seems to be much interested in whether the hate speech laws will actually do anything, or whether they are even justified, and political discussion of the bill has largely skirted the fact that the Bondi massacre appears to have been the result of intelligence and policing failures, not a lack of speech regulation.

We requested comment from authorities on whether the new laws would have prevented the Bondi terrorist attack had they been in place as far back as 2019, when ASIO first investigated alleged shooter Naveed Akram, but they refused to say. ASIO referred our enquiries to the Department of Home Affairs, and the Department deflected, stating, “the circumstances of this incident are part of an ongoing investigation.”

The impetus as far as the hate speech controls are concerned appears to be forcing a sense of cohesion on the community – but serious questions remain about whether this is possible in a multicultural society where people hold clashing values and beliefs.

New South Wales Premier Chris Minns said the quiet part out loud last year when justifying his state’s new hate speech laws on the basis that free speech is incompatible with multiculturalism:

“We don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States. And the reason for that is that we want to hold together our multicultural community and have people live in peace free from the kind of vilification and hatred that we do see around the world,” Minns told the press.

This apparent trade off was not something Australians were consulted over as the government has increasingly opened our borders.

When challenged to repeal the new hate speech laws after the justifying incident – a bomb scare targeted at the Jewish community – was revealed to have been a hoax, Minns argued that scrapping them would “be a toxic message to our community that this kind of hate speech is acceptable when it’s not.”

It’s the same rhetoric from the federal Labor government this time, per Attorney General Rowland:

“[The new hate speech laws] will specifically target those who seek to spread hatred and disrupt social cohesion in our community. And it will send a clear message that this conduct will not be tolerated.”

In other words, legislation as a social engineering and public messaging tool. But at what cost?

What should be resisted now is: the transformation of lawful expression into a criminal act where no tangible injury, threat, or victim can be established; the removal of due process from policing procedures; and the reversal of the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ standard. This bill advances exactly these developments.

Thankfully, it looks set to be roundly rejected, although a later agreement between Labor and the Greens could well produce something even worse. For now, free speech has a stay of execution.

I’ve written for UnHerd about the implosion of this key elite sense-making event in the wake of the Bondi terrorist attacks. It comes as the Australian government is pushing radical new hate speech laws. These will be presented to parliament on Monday, with the public given just a handful of days to comment. More on that coming soon. I’ll be on Josh Szeps tomorrow at 8am Sydney time to talk about it.

Adelaide Writers’ Week has been cancelled following the withdrawal of more than 180 authors, with the director and almost the entire board resigning. The move came after the festival disinvited Palestinian-Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, stating that it would not be “culturally sensitive” to keep her on the programme in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre last month, where Islamic State-affiliated terrorists killed 15 people during the Jewish holiday of Chanukah.

High-profile withdrawals ensued, including authors Zadie Smith and Percival Everett, and UnHerd writer Yanis Varoufakis. Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, hardly known for her free speech advocacy, also cancelled her appearance.

But as progressives rediscover free speech, it should be noted that Abdel-Fattah is herself no free speech warrior, and has been active in trying to get other writers removed from multiple festivals. In 2024, she and nine others signed a letter advocating for the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman to be removed from the line-up of the very same Adelaide Writers’ Week. Friedman did not appear, but reportedly withdrew for other reasons. Additionally, Abdel-Fattah was among 500 progressives who backed a campaign to have pro-Israel singer Deborah Conway removed from the Perth Festival’s 2024 Literature and Ideas programme.

Having been invited, Abdel-Fattah should not have been disinvited; instead, she should have been asked to explain her views. Yet cancellation has made her a martyr, one now likely to help her sell many more books and be invited to many more events. In that sense, it is hopefully a great victory against cancel culture and a mirror to hold up to progressives next time they target others. Panicked board members, politicians and lobby groups, desperate to be seen to be doing something about antisemitism, have taken action which has backfired.

Read the full article here.