ECAJ statement on the Report of Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian universities.

Quotes to be attrib­uted to ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim:

We now have a sec­ond par­lia­men­tary report which con­firms what the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, stu­dents and aca­d­e­m­ic staff have been say­ing for more than a year, name­ly that there has been an enor­mous increase in anti­se­mit­ic behav­iour at many Aus­tralian uni­ver­si­ties and that the response of most uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tions has been hope­less­ly inad­e­quate.

Many of the rec­om­men­da­tions about the need to stream­line com­plaints process­es, report­ing of com­plaints and train­ing of staff to iden­ti­fy and deal with anti­semitism are wel­come, as is the rec­om­men­da­tion about expand­ing the pow­ers of TEQSA to enforce com­pli­ance with high­er edu­ca­tion and stu­dent safe­ty and well-being stan­dards. We called for these mea­sures in our sub­mis­sion to the par­lia­men­tary inquiry.

We would also like to have seen a rec­om­men­da­tion about the need for a prop­er inves­ti­ga­tion into per­sis­tent reports about for­eign gov­ern­ment fund­ing and inter­fer­ence in Aus­tralian uni­ver­si­ties, as the ECAJ also called for.

While the report iden­ti­fies the cor­rect issues, some of the rec­om­men­da­tions are expressed in less forth­right lan­guage than we think the sit­u­a­tion calls for.

The report is cor­rect in rec­om­mend­ing that uni­ver­si­ties need to adopt a clear def­i­n­i­tion of anti­semitism, which “aligns close­ly” with the Inter­na­tion­al Holo­caust Work­ing Alliance (IHRA) work­ing def­i­n­i­tion. Whilst we would have pre­ferred a straight­for­ward rec­om­men­da­tion that the IHRA def­i­n­i­tion be adopt­ed, the com­mit­tee has implied­ly repu­di­at­ed the def­i­n­i­tion of anti­semitism recent­ly adopt­ed by the Group of 8 uni­ver­si­ties, which sharply diverges from the IHRA def­i­n­i­tion, and has been debunked and reject­ed by the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty.

Anoth­er impor­tant rec­om­men­da­tion points to the need to amend the Fair Work Act so as to over-ride enter­prise bar­gain­ing agree­ments to the extent that they cur­rent­ly pro­hib­it uni­ver­si­ties from sack­ing or dis­ci­plin­ing aca­d­e­mics or research grant recip­i­ents who engage in egre­gious pub­lic acts of racial vil­i­fi­ca­tion and oth­er forms of vil­i­fi­ca­tion, includ­ing through pub­li­ca­tion of anti­se­mit­ic con­tent. How­ev­er, the report rec­om­mends only that the gov­ern­ment “con­sid­er” doing this, rather than actu­al­ly doing it, which seems weak in the cir­cum­stances.

We wel­come the rec­om­men­da­tion that a judi­cial inquiry be kept on the table as a pos­si­ble future mea­sure if uni­ver­si­ties do not clean up their act in the next 12 months.

Read report

• Report of Par­lia­men­tary Joint Com­mit­tee on Human Rights Inquiry into Anti­semitism at Aus­tralian uni­ver­si­ties