This article by ECAJ Research Director Julie Nathan was originally published on  Times of Israel.

Since the Hamas-led mur­der of 1200 peo­ple and the kid­nap­ping of 251 more in Israel on 7 Octo­ber 2023, and the sub­se­quent war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, there has been a major spike in hate inci­dents in Aus­tralia. This has pri­mar­i­ly affect­ed Jew­ish and Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties. Var­i­ous oth­er com­mu­ni­ties have also suf­fered hate inci­dents, unre­lat­ed to Octo­ber 7. Recent­ly pub­lished reports from affect­ed com­mu­ni­ties have pro­vid­ed data on hate inci­dents in Aus­tralia since 2022.

Organ­i­sa­tions from four com­mu­ni­ties have pro­duced reports on hate inci­dents. The Exec­u­tive Coun­cil of Aus­tralian Jew­ry (ECAJ), the peak nation­al rep­re­sen­ta­tive organ­i­sa­tion of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Aus­tralia, has pub­lished annu­al reports on anti­semitism con­tin­u­ous­ly since 1990. The Islam­o­pho­bia Reg­is­ter Aus­tralia (IRA), which col­lects anti-Mus­lim and anti-Islam inci­dents, has pub­lished five reports cov­er­ing inci­dents since 2014. The Asian Aus­tralian Alliance (AAA) pub­lished two reports in 2020 and 2021 on anti-Asian inci­dents but has not pub­lished any fur­ther reports. Call It Out (CIO), which col­lects inci­dents against Abo­rig­i­nal and Tor­res Strait Islander peo­ples, has pub­lished two annu­al reports since 2022.

Each com­mu­ni­ty organ­i­sa­tion, in their inci­dent reports, utilis­es: dif­fer­ent time frames; dif­fer­ent cri­te­ria (for exam­ple, objec­tive v sub­jec­tive); dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories (for exam­ple, includ­ing or exclud­ing online con­tent as inci­dents); and dif­fer­ent lev­els of trans­paren­cy. Despite these dif­fer­ences, some com­par­isons between the data on inci­dents can be made.

Anti-Jewish Incidents

The ECAJ Report on Anti-Jew­ish Inci­dents in Aus­tralia 2024, which cov­ered the 12-month peri­od from 1 Octo­ber 2023 to 30 Sep­tem­ber 2024, was released in Decem­ber 2024. There were 2,062 report­ed anti-Jew­ish inci­dents logged. In the pre­vi­ous 12-month peri­od, end­ing 30 Sep­tem­ber 2023, there were 495 inci­dents logged. In the 12-month peri­od end­ing 30 Sep­tem­ber 2022, there were 478 inci­dents logged. Thus, for the 3‑year peri­od 2022–2024, there was a total of 3,035 anti-Jew­ish inci­dents logged.

The peri­od cov­ered by the lat­est ECAJ report (to 30 Sep­tem­ber 2024) pre­dates, and there­fore does not include, the spate of tar­get­ed fire­bomb­ing, arson and graf­fi­ti attacks on Jew­ish-owned busi­ness­es, syn­a­gogues and Jew­ish schools and homes and Jew­ish-owned vehi­cles in Syd­ney and Mel­bourne that occurred after 1 Octo­ber 2024.

Cat­e­gories of inci­dents include phys­i­cal assault, van­dal­ism, ver­bal abuse, mes­sages direct­ed at indi­vid­ual peo­ple or organ­i­sa­tions (emails, post­ed mate­r­i­al, tele­phone calls), graf­fi­ti, and pro­pa­gan­da mate­r­i­al (leaflets, posters, stick­ers and so on) direct­ed at Jews.

It is impor­tant to note that the ECAJ report does not include hate­ful anti-Jew­ish online con­tent as an inci­dent, unless it is a direct threat of vio­lence tar­get­ing Jews. The ECAJ report does not include anti-Israel or anti-Israeli inci­dents as anti-Jew­ish inci­dents unless Jews are tar­get­ed eg anti-Israel graf­fi­ti on a syn­a­gogue.

