The Bondi terror attack was a moment of national horror. Fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration, targeted because they were Jewish. It was an act of antisemitic terror, and it deserved the strongest moral condemnation and action the country could muster.
What it did not require was a new regime of speech laws.
Yet almost immediately, the Federal Government responded predictably with legislation. The proposed Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill was unveiled as an urgent answer to violence. The implication was unmistakable: hatred caused this atrocity, and tighter controls on speech will prevent the next one.
This is a comforting illusion. But it is also dangerously wrong.
The Bondi attacker was not motivated by overheated public debate. He was radicalised by a hardened Islamic ideology, which was expressed in violence. No hate-speech law drafted in Canberra would have disarmed him. The idea that censorship functions as counter-terrorism policy confuses symptoms for causes.
Hatred is not a legal defect. It is a moral one.
Modern governments persist in the fantasy that hatred can be regulated out of existence, provided legislators choose the right words and prosecutors enforce them with sufficient zeal. History suggests the opposite. Societies that attempt to suppress hateful ideas through law rarely destroy them; instead, they drive them underground, where they grow beyond scrutiny and return in more virulent forms.
John Stuart Mill understood this better than most modern lawmakers. Silencing an opinion, he argued, does not refute it. It merely deprives society of the opportunity to expose its falsehood. A bad idea aired in public can be challenged, ridiculed, and defeated. A bad idea driven into the shadows acquires the allure of forbidden truth.
Hate-speech laws require the State to do something it is singularly bad at defining - “hate.” What begins as a narrow prohibition on incitement soon expands to include offence, tone, and then belief. The line between preventing violence and policing speech erodes steadily, always in one direction.
The post-Bondi debate has already illustrated this drift. What began as a response to antisemitic terror quickly broadened into a general project of speech control. Unfortunately, laws introduced in moments of shock have a habit of outliving the crisis that justified them.
There is a deep irony at the heart of the Government’s response. The Bondi attack did not end because of a law. It ended because of courage. Ordinary people, like Sydney tobacco shop owner Ahmed Al Ahmed, acted instinctively and selflessly to protect others. Evil was confronted by courage, not by regulation.
None of this excuses threats, harassment, or violence, all of which are already crimes. The State has a legitimate role in punishing conduct that harms others. But there is a categorical difference between regulating conduct and regulating speech. Once the State assumes the role of moral arbiter, freedoms become progressively conditional.
The roots of hatred lie far deeper than speech. Hatred and ideologically motivated violence flourish in fractured communities, imported conflicts, identity politics, cultural decay, and the collapse of Judeo-Christian morals and ethics. These are hard problems. They do not lend themselves to legislative fixes. That is precisely why governments prefer symbolic laws to cultural renewal.
A confident society does not fear speech. It answers it.
If the lesson of Bondi is reduced to a justification for the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill, then we will have learned the wrong lesson entirely. Hate cannot be outlawed. It can only be exposed, challenged, and ultimately defeated — not by the force of law, but by the strength of ideas and the courage to defend them.