Premier Chris Minns’ latest move to create a permanent hate-hunting police unit suggests, in my view, that when he claims ‘New South Wales’ strength comes from our diversity’ this ‘strength’ will endure only so long as people do not express their opinions.
We already know that Minns has expressed the view that diversity is incompatible with US interpretations of free speech. When the political class was pushing for greater laws against so-called ‘hate speech’ after the Bondi massacre, the Premier once again stated that the need to ‘hold together a multicultural community’ outweighed the need to preserve the right to freedom of speech.
Now, in order to hold together multiculturalism, the Premier is transforming Operation Shelter, a temporary police force established after the anti-Israel protests at the Sydney Opera House, into a permanent policing unit targeting hate-related crime across the state.
In announcing the move, Minns revealed that a delegation from the New South Wales Police Force has travelled to the United Kingdom and Germany to study ‘best practice’ in anti-hate policing.
This should set alarm bells ringing.
The so-called ‘best practice’ in Britain has seen 30 people arrested every day for their comments online, totalling over 12,000 arrests a year. In 2023, less than 10 per cent of those arrests led to an actual conviction, meaning that the British police we are learning from are eager to exercise their powers of arrest, even when the speech in question is lawful.
Nowhere is the campaign against perfectly lawful speech embodied more clearly than the use of police resources to investigate ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs).
NCHIs are acts which are not unlawful, but police believe need to be monitored because they are alleged to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards people with certain protected characteristics. The police have even encouraged third-party reporting of NCHIs, meaning activists can weaponise law and order resources to target people who do not share their political views.
While the NCHI scheme was abandoned recently, since 2014, police forces in England and Wales recorded more than 133,000 of these incidents, with think tank Policy Exchange estimating that these investigations had absorbed 666,000 hours of police resources investigating Facebook comments and not actual crime.
As for Germany, in recent weeks police have raided homes to seize devices in response to 140 investigations into alleged hate speech. In another recent example, a retiree was investigated by police for a Facebook post in which he described Germany’s chancellor as ‘Pinocchio’. Germany’s criminal code allows prison sentences of up to five years for insult, slander or defamation directed at political figures.
In 2023, a 64-year-old man posted a photo of the Vice-Chancellor, captioned with a phrase that translates to ‘professional idiot’ or ‘dimwit’. His apartment was later searched and his tablet seized as evidence.
While Minns’ anti-hate police force does not appear to yet have morphed into a UK-style dystopian censorship undertaking, the mere fact that Minns referred to the UK and Germany as ‘best practice’, should concern all Australians. Rather than a targeted and professional approach to policing that serves the community, the British and German models exemplify an authoritarian commitment to enforcing the preferences and opinions of the political elite. What is equally concerning is that there is every likelihood the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion will deliver the recommendation that Australia tighten its speech laws to prevent an atrocity like Bondi from ever happening again.
But the problem New South Wales faces is not speech. It is the sad reality that for decades governments have allowed increasingly large numbers of people to enter our country who do not share our own values, and who are not encouraged to integrate into our way of life. Of all the Australian states, New South Wales has experienced the highest number of people entering the state from overseas, with the net overseas migration figure reaching 91,573 in the 2025 financial year alone.
Where Covid should have prompted a re-evaluation of our migration intake, when borders reopened, migration surged past pre-pandemic levels. Over the past two years, New South Wales has seen a net figure of over 400,000 people enter the state, nearly doubling the figure that entered the state in the two years preceding the pandemic.
Some of these people have brought with them centuries-old grievances, which have been celebrated under a state-led policy of multiculturalism. This policy has created a permission structure which has treated each culture’s contributions as equally valuable under the dogma ‘diversity is our strength’.
It clearly is not. The result has been a country where hatred festers, division hardens, and our own sense of who we are fades. Our leaders should be more concerned with answering the question of who we are and who we allow to come here, rather than punishing people for speaking their minds.
Margaret Chambers is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.