Anti-Muslim Incidents

The Islam­o­pho­bia Reg­is­ter Aus­tralia released its fifth report Islam­o­pho­bia in Aus­tralia Report 5 in March 2025. That report cov­ered the 23-month peri­od between 1 Jan­u­ary 2023 and 30 Novem­ber 2024 and logged 309 anti-Mus­lim inci­dents, com­posed of 124 inci­dents in 2023 and 185 inci­dents in 2024. In addi­tion, IRA not­ed 366 “online inci­dents” in that 23-month peri­od.

Cat­e­gories of inci­dents include phys­i­cal assault, prop­er­ty dam­age, dis­crim­i­na­tion, ver­bal harass­ment, non-ver­bal harass­ment, and writ­ten harass­ment.

IRA did not pub­lish a report for 2022. Its pre­vi­ous report, cov­er­ing the two years 2020 and 2021, record­ed 40 phys­i­cal inci­dents and 50 online inci­dents, con­tin­u­ing a down­ward trend in the num­ber of inci­dents since 2015. Of note, online posts/comments account­ed for between 42% and 55% of the total logged anti-Mus­lim/Is­lam inci­dents between 2014 and 2024.

IRA’s lat­est (2023–2024) report, includes not just anti-Mus­lim/Is­lam inci­dents but also anti-Pales­tin­ian and anti-Arab inci­dents, thus expand­ing the report to include more than one com­mu­ni­ty. The IRA report states: “Report­ed inci­dents at pro-Pales­tin­ian protests con­sti­tut­ed 8% of the total report­ed inci­dents in 2023 … In 2024, inci­dents at pro-Pales­tin­ian protests slight­ly exceed­ed 5% of the total …  Addi­tion­al­ly, inci­dents involv­ing vic­tims dis­play­ing pro-Pales­tin­ian sym­bols account­ed for 8% of total inci­dents in 2023 and rose to one quar­ter of all report­ed inci­dents (25%) in 2024.”

Anti-First Nations incidents

Call It Out, the First Nations Racism Reg­is­ter, was launched in 2022 to enable report­ing of racist inci­dents against Abo­rig­i­nal and Tor­res Strait Islander peo­ples, and to col­lect, doc­u­ment and report on these inci­dents. Call It Out reports are pub­lished by the Jum­bun­na Insti­tute for Indige­nous Edu­ca­tion and Research (based at UTS) and by the Nation­al Jus­tice Project.

In its annu­al report cov­er­ing the 12 months from 21 March 2022 to 20 March 2023, there were 497 reg­is­tra­tions of inci­dents. In the fol­low­ing annu­al report, released in Feb­ru­ary 2025, cov­er­ing the 12 months from 21 March 2023 to 20 March 2024, there were 453 reg­is­tra­tions. This is a total of 950 reg­is­tra­tions in the two years of 2022 and 2023.

Call It Out notes that “this is a count of reg­is­tra­tions rather than inci­dents as a sin­gle reg­is­tra­tion can cov­er ongo­ing or mul­ti­ple events, inci­dents or issues, includ­ing those that are struc­tur­al or ongo­ing rather than occur­ring at a sin­gle point in time.” In addi­tion, while the inci­dents have been report­ed with­in the spec­i­fied time frame of each report, the actu­al date of the inci­dent may have occurred a year or more before the spec­i­fied time frame (the report form, under “When did it hap­pen?” has a tick-box of “more than a year ago”) thus mak­ing it more dif­fi­cult to deter­mine how many inci­dents occurred dur­ing the spec­i­fied 12 month time frame.

Cat­e­gories of inci­dents include phys­i­cal abuse, van­dal­ism, ver­bal abuse, threats or intim­i­da­tion, bul­ly­ing, hate speech, stereo­typ­ing, graf­fi­ti, dis­crim­i­na­tion, shun­ning, “didn’t recog­nise cul­tur­al rights”, and insti­tu­tion­al racism. Online con­tent is includ­ed with­in most of these cat­e­gories.

