Antisemitism in Higher Education Bill 2026
Mr LEESER (Berowra) (10:03): I move: That this bill be now read a second time. Mr Speaker, before I start, let me join my colleagues on the other side in congratulating you on the high honour of being elected as the President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The Antisemitism in Higher Education Bill 2026 is a bill about the kind of higher education system we want today and the future we want to give our children for tomorrow.
But I need to start by giving some of the bitter context for this bill. That starts by remembering the October 7 attacks by the Palestinian terrorist organisation Hamas. Because, even though antisemitism has been prevalent and growing in this country for a number of years, the October 7 attacks on Israel set off a wave of Jew hate around the world.
They were the catalyst that sent antisemitism off the Richter scale here in Australia. They tapped into and unleashed a wellspring of Jew hate that continues to undermine Australian society today, to corrode our national character and to put the security of all Australians at risk. So it's important that we remember those attacks for what they were: attacks which deliberately targeted civilians; attacks which predominantly targeted Jews; attacks which took the life of Galit Carbone an Australian woman; brutal, horrific attacks, marked by actions of unspeakable cruelty—murder, kidnapping, rape. torture.
The accounts of those attacks are incredibly difficult reading. The official reports of the October 7 attacks provide clear and compelling evidence of the systematic rape and gang-rape of women. In the words of the UN special representative, there was evidence of the rape of women who were, 'then killed, or killed while being raped'.
In the words of that representative, there was evidence of, 'the rape of corpses of women, accounts of genital mutilation and sexual torture'. There were beheadings, including one account of a Hamas fighter attempting to decapitate a Thai national with a garden tool. Children were murdered in front of their parents—like Mila Cohen, just nine months old, who was murdered in her mother's arms; like Mayaan Idan, shot and killed in her safe room while her father tried to hold the door shut—and of course, the kidnapping and taking of hostages, so that the cruelty could continue.
That was Israel on October 7 2023, half a world away. The Australian aftermath But even though it was half a world away, the consequences here in Australia were immediate, and have been ongoing. The very next day after the attacks, we had a public protest on the streets of Sydney in support of Hamas.
A speaker claimed to be 'elated', calling it a day of victory and pride. On October 9, we had an angry mob occupying the Opera House, letting off flares and chanting 'gas the Jews' and 'f the Jews', and the only man arrested there was a Jewish man holding an Israeli flag. And the pathetic weakness, prevarication and equivocation of those responses, from this Albanese government and from others around the country, set the tone for the next 800 days.
There have been more than two years of consistent unalloyed Jew-hate in Australia to which the institutions and authorities consistently turned a blind eye, weekly antisemitic protests in our cities, antisemitic encampments in our public universities which fomented and intensified Jew hate Jews attacked on campuses and in the street, Jewish homes and businesses targeted, restaurants smashed, cars set on fire, a childcare centre burned to the ground, Synagogues firebombed.
And finally, on 14 December 2025, we saw the murder of 15 Jews on Bondi Beach, the murder of Jews celebrating the religious festival of Chanukah at an event that, to most Australians, looks like carols by candlelight. There were 800 days of failure between October 7 and December 14. There were 800 days of weakness and equivocation that ultimately led to 15 deaths.
And in the time since, I am struggling to find a single effective thing this government has done to address it. In the aftermath of the Bondi attacks, we had the idiotic and insulting kabuki play of the Prime Minister pretending the attack was caused by insufficient firearms restrictions, and not two- years of Jew-hate which he did nothing to address. We had Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which was given a ridiculous and arbitrary deadline—a royal commission the Prime Minister never wanted, didn't participate in, whose timeline he has refused to extend, and from which he has protected his most senior ministers.
We have never had Commonwealth ministers and key decision-makers front the commission and be held to account. We never saw the protest organisers and committed antisemites answer for their role, and one has to wonder how well this commission can possibly give us the outputs we as a nation need, given the quality of the inputs. Finally, on Australian campuses, we have had a conspicuous lack of action, universities as a vector of Jew hate.
Let me be clear: when it comes to the elements of antisemitism that have been so corrosive to Australian society, our public university campuses have a lot to answer for. At the start of this year, I spoke about the three vectors of Jew hate in this country. First, we have Radical Islam, with people like Sheikh Ibrahim Dadoun, the speaker at the infamous protest on 8 October in Bankstown, telling Australians that he takes pride in the gang rape and genital mutilation of Jewish women, that he was elated by the murder of Jewish children in the arms of their parents.
