Minns says antisemitism doesn’t start with a firebombing. Will his new laws find where it does?

Whether it’s a childcare centre set alight in Maroubra, a house firebombed in Dover Heights, or the steady stream of hateful graffiti, Sydney’s Jewish population is being targeted by a string of hateful, intimidating attacks.

The violence is becoming more frequent, more brazen. For Sydneysiders, there is a sense of disbelief. Is this really happening? In Woollahra?

NSW Premier Chris Minns visits Maroubra’s Only About Children childcare centre, which was the target of an antisemitic attack.Credit: Kate Geraghty

It is understandable then, that the premier, Chris Minns, is reaching for solutions. Minns has been a consistent supporter of the city’s Jewish community, praised for his vocal condemnation of the spate of antisemitic attacks – which he has described as “monstrous” and “appalling” – across the eastern suburbs and inner west.

But as the violence continues to escalate, it is clear condemnation isn’t enough. Neither, apparently, is the deployment of significant policing resources to combat the violence. So now Minns is reaching for the law.

Over the past week, Minns has flagged potential changes to existing hate speech laws and tougher sentencing for hate-based offences. It follows his promise to ban protests outside places of worship.

The government has not yet spelt out its specific intentions, but from Minns’ public comments, it seems he is considering creating a specific criminal offence for vilification.

In NSW, section 93z of the Crimes Act makes it a criminal offence to incite violence based on someone’s race, religion or sexuality. However, inciting hatred or serious contempt is dealt with under the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act, and while it is unlawful, it is not a criminal offence.

Speaking this week, Minns said he increasingly believed the initial “spark” of violence against the Jewish community was “someone going to a synagogue or a house and lighting a match”.

“The initial spark is hate speech in our community,” he said.

Section 93z has long been a source of contention, and many religious and legal groups are divided on what to do with it.

Last year the Minns government asked the NSW Law Reform Commission to review it after reports of antisemitic sermons in some Sydney mosques. The Australian National Imams Council President Imam Shadi Alsuleiman at the time accused Minns of “specifically targeting” the Muslim community with the review.

In the end, though, the Law Reform Commission recommended against any changes to the law.

While the Jewish Board of Deputies argued in favour of the changes Minns seems to be contemplating, as well as expanding the section to include words such as “urges”, “promotes”, “advocates” or “glorifies” alongside “incites”, others disagreed.

The Anglican and Catholic dioceses of Sydney and the National Imams Council opposed making incitement of hatred a criminal offence, as did the NSW Law Society and Aboriginal Legal Service.

A NSW police officer guards the Only About Children child care centre in Maroubra which was damaged in an antisemitic attack.Credit: Kate Geraghty

In its report, the commission pointed out words such as “hatred” are imprecise, and can mean different things to different people. It warned changing the law could have a perverse outcome, making hate speech harder to prove because criminal courts have a higher burden of proof.

But there is another element to this: if hatred against Sydney’s Jewish population doesn’t begin, as Minns put it, on a street corner in Sydney’s east, where does it?

Minns has remained vague on the source. In the same interview on the ABC, the premier declined to identify where the “hateful rhetoric” was coming from.

Pressed by Ben Fordham on 2GB on Tuesday morning, he said only that it was “taking place in our community” and “in different parts of society”.

Of course, Minns can hardly go on the radio and accuse specific people of spreading racial hate, but his reluctance to identify causes points to a more significant problem.

Hatred, whether on religious, racial or gender grounds, is not unipolar, and it is clear from the identities of some of those alleged by police to have carried out attacks in Sydney’s east, that this is not just a case of sectarian violence being imported from the Middle East.

A state premier can’t solve thousands of years of tangled religious and racial animosity, the vast and confused web of the conspiratorial internet, or the terrible, haunting human carnage wrought by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon that preceded the chilling acts of violence against Sydney’s Jewish community.

Minns’ determination to tackle antisemitism at its root causes is commendable. But a government cannot legislate away prejudice, and a bigotry as complex and confused as this will not be resolved by reforming 93z.

The premier, in some ways, is coming up against the limits of his influence.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.