On 9 Decem­ber 2020 the Min­is­ter for Home Affairs, Peter Dut­ton, and Sen­a­tor Kristi­na Keneal­ly agreed upon Terms of Ref­er­ence for an Inquiry by the Par­lia­men­tary Joint Com­mit­tee on Intel­li­gence and Secu­ri­ty (PJCIS) into extrem­ist move­ments in Aus­tralia “includ­ing, but not lim­it­ed to, Islamist and far right-wing extrem­ist groups”.  On 10 Decem­ber 2020, the ECAJ received an Invi­ta­tion to make a sub­mis­sion from the PJCIS.

The Terms of Ref­er­ence are wide-rang­ing and cov­er many issues that have been of long-stand­ing con­cern to the Aus­tralian Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty and have been the sub­ject of advo­ca­cy by the ECAJ.  These include:

• mea­sures to be tak­en against extrem­ist groups such as Nation­al Social­ist Net­work (and its pre­de­ces­sor Antipodean Resis­tance) and Hizb ut-Tahrir, which advo­cate vio­lence, but are thus far not known to have engaged in vio­lence.
• the effi­ca­cy or oth­er­wise of cur­rent hate crime laws ie laws against crimes which include, among their defined ele­ments, hos­til­i­ty or prej­u­dice against the vic­tim on the basis of a pro­tect­ed attribute such as race or reli­gion.
• the need to list the entire Hezbol­lah organ­i­sa­tion (not mere­ly its so-called “Exter­nal Secu­ri­ty Organ­i­sa­tion”) under Australia’s ter­ror­ist organ­i­sa­tion list­ing laws.
• ban­ning the pub­lic dis­play of hate sym­bols.
• the need for a much more sys­tem­at­ic, whole-of-gov­ern­ment approach to address the prob­lem of extrem­ism, both through leg­is­la­tion and, most espe­cial­ly, through edu­ca­tion.
• the need for a uni­form nation­al sys­tem for clas­si­fy­ing and record­ing hate crime and hate-moti­vat­ed crime.

The ECAJ sought and obtained input from each of the State and ACT roof bod­ies, and oth­ers they wished to con­sult, includ­ing the CSG.  The ECAJ sub­mis­sion cov­ers each of the above mat­ters and is nec­es­sar­i­ly a longer sub­mis­sion than usu­al.

The full sub­mis­sion can be accessed here.

The PJCIS is due to bring down its report to the Min­is­ter in April.