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.