The Albanese government’s Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 was introduced in the immediate aftermath of the Bondi Beach massacre of 14 December 2025. It expanded criminal penalties for speech and was defended across much of the mainstream press. Senior ministers supported it. The Liberal party voted in favour. The Nationals opposed it. The Greens argued that its scope should be widened further.

The legislation was justified as a necessary response to terror. Yet the early, high-profile prosecutions under the strengthened speech provisions have not centred on actors implicated in the operational mechanics of the Bondi attack. They have centred on far-right figures.

Brandan Koschel, associated with Australia’s neo-Nazi fringe, was imprisoned after declaring that Jews were ‘the greatest enemy’ of Australia. His statement was deeply antisemitic, inflammatory and morally indefensible. But the Bondi victims were not attacked by neo-Nazis. The law was justified by one form of extremism and first deployed against another.

In October 2023, outside the Sydney Opera House, a mob was filmed shouting either ‘Where’s the Jews?’ or ‘Gas the Jews’. The dispute over which phrase was used obscured a more obvious fact: neither slogan is ambiguous. Both are genocidal. They echo twentieth-century exterminationist language, and they were used in the context of a group celebrating the slaughter of Jews in Israel. Yet no comparable criminal prosecution followed those scenes.

If the legislation were genuinely directed at the threat that produced the Bondi attack, criminal prosecution of figures such as Wisam Haddad, whose connections to the attackers are documented and whose antisemitic sermons were found unlawful by the Federal Court, would be the obvious priority. No such prosecution has followed. Instead, the Act’s criminal provisions have been directed elsewhere.

The Act includes a defence where a ‘reasonable person’ would consider the conduct to be engaged in for a religious, academic, educational, artistic, literary or scientific purpose, and not contrary to the public interest. A defendant bears the evidential burden. Once speech becomes criminal territory, the boundaries of ‘public interest’ and ‘religious purpose’ become interpretive questions. Interpretation, in turn, becomes power.

The point is not that vile speech should be protected. The point is that once speech becomes criminal territory, interpretation itself becomes political power.

In Australian vernacular, a ‘dobber’ is trivial. A schoolyard tattletale. A sook who cannot absorb friction without appealing to authority. The word carries contempt, as though the behaviour were childish rather than consequential. History is less indulgent. It does not speak of dobbers. It speaks of informants.

Informants are not merely weak personalities. They are structural actors. They are how widened suspicion becomes normalised and how law, once broadened, is supplied with names.

In Germany between 1933 and 1936, before camps and before war, denunciation became routine. The Gestapo in those early years was not yet the omnipotent apparatus of later mythology. It lacked the manpower to police an entire population. Its effectiveness depended heavily on civilian reports. Private jokes. Foreign radio listening. Careless remarks. Insufficient enthusiasm at party events. The regime supplied categories of suspicion. Citizens supplied the reports. Denunciation is a feature of consolidating authoritarianism. It does not create the regime. It smooths its consolidation.

At first the comparison is stark. Censorship laws, even those that imprison people for mere words, seem a long way from authoritarianism of 1930’s Germany. However, it would be dangerous and naive for us to fall into the trap of thinking authoritarianism cannot happen here.

East Germany offers the same lesson from the opposite ideological pole. The Stasi embedded surveillance socially as much as bureaucratically. Colleagues reported colleagues. Students reported teachers. In some cases, spouses reported one another. When the archives were opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the shock was not only administrative. It was relational. The files revealed how deeply trust had eroded within ordinary life long before the regime itself collapsed. Surveillance was bureaucratic but denunciation made it intimate.

In post-civil war Spain, denunciation provided a vocabulary through which personal disputes could be settled under the cover of loyalty. Different regimes. Different ideologies. The same underlying mechanism. Widen the category of suspicion and denunciation follows.

The legislation passed in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre was presented as a defence of social cohesion. Yet it bore little relationship to the operational mechanics of the attack itself. The perpetrators were not enabled by insufficient vilification laws, nor were they prevented by the absence of broader speech controls. The response addressed atmosphere rather than capability. Criminal speech categories were widened and interpretive discretion expanded.

There is a clear difference between urging immediate violence and uttering words that offend. When that distinction erodes, discretion expands. And when discretion expands, the incentive to invoke it expands as well. Once speech becomes a prosecutable domain, reporting becomes rational. Political conflict shifts from rebuttal to referral.

Free speech is not a concession from the state. It is the ordinary condition of a free society. Its uncomfortable virtue is that it allows the ugly to reveal itself in daylight. It allows extremists to identify themselves without coercion or concealment. When vile slogans are shouted openly, the public does not require prosecutors to interpret them. We can hear them for ourselves.

Australia is not an authoritarian state. Once citizens internalise that speech may be referred rather than rebutted, trust erodes before repression becomes visible. Authoritarian consolidation does not begin with camps. It begins with expanded categories, discretionary enforcement and the normalisation of informants.

The maxim often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, though without evidence, was in fact spoken in 1790 by the Irish lawyer John Philpot Curran: ‘The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.’ Vigilance is not hysteria. It is attention to patterns before they harden.