It should be not­ed that the sys­temic and struc­tur­al racism faced by First Nations Peo­ples can take many forms of insti­tu­tion­al and organ­i­sa­tion­al dis­crim­i­na­tion and dis­ad­van­tage, with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly man­i­fest­ing as “inci­dents”. Focus­ing on inci­dents there­fore under­states the preva­lence of anti-First Nations racism.

Summary of incidents 2022–2024

Giv­en the absence of com­plete sets of data for two of the three com­mu­ni­ties for each of the three years 2022–2024 – IRA did not pub­lish a report for 2022 and CIO has not yet pro­duced a report for 2024 – there are two meth­ods of cal­cu­lat­ing the sum­ma­ry of inci­dents for 2022–2024. Both meth­ods are valid.

First­ly, the inci­dent fig­ures in all the avail­able reports cov­er­ing 2022–2024 can be used to obtain the total num­ber of inci­dents over those three years, even though not all reports cov­er all of that peri­od. This would mean hav­ing dif­fer­ent time peri­ods, with­in the three years, per com­mu­ni­ty.

Sec­ond­ly, from the inci­dent fig­ures for each com­mu­ni­ty for only two of the years over the last 3‑year peri­od, an adjust­ed count can be obtained using the lat­est avail­able reports from each com­mu­ni­ty. This method whilst remov­ing the anti-Jew­ish inci­dents in 2022 from the field pro­vides a bet­ter com­par­i­son between the com­mu­ni­ties.

Sum­ma­ry 1 (total): For the three years from 2022 to 2024, there was a total of 4,294 hate inci­dents logged – 3,035 anti-Jew­ish inci­dents (in 36 months), 309 anti-Mus­lim/Is­lam/­Pales­tini­an/Arab inci­dents (in 23 months), and 950 anti-First Nations reg­is­tra­tions (in 24 months).

Sum­ma­ry 2 (adjust­ed): For two of the three years occur­ring between 2022 and 2024, there were 3,816 hate inci­dents logged – 2,557 anti-Jew­ish inci­dents (in 24 months – 2023 and 2024), 309 anti-Mus­lim/Is­lam/­Pales­tini­an/Arab inci­dents (in 23 months – 2023 and 2024), and 950 anti-First Nations reg­is­tra­tions (in 24 months – 2022 and 2023).

Proportionality

The fre­quen­cy of hate inci­dents report­ed by each com­mu­ni­ty varies sig­nif­i­cant­ly. To pro­vide some con­text, the Aus­tralian pop­u­la­tion is com­posed of more than 25 mil­lion peo­ple. Accord­ing to the Aus­tralian Bureau of Sta­tis­tics, in 2021 in Aus­tralia there were approx­i­mate­ly: 100,000 Jews; 814,000 Mus­lims; and 813,000 peo­ple of Abo­rig­i­nal and/or Tor­res Strait Islander ori­gin.

Pro­por­tion­al­ly, using fig­ures in Sum­ma­ry 2 (adjust­ed), for every 100,000 peo­ple in each com­mu­ni­ty, on aver­age annu­al­ly dur­ing 2022 to 2024, there were 2,185 anti-Jew­ish inci­dents, 38 anti-Mus­lim inci­dents, and 117 anti-First Nations reg­is­tra­tions.

The Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion fig­ure is recog­nised as being under­stat­ed, as many Jews do not write ‘Jew­ish’ in the cen­sus due to a his­to­ry of per­se­cu­tion. The Jew­ish Com­mu­nal Appeal (JCA) in Syd­ney and Aus­tralian Cen­tre for Jew­ish Civil­i­sa­tion (ACJC) at Monash Uni­ver­si­ty in Mel­bourne, have cal­cu­lat­ed that in 2021, the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion was 117,000 – which is the pop­u­la­tion fig­ure used in the pro­por­tion­al­i­ty sta­tis­tic above.

Previous study of hate incidents 2014–2021

A pre­vi­ous study of hate inci­dents in Aus­tralia pub­lished in June 2023, pro­vid­ed a sum­ma­ry of the inci­dent data per­tain­ing to three com­mu­ni­ties: Jew­ish, Mus­lim and Asian, between 2014 and 2021.

