State capture was on display last week, with the contrasting treatment of two very different issues in the Federal and NSW parliaments. Andrew Gardiner reports.

A Sydney synagogue was defaced with red swastikas last month. Proposed NSW laws would raise the penalties for that amid rising political concern about antisemitism.

Compare the pair. While mandatory prison time for antisemitism sailed into law in Canberra, draft laws dealing with a bigger issue for battlers – ‘fat cat’ salaries – remain stuck in the Senate.  

On Wednesday, LNP ‘mandatory sentencing’ amendments were tabled in the lower house. By Friday, they and the rest of Labor’s hate crimes package were law.

The LNP changes mandate prison sentences of six years for terror offences, three years for financing terrorism and one year for displaying hate symbols. Labor’s backflip in support of these amendments drew criticism from most cross-bench MPs as undermining judicial discretion and creating “unjust, discriminatory outcomes“. 

“It is vitally important in challenging times to uphold rule of law principles and not adopt measures that risk serious injustice,” Law Council of Australia president Juliana Warner said on Thursday. 

“Under mandatory sentencing, the personal circumstances of the offender are not taken into consideration. This has the potential to disproportionately impact vulnerable groups.” 

Allegra Spender notably broke from the cross-bench critics of mandatory sentencing. Not only did Spender support the LNP amendments, she moved to outlaw “promoting hatred” and “serious vilification”, such as a Muslim Imam or neo-Nazi calling for a “final solution.”

NSW goes a step further

While her serious vilification amendment failed in Canberra, her motion drew support from both sides of the House. And NSW is warming to the Spender agenda, with State Parliament expected to criminalise the “incitement” of racial hatred within days. This prompted an outcry from free speech advocates and legal experts. 

UNSW Professor Luke McNamara has researched Australian hate crime legislation since its early days, and is alarmed by the “broad sweep” of this proposed new law which, he says, could see arrests made for statements where no specific threats were made. 

“This leaves behind 35 years of separation between civil and criminal approaches to hate laws. There will be a need to distinguish between, for example, the contested boundary between antisemitism motivated by religion, and political criticism of Israel,” he told AFR.

The new measures include a new offence outlawing blocking access to places of worship or harassing people nearby. Displaying a Nazi symbol on or near a synagogue would bring two years prison, and penalties for graffiti on a place of worship would be stiffened. 

As in Federal Parliament, NSW’s new hate crime and antisemitism laws are expected to sail through parliament with the sitting beginning this week.

Meanwhile, over in Canberra’s upper house, Senator Jacqui Lambie tabled a pair of private members bills to cap salaries for senior bureaucrats and university Vice Chancellors at $430,000. As things stand, departmental secretaries and senior academics often take home salaries in excess of a million dollars – up to half a million more than the Prime Minister –  a situation Lambie calls “obscene entitlement”.

“We need a big stick, a federal law to significantly cut and cap the salaries of vice chancellors, rather than a powerless advisory body (with no legislation or enforcement) which the government wants. I’m still fuming that someone like Catherine Campbell got a nearly million-dollar gig after she presided over Robodebt,” she told MWM.

The Bill targeting academic salaries amends existing legislation to set a statutory limit of $430,000 for Vice Chancellors, ensuring compliance by allowing the relevant agency to obtain Vice-Chancellor salary details. 

Explanatory notes for the senior public servants bill include the following: “any variation from that limit will be a direct political responsibility of the government of the day and will be subject to parliamentary disallowance.”

Lambie’s changes “may lead to a Senate Inquiry, with Vice-Chancellors and senior bureaucrats called to justify their salaries and explain just what it is they do to earn them,” former Senator and 2025 candidate Rex Patrick said. After that, however, they must run the major party gauntlet (55 Senators out of 76). 

Fat cat salaries is a kitchen table topic which roils the suburbs in tough times, yet it seems to have scarcely caused a tremor among the big Canberra players. An insider who spoke with MWM rates their chances of making it into law as “slim to none”, given the many major party chums who wind up in the kind of cushy jobs Lambie has targeted. 

The insider outlined another reason why antisemitism measures “sail through” into law, while Lambie’s bills will likely go nowhere. “Some issues bother the top end of town, and others just don’t,” he said. 

Mary Kostakidis has some thoughts of her own on the new Federal hate crimes laws.  

While Spender’s “promoting hatred” and “serious vilification” amendments failed last week, the journalist, political commentator and former SBS newsreader Kostakidis saw free speech pitfalls in the hate crimes laws as they are. “18c is so yesterday isn’t it?”, she quipped on Twitter/X, referring to the old, relatively benign regime which gave Andrew Bolt a legalistic slap on the wrist.  

“No more need for to expend your own resources trying to shut down criticism of genocide and free speech. All you have to do is go to the police and denounce whoever you think will attract most attention in order to frighten everyone else,” she wrote.  

“I’m assured we don’t really have a protection for political expression despite a mention in the Constitution, so your freedom of expression is unlikely protected. However, by criminalising your criticism of Zionism, Parliament is conferring to that (and other groups) precisely that right”.

https://michaelwest.com.au/hate-speech-fat-cat-pay-and-parliament/

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