Australia’s rising racism problem under microscope
Australia’s growing problems with racism and antisemitism will take center stage at the launch of a new scorecard on human rights.
Australian Human Rights Commission chairman Hugh de Kretser will deliver his first annual human rights review in Canberra on Wednesday.
The assessment sheds light on Australia’s performance in a range of areas, including democratic standards.
There is no escape from the threat racism poses to social cohesion, Mr de Kretser told AAP.
“Following the failed Voice referendum, the 7 October attacks and the war in Gaza, there has been a rise in racism across Australia,” he said.
“In Australia, we have seen affected communities experience greater racism, culminating in Bondi’s attacks on the Jewish community, but also Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Arab racism and more.”
Many of these experiences were documented in the AHRC’s “Seen and Heard” report, published earlier this month, which documented a “sharp increase” in “horrifying” racism from October 2023.
The report details the shocking experiences of abuse Australians experience every day, including a member of the Jewish community being called a “baby killer” and Muslim Australians questioning whether they can call their country home.
Mr de Kretser is likely to use the stage to call on the federal government to adopt the AHRC’s national anti-racism framework.
This framework, funded by Anthony Albanese’s government and supported by special envoys against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, has not yet been implemented.
Beyond the problem of anti-Semitism and racism, Mr. de Kretser sees “a number of areas where there is a decline in human rights and where we urgently need to do better.”
He names protest rights, the treatment of people in aged care and disabled people in institutional care as areas where there is a “rollback”.
However, the national scorecard initiative is not entirely negative and conservation advances also need to be acknowledged.
New federal laws on hate speech, improving whistleblower protections, and repealing some privacy laws would fall into this category.