The three sets of pub­li­ca­tions used in the study were: the Exec­u­tive Coun­cil of Aus­tralian Jew­ry’s (ECAJ) ‘Report on Anti­semitism in Aus­tralia’ (pub­lished annu­al­ly since 1990); the Islam­o­pho­bia Reg­is­ter Aus­tralia’s (IRA) ‘Islam­o­pho­bia in Aus­tralia’ (four reports pub­lished, in 2017, 2019, 2022, and 2023); and the Asian Aus­tralian Alliance’s (AAA) ‘COVID-19 Coro­n­avirus Racism Inci­dent Report’ (one report pub­lished in 2020 and anoth­er in 2021).

The analy­sis in this study showed that in Aus­tralia there were 3,612 logged hate inci­dents in the sev­en-year four-month (88 month) peri­od between 17 Sep­tem­ber 2014 and 31 Decem­ber 2021. That amounts to an aver­age of 492 inci­dents per year, and over nine inci­dents per week.

These inci­dents were com­posed of 2,142 anti-Jew­ish inci­dents (in the 84 months from 1 Octo­ber 2014 to 30 Sep­tem­ber 2021); 929 anti-Mus­lim inci­dents (in the 88 months from 17 Sep­tem­ber 2014 to 31 Decem­ber 2021); and 541 anti-Asian inci­dents (in the 15 months from 2 April 2020 to 28 June 2021). As pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed, anti-Asian and anti-Mus­lim sta­tis­tics include online inci­dents, where­as the anti-Jew­ish sta­tis­tics exclude online inci­dents.

Under-reporting of Incidents

This study only cov­ers hate inci­dents that have been report­ed to and logged by the three com­mu­ni­ty report­ing organ­i­sa­tions. All com­mu­ni­ties, in Aus­tralia and over­seas, have the prob­lem of under-report­ing of hate inci­dents for var­i­ous rea­sons. There­fore, the num­ber of hate inci­dents logged by any of the com­mu­ni­ty organ­i­sa­tions is only a pro­por­tion of hate inci­dents occur­ring. In addi­tion, inci­dents against oth­er tar­get­ed com­mu­ni­ties go unre­port­ed due to the lack of an organ­i­sa­tion which logs reports for these com­mu­ni­ties.

Conclusion

In Aus­tralia, dur­ing the sev­en years from 2014 to 2021, there was a total of 3,612 report­ed hate inci­dents. Dur­ing the three years from 2022 to 2024, there were 4,294 report­ed hate inci­dents. In total, there were more hate inci­dents report­ed in Aus­tralia in the last three years than dur­ing the pre­vi­ous sev­en years.

The sta­tis­tics show that 59% of the total hate inci­dents report­ed between 2014 and 2021, were against Jews. This fig­ure jumped to 70% of total hate inci­dents between 2022 and 2024 (which excludes the inci­dents occur­ring after Sep­tem­ber 2024 as pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed). The Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty is one of the small­est eth­nic com­mu­ni­ties in Aus­tralia, being only 0.4% of the total pop­u­la­tion, yet it accounts for 59–70% of all report­ed hate inci­dents.

This is not to under-state the preva­lence of hate inci­dents against oth­er com­mu­ni­ties. Dur­ing dif­fer­ent peri­ods of Aus­tralian his­to­ry, racist atti­tudes and inci­dents have waxed and waned against par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ties. In recent times, it is the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty that has been dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly affect­ed.

It is incum­bent upon gov­ern­ments, police, civ­il soci­ety lead­ers and oth­ers to take effec­tive action against hate inci­dents tar­get­ing any and all com­mu­ni­ties. Fail­ure to counter the hate and reverse the trend demon­strat­ed in the sta­tis­tics has already had, and will ulti­mate­ly have, enor­mous social and eco­nom­ic costs that will be to the detri­ment of all Aus­tralians, and of our mul­ti­cul­tur­al nation.