Pros and cons in Antisemitism Envoy’s new proposals

As we reach the one-year mark since the Bondi attack, there is a vague feeling that after the Royal Commission recommendations are digested and memorials completed, Australian society will tick off the antisemitism box. The focus of social concern will move onto the simmering grievances around cost-of-living and housing crises, and AI.

Antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal is determined that this will not happen. Her new report, Combatting Antisemitism: Special Envoy’s priorities, sets out to remind us of the extent to which antisemitism has taken root in the community and the ways it has shapeshifted since her first report in June 2025.

She has again unveiled a broad raft of new hard-hitting recommendations, while doubling down on contentious proposals from the first report. The new report’s proposals include sensible and nuanced initiatives in the education, health, media and sport sectors, but Segal again overreaches with authoritarian recommendations in relation to public protests and police powers.

These new proposals have been informed by a changed landscape, Segal argues. “Modern, progressive antisemitism is the most pervasive manifestation of antisemitism facing Australia today”, she writes, and it has become “fashionable by laundering far-left antisemitism and Islamic extremism through a progressive lens, such as social justice and human rights”.

Segal argues this context has created “ambient antisemitism which generally sees anti-Israel hostility (while not necessarily inherently antisemitic) utilised to create an environment where that sentiment can so easily morph into hostility towards Jewish people and see them ostracised or unsafe”.

Within this environment, the report notes the growing use of the word Zionist “as a proxy for Jews, particularly where Jews in Australia are treated as collectively responsible for the actions of Israel” and “allow for the depiction of anyone who associates or aligns with Israel as complicit in its purported evil”.