Second, we have Neo-Nazis and the extreme right—weak men who have betrayed our country by siding with the ideology our grandfathers fought to destroy. Third, we have the academic and cultural left: institutions where Jew hate has taken deep root—universities and arts bodies; institutions like Macquarie University, which employs academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, who, in the wake of October 7, not only refused to condemn Hamas but was their outspoken apologist, who even called the October 7 attacks a 'glimmer of hope'.
Why is a taxpayer-funded academic at an Australian university calling the rape, torture, kidnapping and murder of Jews a glimmer of hope? This is also a person who explicitly says, in print, that her politics should not be kept out of Australian classrooms, and who leads small children in chants of 'intifada'. This is of course just one case among many, and the incidents are far too many to list.
We've seen Jewish students harassed, followed, abused, assaulted and even spat on by other students and staff. We've seen campus employees and businesses abusing Jewish students, posting bizarre anti-Jewish conspiracy theories online, doxxing fellow academics, and glorifying Hamas. We've seen weeks-long encampments, facilities defaced, buildings occupied, and Jewish staff whose offices were invaded, vandalised and even urinated on.
We've seen visibly Jewish people attacked on campuses, Nazi salutes, death threats. In the last few weeks, a student group ran for the Sydney university student council elections under the name 'Globalise the Intifada'. Well, we've seen what that means.
It looks like 15 Jewish bodies dead and murdered on Bondi Beach. To the public universities To the public universities I say this. In far too many cases, you have allowed Jew hate to become normalised on your campuses.
It always hides behind the fig leaf that abuse and intimidation isn't antisemitic; it's just anti-Zionist or anti-Israel. That is a pathetic and ridiculous excuse where the targets are overwhelmingly Australian staff and students, in this country, and we all know that Zionist is just the politically acceptable way to say the word 'Jew'. You've been told, unequivocally, by both sides of politics to clean up your act, to stop the antisemitism.
And what's been the response? They've been arguing over the definition of the word! You can't make this stuff up.
We now have the ridiculous situation where conduct that is antisemitic on one campus on one side of Sydney is completely acceptable at another campus on the other side of Sydney, because rather than show leadership and take a strong position, they've been arguing the semantics. The universities have failed at the first hurdle. If I were them, rather than focusing on the definitional issues, I'd be more worried about the attitudes I was allowing to take root.
Perhaps it's a coincidence that one of the two Bondi attackers came to Australia on a student visa. Perhaps it's only chance that the pilot on the flydubai flight to Israel, Hammam al-Hammami, a man who planned an antisemitic 9/11-style terrorist attack that involved him crashing his plane into the Tel Aviv passenger terminal to kill as many people as possible, was radicalised while studying at RMIT.
But if I were the universities, I'd be terrified by the antisemitic attitudes that we've seen take root on their campuses. What this bill does Antisemitism is a national problem with profound national security consequences for this country. This bill is a circuit breaker.
It's not a complete solution, but it's a start. It's not a bill about a foreign conflict thousands of kilometres away. It's about fixing a problem that affects Australians, in Australia.
It's about taking steps to ensure that Bondi is not the midpoint but the end of the story. It does two simple things. First, it requires the consistent national definition—the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition—for every university and the Australian Research Council.
That same definition has been adopted by the Albanese government, by all the state governments, by the royal commission and by the National Student Ombudsman. How can we fight antisemitism if we can't define it? And for those on the hard academic left who are obsessed with their ability to criticise Israel—don't worry, this definition permits the criticism of Israel, in the same way you'd criticise other governments.
What it doesn't tolerate is the abuse of Jews using Israel as a pretext. The second thing it does is require universities to prevent, combat and respond to antisemitism. It says taxpayer funded researchers must not promote, enable or amplify antisemitism.
These shouldn't be controversial. What do we expect of our universities, if not to prevent, combat and respond to antisemitism? And to Labor I say this: support this bill.
I'm asking you to vote for your own policy. I'm asking you to set it down in law, to send universities the clearest message that our parliament expects them to rid their campuses of the Jew hate they've allowed to fester.