Albo Blinks on Hate Speech But the Power Grab Isn’t Over

Canberra doesn’t retreat unless it has to. When it does, it rarely admits why.

Over the weekend, the Albanese government quietly confirmed that it has stripped the racial vilification provisions from its “Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism” legislative package, splitting the original omnibus bill and abandoning the most explicit hate speech offence after it became clear the numbers were not there in the Senate.

That is not a minor concession. It is a recognition that the original architecture went too far, too fast, and into territory that alarmed not only civil libertarians but a wide cross-section of the crossbench. The government did not have the votes, and it knew it.

But claims now circulating that the anti-free-speech elements have been dropped altogether are premature. The sharpest blade has been removed. The knife remains.

What is left is a reconfigured hate crime and extremism framework that no longer criminalises speech directly through a racial vilification offence, but still materially expands the state’s reach into belief, motive, association, and expression.

That distinction matters.

Under the original draft, speech could itself be the offence. That is no longer the case. There will be no standalone crime of saying something deemed hateful on the basis of race or ethnicity.

However, under the remaining framework, speech is still elevated into evidence. Belief still matters. Motive still aggravates. Associations still carry risk. And the logic underpinning the regime remains preventive rather than reactive.

This is the quieter, more durable form of expansion.

The hate crime provisions still require courts to interrogate an accused person’s worldview. Identical conduct can attract different penalties depending on what prosecutors infer about ideology or motivation. Speech, writings, sermons, posts, and affiliations become probative material in ways that were not previously central to criminal liability.

That does not ban expression outright. But it does chill it.

The legislation still allows the government to arbitrarily ban organisations and associations it believes are spreading “hate”. Just how far that will extend is anyone's guess. But it is clear that organisations deemed to promote hatred on racial, national, or ethnic grounds can still be proscribed. Membership of and association with any right-wing organisation then becomes a legally hazardous terrain.

This is not hypothetical. Australia has already seen how expansive listing powers can migrate beyond their original targets once the legal machinery is in place.

The government’s rhetorical posture has also not shifted. The Prime Minister continues to frame the remaining provisions as essential to “unity” and “lowering the temperature” of debate. That is revealing. Laws that seek to manage social temperature are not narrowly tailored criminal statutes. They are instruments of social regulation.

That preventive logic is the real civil-liberty issue here.

None of this is to deny that the removal of racial vilification provisions is significant. It is. Public pressure worked. The Senate asserted itself. The government blinked.

But the episode also illustrates a familiar pattern. Ambitious legislation is introduced at maximum scope. Resistance forces a retreat. What survives is then reframed as modest, reasonable, and settled, even though it still represents a meaningful shift in the balance between state power and individual liberty.

The remaining framework will not criminalise ordinary disagreement. It will not outlaw political debate. It will not mirror European hate speech regimes.

But it will embed belief and expression more deeply into criminal justice outcomes. It will expand executive discretion. It will normalise the idea that speech is something the state manages for downstream risk rather than tolerates as a democratic cost.

The right question now is not whether the worst excesses were avoided. They were.

The question is whether Parliament is comfortable entrenching a system in which speech is no longer neutral with respect to punishment, even when it is not itself unlawful.

That debate has not been resolved. It has merely been postponed, narrowed, and rebranded.

And in Canberra, that is often how power advances.

“If you glance at the legacy media headlines and listen to some of the online commentary you might think that the anti speech bill is dead. IT’S NOT! Large parts of it are still going to be rushed through the parliament next week and Labor will sit down with the Greens/Liberals to work through the rest in the coming weeks/months. This is far from over. Stop reading headlines for goodness sake.”
– Senator Ralph Babet