Joint statement on Victorian hate speech laws from ECAJ, JCCV, Zionism Victoria, and Zionist Federation of Australia.

The Vic­to­ri­an Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty unites to sup­port the hate laws that are being pro­posed by the Vic­to­ri­an Gov­ern­ment.

The Gov­ern­ment has today lis­tened to Victoria’s faith com­mu­ni­ties, and calls by the Oppo­si­tion, in amend­ing the bill to remove the “polit­i­cal pur­pose” defence.

We have observed reports that notwith­stand­ing these amend­ments by the Gov­ern­ment, the Vic­to­ri­an Oppo­si­tion is propos­ing to vote against the bill.

We recog­nise that the Oppo­si­tion has over a long time tak­en con­sis­tent­ly strong posi­tions against anti­semitism and hatred in Vic­to­ria.

How­ev­er, we are deeply dis­ap­point­ed by these reports.

We intend to work with the Oppo­si­tion to con­vey our views that it should sup­port the bill in its cur­rent form on a bipar­ti­san basis.

That is because we are fac­ing a cri­sis of hate speech. There has been an explo­sion of hatred in our com­mu­ni­ties in recent years. Hatred is fuelled by hate speech – that is why the most extreme forms of incite­ment must be out­lawed.

But our hate speech laws are bro­ken – there has been only one suc­cess­ful pros­e­cu­tion for seri­ous vil­i­fi­ca­tion in 25 years.

Now, with this amend­ed bill, Vic­to­ri­ans will have a once-in-a-gen­er­a­tion oppor­tu­ni­ty to fix our hate speech laws.

The bill will make the evi­den­tiary thresh­olds for hate speech fair­ly and rea­son­ably attain­able, and it will pro­tect free speech. It fol­lows the rec­om­men­da­tions of a bipar­ti­san report issued by the Legal and Social Issues Com­mit­tee.

And it will send an impor­tant mes­sage – that incit­ing hatred or revul­sion of anoth­er per­son on the basis of who they are has no place in Vic­to­ria.

There is no time to waste.

Elyse Schachna
Pres­i­dent, Zion­ism Vic­to­ria

Philip Zajac
Pres­i­dent, Jew­ish Com­mu­ni­ty Coun­cil of Vic­to­ria

Jere­my Leibler
Pres­i­dent, Zion­ist Fed­er­a­tion of Aus­tralia

Daniel Aghion
Pres­i­dent, Exec­u­tive Coun­cil of Aus­tralian Jew­ry

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• Joint state­ment – Vic­to­ri­an Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty lead­er­ship backs new hate speech laws (PDF: 147KB)